Where would I be today if it weren’t for my three wine industry mentors, Lavonne Homes, then Katrina Walker Commesso, and finally Corinne Reichel… All at Belvedere Winery?

Probably still on my knees cleaning more toilet bowls for Merry Maids… Yes, I did that so that I wouldn’t have to bother any company with their hiring me to “teach me” their culture, and then have me leave abruptly.  I was already good with a scrub brush, and leaving wasn’t going to devastate that company as soon as my big break finally came when it did.

While at Belvedere, each woman named allowed me to progress to the next step necessary, growing not only within that company, but also broadly growing within the industry. I wouldn’t have made it without them.

I just became aware that it’s my turn to mentor someone who reached out to me…Nikitas Magel of Vinikitas.

From the Email that he sent, I was able to learn a lot, and it was all really great. His writing style is exceptional, his skills for creating a Web presence are substantive, and his interpersonal relational skills are highly developed.

We were both at the Wine Bloggers Conference. In Emails back-and-forth, we realized that we both struck a low profile as anonymous observers, rather than vociferous contributors. A similar work/study ethic attracted me to his site just as a curiosity, and I was drawn in like a month to a flame. Living and loving my own Webmaster, I know a lot more about the World Wide Web than the average observer, because Web talk in this house is constant. Nikitas’s skills are well above average.

To see his Web presence, told me that I want to give him more exposure as he continues to find his place within this wine industry.

His really strong point is his ability to interview. It’s also coincidental that one of his recent interviews is with Charles Creek Vineyards, a company that I helped launch a few years ago, and a company that my husband/partner still helps with Internet marketing.

Tomorrow will be Nikitas first contribution to wine-blog. His story is informationally very in depth, really well written, and a welcome addition to this blog site.

Dan Berger’s latest issue of Vintage Experiences just arrived.

One of his topics, “The Demise of Newspapers,” touched off this blog entry, because it was already bubbling under the surface for me, too, as an issue.

Dan wrote, “In a recent Wall Street Journal article, author Paul Mulshine wrote about the fading of the press. He decried what seems to be replacing it, the blogosphere, an amorphous electronic sea of blather that has a few tiny snippets of brilliance.”

Let me digress for a moment, because it’s worth it… Recently, I was watching a CNN talking heads discussion on the subject of blogs. The panel was questioning whether or not many bloggers are just writing willy-nilly dribble [I'm paraphrasing here], and this might be ruining the future of newspapers.

One of the panelist, who is a Constitutional attorney, said, “I’d like to remind you all that when Thomas Jefferson crafted the First Amendment, he wrote it precisely with independent journaling in mind. He didn’t say “journalist (reporting facts),” he said “journaling (reporting opinions).” The first Amendment was created to do the following:

The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is also the first section of the Bill of Rights. It is arguably the most important part of the U.S. Constitution, as it guarantees freedoms of religion, speech, writing and publishing, peaceful assembly, and the freedom to raise grievances with the Government. In addition, it requires that a wall of separation be maintained between church and state. It reads:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

Today’s journalist are working for newspaper companies, many of whom (Rupert Murdoch, for example) give money to lobbyists, who push through their agendas on Capitol Hill.

So, I ponder, can the freedom of speech then be crafted its purist form within his network?

When I worked in radio, I wanted to do one of my Modern Health segments on  how bad soda is for anyone’s health. I had learned that for each ounce of soda, there’s one teaspoon of sugar. Equated: 10 ounces of soda = 10 teaspoons of sugar.

Just imagine that for those who have one can of soda a day! Today, it’s now reported that if you have one soda a day for a year, that equals a 10 pound weight gain each year. Over a period of 10 years, is it any wonder that we have obesity as a national crisis?

Before my segment aired, the general manager called me into her office. She told me that I couldn’t run with that story, because a major soda company paid many salaries within the radio station.

Censure, pure and simple…

On this blog, I have no advertisers to worry about. My fellow wine bloggers, who aren’t overwhelmed with advertisers on their sites, also have nothing to worry about… It’s just freedom of speech at its best, returning for a cycle of time. Once people figure out how to moneitze their sites, we’ll be back to censure, trust me.

Those who have a gift for writing will continue to do so, and will flourish. While their subjects and blog focus might change, their passion for writing won’t. They’ll also refine what Paul Mulshine considers “an amorphous electronic sea of blather.”

