It was on a warm June day in 1990, that I first met John Kautz, visionary, patriarch and chairman of the board of Ironstone Vineyards in the small Sierra Foothills town of Murphys. After a ride around the hillside vineyards, we had walked out to the edge of an excavation opposite a rock wall where drilling and blasting had begun for the winery’s aging caves.
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High on a hill above the Santa Rosa plain, on the northern edge of the City of Santa Rosa, is Paradise Ridge Winery. The magnificent winery, owned by Walter and Marijke Byck, overlooks what was once the legendary Fountain Grove Vineyard, founded by the mystical prophet, Thomas Lake Harris. Harris and his followers brought their Brotherhood of the New Life to Santa Rosa in 1875, where he established his vineyards and hired the distinguished Japanese winemaker, Kanaye Nagasawa, to create what were regarded as some of the finest wines produced in pre-Prohibition California.
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Every now and then Lady Luck comes calling. Take the case of Dick Sherwin, a multi-talented professional whose activities included publication of Wine World Magazine. On a business trip to San Francisco in 1968, he happened to buy an amateur winemaking kit. The wine he made from the kit, he confesses, was pretty terrible, but he had been bitten by the wine bug.
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There is a group of wine personages who started getting together at informal luncheons in 1989. They call themselves, simply, the Old Timers, and that’s what they are – wine industry pioneers who have weathered the storms of Prohibition, phylloxera, the Great Depression and all the curves that Mother Nature has chosen to pitch at them. The roster contains a lot of familiar wine names: Sebastiani, Mondavi (both Peter and Bob), Martini, Pedroncelli, Rossi, Gallo, Seghesio, and Foppiano. Those invited to lunch fit the two requirements: over 25 years in the wine industry and over 70 years of age. Most are well past 80, and Ernest Gallo has marked his 91st year.
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Rose wine seems to be aimed at the background. It seems difficult for example, that the selection of wines makes a bride and groom for their wedding, including a rose. Similarly, almost any wine lover would ever say that your favorite wine is a rose. For this, and are positioned white wines and especially the reds.
However, rose wine is gaining more followers. We talked a few months ago on the boom that is taking the pink Champagne in recent years. This trend is comparable to all rose wine. which become really delightful when enjoyed with the first hot days of the year …
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My first encounter with Zinfandel was back in the early 1980s, on holiday in Hawaii. I chose the wine from the restaurant wine list because the name was so unusual, I didn’t know whether Zinfandel referred to the grape, the name of the wine or the grower. Since this was early in the 1980s what came to the table was a salmon pink off-dry wine which was an ideal accompaniment to the seafood on offer. And at the risk of putting off readers so soon in the story, I enjoyed this wine and thought no more about it.
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HISTORICAL CHARACTERS AND WINE, RECREATION AND ENTERTAINMENT
That comes to you son, and asks: “pa, and tell me about the orgy” - what you tell him? But parental authority depends on the little things, like awareness of the ancient orgiastic cults. “I had a friend … So here it is, if what his father asked - always got a full, no discount on childhood response. Ask why airplanes fly - in response to a lecture on aerodynamics. Wondered why the snow white - gets excursion into the visual system of mammals and the physics of light. I’ll try and I in the same style to tell about the orgy (no, not his, but those old).
Do not read before dinner
Maybe you think that the concept of “style”, “school” and “classic” refers only to things like music and literature? From St. Petersburg School of Rock “,” a classic picaresque novel “,” neo-Gothic style “? In fact, the history of poisoning conceptualized in similar terms. Italian School of poisoning - subtle.
French - vulgar. Poisoned gloves or a key - a classic, but, say, a hyperactive strain of tuberculosis in the borsch (who poisoned Baron Wrangel) - fashioned kitsch. But the richest source of “classics poisoning” is a good old 19 th century England. The incredible availability of poisons, which appeared practice of life insurance and the lack of reliable ways to prove the facts of malicious poisonings in court creates a whole new wave of “domestic homicide”.
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The most common poison in our great-grandmothers was arsenic. The average person could buy him under the pretext of buying rat poison. Arsenic has no smell and can accumulate in the tissues, which makes possible the gradual poisoning of small doses. Plus, the symptoms of arsenic poisoning can easily be confused with symptoms of cholera, and the gradual poisoning - with a lot of diseases until venerichiskih, the benefit of the then medicine has not yet reached today’s heights.
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When you suggest wine woman, she would probably prefer a sweet or semisweet that pokisley and drier. Sweet taste in wine - historically the most popular. Therefore, the technology of its production since Roman times, were aimed at sweetening. In particular, the Romans boiled grape juice to a syrup by boiling it in lead containers. One simpotomov lead poisoning - the loss of reproductive ability. Lead water pipes and lead-sweetened wine - one of the main causes of low fertility in ancient Rome.
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