Latin Music Day!

Four leads on housing before 9 am! I call Papi and let him know that I won't be in, having done the cost benefit analysis that a place to live is more important than 6 hours of work. I am ready, wearing clean things and having showered. Papi seems distracted, but I need a roof and walls.

One pock, two pac, three pock four. I'm pock none. Everyone retracts their kind invitations to take my money for a place to live. "Ummm....Papi, I'll be in as soon as I get there."

I arrive at the winery to what can only be called a cacophony. The little boom box is blasting Latino jams, the tiny speakers tinny, and the guys that everyone has to love, Manny and Pedro, hamming it up. I think Manny is about 17 years old, and Pedro, despite his ability to make me fall down laughing, is great with a forklift. I'm not sure about his fastball. With this whole "disidentify" thing that I am trying to do, I worry that the reader might think that I am stereotyping my two Mexican co-workers by naming them after Ramirez and Martinez. As a Red Sox fan who followed the antics of said heroes almost as much as I followed the box scores, so-named guys are the real deal. Their joy at fucking with one another is tough to match.

Today's goal is 10 barrels. I make it through 8 before I realize that the heat is going to be overwhelming outside and I need to pace myself. I'm almost done when Manny lifts a bag of something and unearths a large mouse. The game is on. I go and get a bucket, the mouse taking refuge somewhere close to Manny. I lift the last bag that could possibly be hiding the critter. It bolts. Manny and I run through the building trying to corner it. No dice. We both broke into "Ai Ai Ai! Yahhhh!" type herding techniques. Mouse safe and sound, we both laugh.

_____________________

I have wrangled all the barrels outside. I am assembling things and doing things. Pedro and Manny are crushing some horrible example of Dolcetto. The yellow jackets are in full force. Pedro is singing his lips off, the difference now is that there is no radio on. He's crooning. Now he's whistling. I hope he has a dog, as the dog will be the most responsive beast in the world. There are at least five loud machines between me and Pedro, yet his whistle hurts. I hope he has a dog.

There is a device that is used to clean barrels that is a two foot bar, bent towards the end, with a tip that spins around, shooting water like a lawn sprinkler. You put the bent part in the barrel, press play, and thanks to your efforts before and after this step, all your bacterial problems go away. I want to play with it.

Pedro's whistling is making me giddy, and the sun is making me livid. I I close the valve on the wand, letting the pressure build up in the line, waiting to make eye contact with Pedro. It's there, I turn the valve, and suddenly remember how much pressure would have been built up. The water jets about 20 feet in the air, my sunglasses are almost knocked off, and I am soaking wet with a sore nose and set of cheeks.

The fact that my feet are wet is no big surprise. I know how Jesus made wine out of water now.

A foray into hyperlinks.

I've come to discover that people unfamiliar with the wine industry tend to think of vineyards and wineries as the same things. Simply, vineyards are where grapes are grown, wineries are where the grapes are processed to become wine. Notice, I did not say "where wine is made," as many, including myself, adhere to the belief that the quality and essence of wine is made in the vineyards through the collaboration of soil, weather, nature's other intangibles, pruning and whatever additions or subtractions the vineyard's human handlers wish to make. Not that you can't screw up a wine once it gets to the winery, this is just the observation that, like any product, wines can only be as good as their raw materials.

Some think that this is only partially true, that juice can be manipulated through various means to make up for imperfections created by poor vintages or lack of attention and/or greed by vineyard managers. Yields can be high if the wine can be concentrated later to make up for thin, dilute character. Familiar oak flavors, used to an extreme, can mask undesirable flavors or aromas, wrapping flawed fruit with the known cloak of vanilla, dill and mocha. Colors can be fixed, tannins may be added or removed. Sweet, high sugar grapes, naturally producing high alcohol wines are not a problem, as the overall alcohol levels can be scaled back thanks to dear technology. Dear technology.

All this is pretty remedial stuff that one encounters early on reading books like “Making Sense of Wine” or talking to a particularly opinionated winemaker. What brings this to mind is the care that Papi takes with all the fruit that crosses his path.

