Awesome Christmas Presents - Part Two

[UPDATE 1-24-10: I've since discovered two great uses for the power cap. We lost our power the other night and with the cap I didn't need a flashlight to move around. And the second, which is much more practical in the winery, involves looking into barrels to see where the level of the wine is. You have to do that all the time and now I won't need a flashlight. Very cool.]

I received something called a Panther Power Cap. It looked like a normal baseball hat, but had LED lights built into the brim. To be honest my first impression was what am I ever going to do with this. I included a picture of the hat with the original label - it not only lights up, but does it in three different ways.

So about ten minutes later I had to get behind the stereo system ro reconnect a DVD player. My stereo is of course in a cabinet against a wall and has lots of wires that I'd have to disconnect to pull it out far enough for easy access to the back. So I usually wind up doing the 45 degree tilt, sliding it out a bit, and groping around to connect cables.

The hardest part is reading the tiny text under the connectors that tells you what's what in the back. So I put on the Power Cap and shazam! I could read the text on the connectors without needing a flashlight. Then later in the day I needed to get some wine out of the cellar. I have a light fixture that is intermittant. And now more times than not it just doesn't light. That's why I have a flashlight by the door. I donned the Power Cap, switched it on high, and again could easily read labels and find bottles.

I'm now officially sold. Our circuit breakers are in a room under the stairs with no light at all and I can't wait to use the Cap when something trips.

Awesome Christmas Presents - Part One

One member of the family definitely liked his Christmas present. Charlie, our dog, received a new bed. Here's a picture of him tentatively checking it out then another of him getting comfortable. He's a very happy dog.

One Thing I Won't be Doing for Christmas Next Year

My wife has always wanted to see one of the traveling Chrismas music shows, so we attended the Mannheim Steamroller concert in Portland on the Saturday before Christmas. I think we realized about two songs in that we really wanted to attend the other traveling Chrismas show - the Trans Siberian Orchestra. I had a premonition before the show when I was reading the program and got the instinct impression that Mannheim Steamroller was trying a little too hard to justify their existence.

How many bands consider it necessary to make points about how many hotel room nights they've booked or how many yard of video screen they've hung or how more many records they sold than Springsteen and Bon Jovi? I saw Springsteen in April and he didn't mention anything about the band's history or that he had sold more records than someone - he just played (really well, I might add).

It really hit home when one of the keyboard players introduced himself as the "featured keyboard player" and then introduced the other keyboard player - who happened to be his wife. Is his wife less valuable to the band because she's not "featured"? I can't imagine that going down too well in my house. And who cares who the featured keyboard player is anyway? Very odd.

They are perfectly fine musicians. The women playing recorder was awesome. I think we were just expecting a little more rock-n-roll and a lot less of the medieval vibe. I did check around with some friends a couple of days later who all said that the show we should have seen was the Trans Siberian Orchestra. Now that could wind up being equally lame for a whole set of different reasons, but now we're committed. We're going to have to go see for ourselves next year.

Halfway Around the World and Back Again

Made my semi-annual India/Egypt/UK trip over the last two weeks. I felt a bit guilty walking around Noida, India in a short-sleeve shirt while Carlton had a week of below freezing temps. Did get to see the Nile for the first time. But it was at night and from the middle of downtown Cairo the Nile actually didn't look much different from the Willamette near Portland.

Couple of interesting pictures. First probably only appeals to gadget geeks. The Intercontinental Hotel in Cairo features interesting elevator controls - you put in the floor you want to go to, the control then displays which elevator to get onto, and once you're inside there are no buttons, it just takes you to your floor automatically. While that prevents the kids pressing every button, it also prevents you from changing your mind during the trip. I did get stuck going up and down and in and out trying to find the lobby until I figured out I needed to enter a minus sign before the number to get there. Maybe these are everywhere now, but it's the first time I've seen them.

Second picture was just amazing to me. Seeing a Christmas tree behind an obelisk and the Sphinx was just bizarre. I don't even think they celebrate Christmas, but I forgot to ask about it

Allison Inn: Jory Restaurant - Thumbs Up

Finally made it out to the pretty spectacular Allison Inn in Newberg on the Sunday of Thanksgiving Weekend. I had seen it on a tour before all the drywall was up, so it was great to see the finished product. We had just completed three days of pouring wine and could best be characterized as wiped out. We had heard very good things about Jory (and they even have our 06 Pinot Noir 144 on their list).