A perfect example of where I believe electronic media is headed is this site… SeriouslyMedia. I accidently fell upon it, as I was Google searching on Jeff Miller. I found him on this site, in an aggregated story from wine-blog.

I dug deeper into this site, to better understand it. When I read what John Merrells is offering his readers, I was honestly humbled to find myself there. It read, “A seriouslymedia site should simply be the best starting place for a person to engage with those publishers making the world pay attention to their subject.”

I honestly believe that if bloggers keep “making the world pay attention to their subjects,” cream will rise to the top, and there’s room for it all.

How one’s compensated for that? Well, that’s another subject.

The day that I walked the ranch with Dick Keenan (above), I left him and returned to my computer. I then off-loaded the images from my camera to a folder on my desktop. I had so many images, and they come off this camera at 24 megabytes each, that sometimes I get a slow down. In that process, I thought I had lost the images from several tries. As it turned out, the images did make it off my computer, and I hadn’t lost them.

So, these are found images that augment the ones that Jose (my partner) had taken. We both see the world separately, so I thought I’d share these too, making the Kick Ranch story complete.

Enjoy the visuals of a really beautiful vineyard, and a continuation of that day’s story.

As we walked the vineyard, Dick was directing Jose and me toward his reservoir. The nearly full moon was beginning to rise on the eastern horizon, and Dick was concerned about how low his reservoir had become. As I looked toward the nearly full moon, I told him rain would be coming soon. He asked something like, “Really?”

I told him that the full moon regulates water, as evidenced by the tides and how they rise during both the full and new moon cycles. I also said something to the effect that our bodies are mostly water, and that jails and hospitals become over burdened with both of these lunar cycles. (I learned this while growing up. When my father was alive, he owned an ambulance and livery service. When the moon was full, that time filled the jails and hospital psyche units, with his cars going out with my more frequency.)

As we neared his reservoir, Dick explained that at its peak this past spring, this reservoir was full. At this point in time, only the exotic ducks swimming just out of range of this image (to the far right) still had something to celebrate. Dick was nervously waiting for rain.

We then were guided up the hill toward a block of Sauvignon Blanc that was doing really well, tucked against the side of the mountain.

Dick Keenan and his highly respected vineyard manager Glenn Alexander, who runs Bacchus Vineyard Management, respected the land they planted, as evidenced by this old oak tree. It still stands amid the vines as it had before the vineyard’s arrival, and will most probably outlive us all.

Looking back as we climbed showed the natural beauty of this land in Rincon Valley. To the west, haze covered the landscape. The east, the skies shone brightly blue.

Once we had climbed about two thirds up this hillside ranch, Dick took special care to point out the scraggly, old fig tree in the above image - just in front of the retaining wall. The land was once an old farmstead, and the fig tree was [no doubt] a remnant of that era. Scientific mind that Dick has, he took the Latin name for that fig tree (carica) and named his own wine accordingly ~ Carica Wines, honoring that still holding on fig tree. [Carica is a genus of flowering plants in the family Caricaceae; the fig tree's botanical name: Ficus carica)]

From afar, we looked back to the reservoir, seeing how drastically it needed to be filled, realizing each ridge line of its evaporation.

The further we went, the more we could see it’s need to be refilled ASAP.

This image is a great example of grafting, if you’ve not seen it in a close up before.

Once we reached its pinnacle, it was time to descend. At the foot of the vineyard, because we were now headed toward this view, I spied the beauty still before me.

Assuming that 2009 is going to be a “Year on the Beach” versus a “Day on the Beach” this image works. Also, like the tides, years wash in and then wash out again.

Last year I resolved to write some children’s stories in 2008. I wrote six of them.

In 1972, I resolved to quit smoking cigarettes. I did it cold turkey, leaving 13 years and two packs a day as a smoker behind. I estimated that I was smoking for 10 minutes, waiting for 10 minutes, then lighting up again… All day long. That was a time when we actually smoked on the job, regardless of what we were doing. I was teaching young adults, and so - I guess - it was considered “chic” at the time? Now I know is was pure addiction and insanity.

For 2009, I’m resolved to learn about Portugal’s history and it’s place within the wine world. The reason for this is two-fold.