More on this later…I can hear the barrels calling.

Pastaworks in the Oregonian.

If only I'd stuck around, I would have been part of the even larger world renowned phenomenon known as Pastaworks or The Pastaworks as I've noticed people down here like to call it. Peter and Katie got a great write up just after I left, and I only just found it. So here's the rub. 30 minutes of trying to provide you a link have left me cranky. Here's how to find the article, your efforts will keep me sane: go to The Oregonian, and put "Pastaworks" and "buds" in the search field. A unique hit for a unique hit.

I trust that the three people who read this will read the article. I will be posting my own tasting notes sometime late tomorrow. Most of these wines are dear to my heart, and the people certainly are more so.

Good Tomato.

The tomato has redeemed itself. I roasted a small chunk of pork shoulder that I talked a butcher out of with some red onions, garlic and the 4/5 of the tomato that remained. 8 hours later, I have tasty sandwich meat. Best part: the tomato is really good now that it is mixed with pork fat and some heat. Bless you tomato for all that you do.

Yeah!

The bad news: Big Papi called from the winery to let me know he'd forgotten he was going to give me a ride. So be it.

The good news: More barrels! That stack of 36 barrels in the corner that have been glaring at me for the past week is apparently in need of some tough love. Once Mueller plays some more Fork Lift Donkey Kong I will be a cooper once again.

I got to punch down (stir the solids that rise to the top of a fermenting bin of grapes) by hand yesterday, and my arm still smells vaguely of Gamay Noir, despite two showers and 18 hours of elapsed time. There is something very satisfying about being up to your shoulder in warm, fizzy pre-wine. I rather like it. I was supposed to drive a truck yesterday, what would have been the largest I'd ever driven, to drop off some bins at a Sonoma vineyard, but the rental couldn't make it out of the driveway. The vineyard owner picked up the bins himself, leaving me to futz around and then call it a short day.

My $6 tomato from the farmers' market is disappointing, and I have only eaten about 1/5 of it. It seems ripe enough, but the skin is metallic tasting with a bit more tooth than I like in a late summer tomato. Hmmph...time to make a lettuce sandwich for lunch.

Made it home in time for the Red Sox game, but it was rained out, so I slept from 7:30 until 6 this morning. God willing I will make it back in time to catch at least part of the double header. Last night's entertainment was Waiter Rant, a very amusing blog, the subject of which I am sure you can guess.

Dog is walked, coffee is cold and miles to go before I sleep.

Shiraz?

Big Papi gave me a ride to the winery today, a blessing in that I had no money for gas or toll. Also, we hadn't actually gotten a chance to talk. When he asked me why I chose my major, I think I said something about politics, completely forgetting that I have always wanted to write something about anything and that perhaps that was why I came down here. Next time, right?

He walked me through brix and punch-downs, then back to the barrels. I heart me some barrels. In some ways I am sad to see the task almost completed. I like re-fitting a barrel from top to bottom now that I have an idea of what I am doing. There is a certain satisfaction in everything holding together, with the rivets now perfectly aligned, on a barrel that looked like zombies could have emerged from it any moment just half an hour before.

Johnny D. showed up with some Syrah from Paso Robles, looking like he had driven a good distance with someone else's livelihood strapped to his back. If you consider the truck an extension of man, he did. The 30 tons of estate syrah that were coming in from the time we got there had priority over Papi's measly pickings, but getting a chance to try the fruit side by side was illuminating.

All day long the forklift was hoisting bins to the crusher, leaves, raisined bunches, god knows what else getting pitch forked in with more eyes towards efficiency than quality. It was a production line as Papi slowly worked the cap into the juice of his Gamay by hand, me wrestling miniaturized sumos and dreaming of a day when I could build a tower 100 storeys high made only of barrels. Though I was initially skeptical, I am grateful that I get to see the contrast between what Big P. is about and what a larger winery does with their fruit.

I get home in time to hear the Red Sox win. Today it was a good day.

Academics say what?