The bar area that surrounds part of the kitchen is beautiful (I can't wait to sit there for a late lunch), but we had a group so we sat at a table. They're obviously used to winery people, because they had no problem opening a bunch of bottles of wine that we brought. The rack of lamb was outstanding. I wish I could remember all the appetizers I tried, but I wasn't feeling too much pain by the end of the night (had a designated driver). We had a couple from Seattle join us for us for a while to try some wine - we're a friendly group and love meeting new people.

I do want to thank Tom and the staff there - some restaurants aren't as thrilled about people bringing their own wine.

Thanksgiving 2009 - Fried Turkey and Wine Tasting

I'm always surprised at how many people haven't tried a fried turkey. We started cooking them that way a couple of years ago and we wouldn't ever think of putting one in the oven any more. You can cook a 14-15 pound turkey in about 50 minutes and it comes out moist - what's not to like about that? So here's a picture of the turkey frying and the end product. Looks very tempting even with the bad lighting. We had a very nice 1999 Belle Pente Murto Vineyard Pinot Noir with it.

Day after Thanksgiving we were pouring wine at ADEA Wine Company with four other wineries. $15 tasting fee = 20+ open Pinot Noirs. This is one of the best values and most laid back places to try wine in Willamette Valley. Come see us sometime. Next big open house will be Memorial Day Weekend but we can make ourselves available on most weekends if you call to set up a time. One note - the 2007s are starting to come together - major improvement over how they were showing at the '08 Memorial Day tasting.

2008 Vintage - First Consumer Trial

We bottled our 2008 main estate blend in early October. We think it's pretty good, but we've had no one outside our facility taste it yet. So last Sunday we had a call for an appointment and I remembered that I had a case of 08 in my trunk. These bottles were going to be used for samples because the labels were all at odd heights - every time you change a roll of labels on the machine you hope you've set it in same place as the last roll. Sometimes you're a bit off.

So I decided this group would be the first "outsiders" to taste one of my 08s. I poured them the 07 estate, 05, 06 and 07 reserves and the 08 estate. This was an experienced group - they've been drinking Oregon Pinot for 20 years. The 08 estate, even with only a month of bottle age, was really impressive. They forced me (OK, strongly encouraged might be more accurate) to take them into the barrel room to try the 08 reserves which are still aging in barrel. Then they went and bought two cases of reserve futures (I don't even usually sell futures - they were persuasive) and most of the case of the 08 samples.

So all I can conclude so far is that the 08s will be very well received when they are released. These are very elegant Pinots. There may be an Uh-Huh bottling and there is a strong possibility of a completely new label. If I can get the bottles, we will bottle our first magnums ever.

What's Your Favorite Oregon Vintage?

Last weekend we poured our 2005, 2006 and 2007 reserve Pinot Noirs at our Weekend Before event [Note: There are two traditional open house weekends in Oregon - the weekend after Thanksgiving and Memorial Day Weekend. Every winery including all those without regular tasting hours pour wine during those two weekends and many are also open the weekend before.]

I was interested in what people thought about those three vintages and I have almost the perfect setup for finding out. All three wines had the same clone percentages: 50% Pommard, 25% Wadenswil, and 25% 115. All three wines were aged for about the same amount of time in 50% new French oak [50% means half of the barrels were new]. And even the winemaking was almost identical - every vintage was completely destemmed and fermented in small lots in 1.5 ton fermenters.

So as I told the tasters, the variables were mostly yield and weather. We had a bad fruit set in the spring of 05, so our yield that year was very low. We had a normal crop going in 06 and then it got hot in October (the 09 harvest reminds us a lot of 06). And in 07 we had a normal crop going and then it got cool in late September with some rain.

So which one did people prefer? If you look at purchased bottles, it was 56% 06, 22% 05 and 22% 07. There did seem to be some differences in preference among people who have purchased Oregon Pinot for many years - they seemed to prefer the 07 over the 06. If you remember (and we certainly do) the "experts" were trashing the 07 vintage before we even picked it because it rained in late September. The wines are really coming around now and showing quite nicely.