1. When someone gives a book to me, I don’t see it as coming so much from the person who delivered it; rather, I see it coming from the universe as something intended for me to learn at that exact point in time. (I recently saw a blog title that read, “I really wanted to hate this book.” My reaction was,  “What?” I guess that’s why there’s chocolate and why there’s vanilla, as my Jose likes to say.) The book is Martin Page’s “The First Global Village, How Portugal Changed the World.”
2. At the Wine Bloggers Conference, I gave Delfim Costa, the general manager of Enoforum Wines, a ride from Kick Ranch’s Welcome B-B-Q a ride back to the hotel, because he had just missed the bus provided. Later, when I looked up his Website, I remembered that someone else from his company (based in Portugal) had reached out to me earlier in the year. At that time we just quickly went back and forth, because I was so busy. Then, in a kismet moment, our company’s paths crossed again. At the Wine Bloggers Conference, I kept a very low profile and met only a handful of new people. There were plenty of people I already knew in the business, and wanted to observe the rest of the group. I did let in a few more people, and one of them was meeting Delfim, for whom I took very seriously as someone worth getting to know. I didn’t know why, I just did it.

And so I will also take the book (his birthday/Christmas gift to me) very seriously. It will allow me to have a much broader, global perspective and culture, that has so far eluded me.

I’ll also brush up on my foreign language background. Two years of high school French, led into one year of high school Spanish, which led into Spanish I and Spanish II in college courses. This led me to being una vendadora en Puerto Rico for a couple of years through Belvedere Winery under Ed Schrufer’s time there. I was so lucky working with V. Suarez & C0., Inc. during that time on that gorgeous Isla de Encanta.

I’m resolving that 2009 is my year for understanding Portugal .

What about you?

I’d really like to know what you’ve resolved to do; and either made it your reality, or want to make a fresh start this year.

It is a global village, as I look at who’s reading this blog from behind the scenes analytics. Before Americans even wake up, there have been at least 500 people around the world who’ve read this blog, mostly in China. You’re part of global village if you’re reading this before 6:00 a.m. EST, 2009.

by Jeff Herinckx of Oak Knoll Winery, Willamette Valley, Oregon

We’ve moving the 2007 Pinot Noir out of the barrels and putting in the 2008 Pinots. Its pretty time consuming working with about 380 barrels as we empty them and fill them back up. We’re also cold stabilizing the Niagara, the Riesling, and the Chardonnay from the 2008 harvest. Once we done with the cold stabilizing, we’ll be filtering these whites.

When we move the 2007 Pinots from barrels to tanks, we keep lots separate so we can have better control for blending as we make decisions for vineyard designates or reserves. We try to be efficient so that we don’t spend time with empty barrels. When they go empty, they can dry out and they take much more maintenance. That’s why we are moving the 2008 vintage into barrel as soon as we move out the 2007 harvest. We mostly age in oak for about a year, so this works. When we do a reserve, we do age longer in the barrels. Of course, we constantly monitor the wines to make sure we don’t have too little or too much oak.

On the 2008 Riesling, we have it down to the level of sugar we want. That’s why we are now doing the cold stabilization. Once cold stabilization is done, we’ll filter the wine and get ready to bottle. That is the same plan for the Niagara and the Chardonnay. As you can imagine, this is the best time of year for cold stabilization, because our tanks are outside and it gets pretty cold at night.

One of the things I just realized is that this is my 25th harvest at Oak Knoll Winery. Boy, how time flies when you are having fun! I’ve seen a lot of changes over 25 years here. The biggest change I have seen is vineyard practices and the weather. For example, I’ve seen more machine harvesting than ever. The machines are much more refined and you can harvest with them without damaging as much fruit as the early machines used to. Back in the late 80’s and early 90’s, we actually had a lot more rain during harvest than we do now. It can still rain during harvest, but back then it was a regular occurrence.

[Barrels in the snow]

On the winemaking front, back when I started, we made a lot more berry wine than we do know. For example, we’ve recently released a blackberry wine, which we hadn’t done for 18 years. Back in the old days, we use to make a few thousand gallons of various fruit wines. We had Pinot back then but not to the extent we do now and we didn’t start doing Pinot Gris until the late 80’s. Overall we’ve changed so that the majority of our wines now are dry wines versus sweet wines.

Looking to the future, I’m looking forward to equipment improvements to be able to make the highest quality wine. Working more with whole berry clusters, more punch downs versus pump overs to treat the wine as gently as possible. We are always interested in improving our techniques to make the best wine possible!