I self-describe as a recovering academic. What does that mean? Well, it means that putting me in the middle of a dinner party with three doctoral candidates, an editor for a kick ass press and her fiance who intimidated me five years ago before I really even knew him will create extreme anxiety and the sort of social dysfunction that I have come to know as myself.

Mike left town this morning, so threw a dinner party last night, inviting some of the nicest people I have met in a long time over for a dinner/birthday party for himself and the above mentioned editor. I will often be cynical, and likely come off as an ass, but if I do so in this post, please know that these really are some of the nicest and most sociable folks I have run across in a long time. I mean no disrespect.

That said, in some ways I am glad that I am done with school. I don't want to surround myself with towers of books, but I don't know what I want to surround myself with in their stead. I am likely guilty of talking obscure Italian DOCs like they talk critical theorists or lecturers due in town, but I am happy with what I know and what I am studying and practicing. This is all to say that even the reclusive and socially dysfunctional me was welcomed into their pack, their conversation and their joy. I love that about humans, and experience it so rarely. Here's to good conversation, in Berkeley of all places.

In the shed.

I played a fair amount of Donkey Kong as a kid. I remember the barrels shattering, I remember the fear of them taking me out. I am now struggling with my little plastic hammer and skinny white ass to figure out what I would do if any creature, let alone THE Donkey Kong decided to come into this room and start chucking barrels at me. There is definitely enough ammo here to force me to break a sweat, if not my neck. Aside from the garage door, there is only one exit.

I figure there is no way around this fear except to treat the barrels with the utmost respect, despite the fact that I am trying to help them with my banging away at their ids and egos. I feel like Dr. Phil. I know I can help.

Big P. gets back from NY, and I am immediately in love with him again. He is a winemaker, he knows what he wants and what to do to get it. That, and he takes off for Napa without mentioning he's leaving just because he needs a solution to a fruit fly problem. I once was told that fruit flies add character to wine. I'd rather know that the person behind the wine I am drinking cares to go away for a couple hours, despite having woken up in a different time zone at an ungodly hour, just to get form fitting tarps to keep the bastards out. I can still feel the little buzzers in my nose.

I walked out into the vineyards surrounding the winery today and tasted more fruit. I am getting confident in thinking that this is a complete waste of space. I am not sure if it would make a difference in quality or not, but these are raisins, past any point of ripeness that might be considered okay for making wines. Sure, I'm a hack, but is this a deliberate attempt to attain phenolic ripeness? At what cost? The fruit is actually closer to a raisin, not in the French sense, than a mature grape, and the sugars remind me of jelly more than fresh fruit. That and the pips break like dried cork in my mouth, leaving a dusty not in a a Sangiovese way residue in the mouth. Hogwash, but, like I said, I'm a hack.

Not Richland.

I can't get it through my head that the winery is not in Richland. My limited research has me thinking there might not even be a Richland in all of California. Leave it to me to send missives to friends letting them know that I work in one of the few town names that doesn't actually exist in California.

Monday:
Not much in the way of work so far. Met Big Papi, my boss, at the winery on Monday afternoon as he returned from fetching his second picking of Gamay Noir. Helped on the line by wielding a trusty plastic shovel and playing with stems. The only real excitement was when the cinch strap on an elevated bin of grapes broke loose from the forklift that was tilting it into the crusher. Papi got whacked by the metal hook first, then it went slamming into my ankle. My heroics consisted of me running to the kill switch, thinking I was preventing the bin, and possibly the reeling Papi from falling into the de-stemmer pit. As I listed motivations for my concern in that order: bin, Papi, I am not sure he formed a greater or lesser impression of me. He does seem to like his grapes.

Then I got a brief rundown on how to fix and sterilize barrels. Big P hired a friend of his, Johnny D., to help out as well, and though Johnny is a nice enough guy, he seems to have burned most of his candle in the years after he moved to Berkeley in the late sixties. It was apparently the third time Steve had showed him how to hook up all the equipment involved in the 4 steps, and Johnny was still dwelling on how many steps there were and in what order they were to be performed.