I was asked quite a bit which one is my favorite and I responded by stating the order in which I'd drink them right now. I'd drink the 07 first (nice acidity with a beautiful laser beam of cherry fruit running through the wine - very refreshing), the 06 second (definite crowd pleaser with upfront dark fruit flavors and a tremendous round mouthfeel) just because I think it could benefit from another year or two of aging, and the 05 third (still very tight but showing more fruit this year) because I think that needs another couple of years.

I'll get another couple of hundred opinions this upcoming weekend and update this post if I find anything interesting.

Swedish Food

I was in Sweden last week and wound up having an amazing and unexpected dining experience. My previous experiences with Swedish cuisine haven't been all that memorable - for example, heaping plates of cold baby shrimp on lettuce isn't my idea of a mid-morning snack, but seems to be a national dish. A colleague wanted to try someplace he'd never been before in old town Stockholm, so I said let's go.

We wound up in the basement of a hotel at a restaurant called Leijontornet - Lion Tower in English. It turns out that the restaurant sits on top of an ancient outer wall of Stockholm and they actually built the dining room around some of the ruins. Parts of the wall we could see were almost 700 years old. I attached a picture. I didn't have my camera so I had to take pictures with my phone. I apologize for the horrible quality. There are much better pictures on their website.

We were the only two people in the restaurant - I guess Tuesday nights are slow. Two parties showed up later in the evening. The menu showed three choices - four course seafood meal, four course meat, and a seven course combination. The meat menu was interesting and included duck liver, ox tartare, and lamb, but we both decided on the seafood menu (picture attached). I couldn't pass on lobster and truffles.

So we needed a white wine. Our very funny Norwegian server brought out the list (my companion was Danish, so they both compared notes on Swedes throughout the evening - apparently Swedes are an inferior species). Then they let us go down into the wine cellar to look around (benefits of a slow night). It was full of first growths and ridiculous burgundies plus high-end wines from all the other areas of the world. I decided to pull out the personal credit card and we wound up with an '04 Leflaive Batard-Montrachet (picture attached). I'm a sucker for white burgundy and we needed something worthy of the menu. The wine kicked ass all night - we couldn't have picked a better match for the food.

About the food. First thing that came out was what's in the bottom picture - a four item sampler that included a salt pike lollipop, a very thin slice of reindeer jerky, some sort of cod skin and the Swedish version of a pork rind (the clear twirly thing in the left of the picture). The pork was like eating bacon-flavored air and everything else was equally good. Highlights were the mussels in the first course (I'm not a mussel fan at all - these were the best tasting mussels I've ever had), and the lobster, of course. Everything was fresh and from Sweden - even the raspberries and truffles.

I had my eyes opened to good Swedish cuisine. It's not just meatballs and herring. If you get to Stockholm, check out Leijontornet.

Winemaking Update - 10/27

Fermentation is winding down. Brix readings range from 0 to -2.1. I expect to start barreling down fermenters by the weekend.

New Restaurant - Farm to Fork in Dundee

My wife and I went out to dinner on Friday night to celebrate our 27th anniversary. We finally made it to Farm to Fork, the restaurant at the Inn at Red Hills in Dundee, Oregon. They focus on local ingredients and have a gourmet deli as part of the restaurant. Can't believe we haven't been here before. We had the carrot soup and pork and duck rillettes as appetizers and the duck breast and scallops for dinner. And (not like this has not happened before) we wound up spending more on wine than the food - we had a 2006 Louis Michel Chablis Premier Cru from a vineyard I can't remember. We both thought the food was excellent and the prices were very reasonable consdeiring the quality. We'll have to go back.

Winemaking 2009

All the pinot is in fermenters. We used roughly 30% whole clusters in all but one fermenter. (You always need a control lot) We cold soak and gently pump over for a few days before we inoculate with yeast. Right now the first lot that was picked is in active fermentation, the second lot is just starting, and the third lot is still soaking and expected to start soon. We've seen temperatures in the mid to high 80s - which is where we like them. One thing with using whole clusters is that the fermentations take a little longer to get going and a little longer to end. Everything looks good so far - I'll update in a few days.