Tuesday:
With The Man in New York for a distributor function we were left alone to practice what Johnny had seen and I was told about barrel maintenance. Wrangling 120 gallon barrels is like trying to move a miniaturized, hollow and immobilized sumo wrestler whose discomfort can only be judged by how many rings fall off of the barrel. In the 45 minutes it took me to set up, Johnny managed to piss off some barrels, enough so that what was supposed to be "tightening" turned into "re-fitting."

Johnny thought that since Big P. told him that, on a relaxed day, someone who knows what they are doing can finish six barrels that we should make it through two and be lucky. I was thinking assembly line style and that we could at least finish 6, if not more. I think his attitude is the inverse of mine: he didn't leave a job, pack his belongings and drive 625 miles for the job. Just as we were about to finish the last two barrels, a fuse blew that no one knew how to find or fix. I am glad the must-buster didn’t blow the same fuse when fruit was coming in. Would have been a bad scene.

As that was our only work until Papi returns on Thursday I spent Wednesday in a holding pattern to see if the winery operators could get the problem fixed. This involved sitting in my car, now illegally parked, talking on my cell phone that keeps beeping at me that I am over my minutes and under my payments for the month. The meter maid is my enemy and I look over my shoulder like a convict. I finally buy an egg salad sandwhich that I forget in the car for twelve hot hours. It didn't kill me.

The setup is a little disappointing, as I thought that either the winery was Papi's or that he was making his own wine as well as consulting. Apparently the rent became too steep on the Warehouse winery in the Bay area that he was sharing space in last year, and this is his first year at a custom crush facility near what is apparently not Richland 35 minutes from the flat I'm in towards Sacramento. When I asked Mueller, one of the two guys who runs the facility, if he worked only for Papi he sniped back "no, Papi is my client." Funny, when I wrote the above sentence I wrote "ruins" instead of runs. Lapsus Calumni, a written Freudian slip. God bless my Reed education.

Sveum, who is the consulting oenologist for the facility (and who apparently used to have a winery in Oregon in the early 90s/late 80s) is a nice guy who seems to like my willingness to admit that sometimes it is fun to be a rational human being. The only problem I have with him is his lack of attention to detail (forgetting to put a pretty essential support bar on the forklift, creating the falling bin problem) and his snide attitude towards Papi, who, despite my cynical tone, seemed like an easy to like guy in my short exposure to him. Especially if he is a "client."

The winery was recently bought by a group of "investors" or the "three BMWs and a car I can never remember in the parking lot" as I have come to call them. They are currently trying to figure out what to do with the 40+ acres of increasingly ripe and bird-picked merlot and syrah on the estate while also trying to figure out how to maximize the cost per square foot of the facility. I am privy to many of the complaints and exhortations they will make to Papi on Friday as I thought they were OSHA when they passed through a building where I was hammering rings into place and decided to pretend I didn't speak English. I am a little wary about how this will work out.

Spent the day in the holding pattern and then driving to Oakland to look at three places to live. The most appealing, in a really depressing way, was the entire bottom floor of a large Victorian in a really sketchy neighborhood. The rent was $600 and there was about 1500 sq ft. of fake hardwood with a big backyard. The catch: apparently there was a roommate who was never there except to crash a couple of times a week. Her seven cats ran the place the rest of the time. I told the landlord that Misha the dog is allergic to cats.

High point yesterday: I got to taste Viongier that had yet to undergo malolactic, making up for the three days I didn't have a toothbrush.

High point today (so far): walking into a deli owned by a recently immigrated Palestinian family who were working a hard lunch rush but watching TV to see about Rita, that soon-to-be star hurricane. "I hear we will be okay if it moves quickly. It won't hurt us then." Do you have to have been born somewhere else to feel attached to the rest of the country you are living in?

Mike.

I am staying with Mike, a college friend who is probably the smartest human being I have run across. He is letting me sleep on his couch. I feel smarter after the second day, and by the third, I can't even remember how dumb I used to be. Is memory loss characteristic of abnormal brain growth?

Mike hurt his ankle dancing into a post. He might not remember it, but his friends confirm it. I was asleep, dreaming of mowing down elk on I-5. I am glad I am not responsible for once.

I think I've been here.

Saturday, September 18, 2005
On the road the next day by ten, glad that I saw people, but once again glad to get the hell out of Eugene.

I have always liked Ashland, both times I spent there. Mostly it’s the allure of New Sammy’s Cowboy Bistro that keeps Ashland alive in the back of my brain as a place I would like to devote time to. I have never been there, but thanks to the testimony of friends and every article I have been able to find about it, I want to eat there before I die. Instead, with an overheated dog that needs a break from the road, and a belly still trying to recover from whatever the hell it was that I ate in Eugene, I wind up at a breakfast joint downtown.

This may sound heretical, but I am really tired of chefs that tell you the names of the farmers that produced each discrete ingredient of an item listed on the menu and then do the producers the disservice of cooking up crap. If I were farmer John of Laughing Head Cheese Farm I would be pissed off if restaurant X couldn’t make a decent Huevos con Chorizo with the remnants of a pig whose life I took with my own hands. There is really something to be said for anonymity when every twobit hack realizes that attaching a place and person to the source of the food will sell the item regardless of how poorly the dish is executed. My dog gets most of the plate, a decision I made that haunts me for the rest of the ride. My hair stands upright when I alight the car in Berkeley, the windows never less than a 6 inch crack the rest of the drive.

Needing a place to plug in my computer to figure out where I am staying exactly, I go to a brew pub. When I ask for a beer suggstion, the bartender tells me where they source their water. I ask if they have Olympia, explaining away the raised eyebrows with “It’s the water.”

Leaving for Berkeley.

I woke up in Portland on Friday, September 16th with the intention of being in Berkeley by late that evening. The difficulty was that my room still had most of my belongings strewn around it and it was 1 in the afternoon. A panic attack, taqueria breakfast and a bottle of bud later I was somewhere south of Portland on I-5, left arm twitching nervously and a keen eye on the ridiculous price of gas at every off-ramp I passed.

At five the panic attack has not stopped but I have. I am watching a Red Sox game in Eugene, a town that, depending on whose telling the story, I either chewed up and spit out or was chewed up and spit out by. I go out for dinner with friends and remember why I hated the food and wine culture there so much. We are glared at by the fuddy duddies, condescended to by the younger-than-us waiter and told that the oxidized Savennieres I ordered will be taken back, but that is how Rhone whites taste. When I attempt some diplomatic and humble (hell if I really know) assertion that it might be a Loire wine, I am laughed at or ignored. I can’t quite remember. Looking online, the wine is listed under “Sauvignon Blanc and Loire Valley” on the list. What do I know anyway?

2001 Château de Chamboureau Savennières.

Good, pre-oxidative nose with a prickly minerality and nuttiness that is initially off-putting but resolves itself. I kept going back to the nose thinking it was corked, then realizing that it was simply fruitless and tired on the palate. Called the server over and was told it wasn’t corked, which wasn’t my question, but that he would replace it. The wine had good acid, light weight, and persistent pre-ox flavors, all things I like in wine. Though I was trying to tell the server I thought it interesting and only wanted his opinion, I kept getting the “I’ll replace it” answer. I won’t fight it, choose something and let me get back to the company. He picked an innocuous Cassis. I wanted to tell him it tasted nothing like raspberries, but thought the better of it. Thanks Beth, for picking up the tab.

Hello, where am I?

My name is Jeffrey Jassmond, and I have no idea what I am doing. Despite the advice of a dear friend, I became interested in wine about seven years ago. Since then I have read whatever I could get my eyes on, and tasted everything that passed my way. I survived a year of law school, and have worked with some amazingly generous people. Last week I decided to make the drive from Portland, Oregon down to the Bay Area to do some seasonal work at a winery. This blog will document those adventures, as well as publish some of my writing from over the past few years, assuming I brought any with me. My car is loaded with all my belongings, my dog is really curious what is going on, and I have a loaf of Basque bread and a $6 tomato to my name. Let’s all hope this works out okay.