More Harvest 2009

Final numbers - 16 tons of Pinot Noir from 11 acres or 1.45 tons per acre. That's a little less than we were expecting. We definitely had some dehydration in the vineyard - it looked a lot like 2003 and 2006 out there. Sugars were higher than normal, but we also saw that in '03 and '06. We deliberately maximized hang time even with the higher sugars to help develop the right flavors. We picked on Oct 6, Oct 9 and Oct 11. The fruit was extremely clean with no noticeable botrytis. The "farmer" part of me is always happy to get clean fruit into the winery quickly, but the "winery" side is always greedy and wants as much hang time as possible.

I think we're going to have very nice wines from this vintage. I attached some pictures from Oct 11. You can see Charlie, the Twelve mascot, patrolling the filled grape bins in one. Our picking crew was amazing - they pick extremely fast and clean, so that we can get the fruit to the winery before the day gets too warm.

First Crush 2009

We finally picked some Pinot Noir yesterday.  It was our Block 1 Pommard which was planted in 2000.  It's been the first block picked for the last four years.  Yield was only 1.5 tons per acre and 3 tons total.  We would have been much closer to 2T/acre if we hadn't had the dehydration that you can see in the last post.  There are some pictures of the bins at crush pad, a bin loaded in the sorting line and some clusters on their way to the destemmer.  We filled two fermenters - each with 1.5 tons of fruit.  We dumped one bin of fruit directly into the fermenter and then destemmed and crushed three bins to wind up with 25% whole clusters.  We'll be picking more later this week.

Harvest

We are picking grapes later today.  This is our first pick of the vintage and we're bringing in the Pommard block that was planted in 2000.  The fruit is definitely ripe.  I've attached a picture of a Pinot Noir cluster and you can see some shriveling from the warm weather we had a couple of weeks ago.  We plan to pick the rest of the Pinot Noir before Monday, but we'll see. If we can squeak out some more hang time, we'll go for it.  I also attached a picture of some Pinot Blanc clusters (they're huge, as usual) and a picture of the harvest bins cleaned and ready for use.  They're upside down to prevent the one that don't have slots from filling up with rain.

We had a little rain last week which actually helped firm up some of the clusters that were showing signs of dehydration.  I'll post more pictures from the harvest process over the next couple of weeks.

Veraison 2009

We're through veraison or the 'changing of the color' of our Pinot Noir grapes. Here's a picture from 10 days ago showing some clusters in the middle of the transition. Now it's just waiting for harvest and hoping for the best weather possible to continue the ripening process.

Ridiculously Good Wine

Had a 2005 Comtes Lafon Volnay a couple of days ago. Love this producer. There's a place called Willi's Wine Bar in Paris which always has several years and several kinds of Comtes Lafon white and red Burgundy. I have been known to sit at the bar and splurge on a bottle with dinner.

This was the village Volnay not his single vineyard. Spectacular. I know he's justifiably famous for his white wines, but the reds are just as good. I just wish I could afford more of the 2005 Burgundies - I tasted a bunch of them at the 2007 International Pinot Noir Celebration and they were all outstanding.

Blending

I'm starting the blending process for the '08s. Blending is one the most fun things you do at a small winery. Usually start in July, but the day job has been really busy. There are 50 barrels which have been separated into 11 lots. You can see a picture of some small bottles filled with samples above.

The current target is one main estate blend and two reserve wines. There are a lot of interesting components to work with - the Wadenswil this year has a tremendous upfront fruit component and the lots we picked last that hung for almost the entire month of October have some beautiful texture and balance. We'll carry the reserve blends over harvest and bottle sometime next year. Haven't made our mind up yet on the main blend. Check back for updates.

Venezuela in the House!

I get a call at about 10AM on Saturday the 8th asking for an appointment later in the day for tasting. I needed to be up at the winery anyway to work on blending, so I agreed. It was a Washington state phone number - Seattle area code, but the person calling had a bit of an accent. My hopes weren't too high - I've learned that the later the appointment the much higher the probability of a no show. Which is why I never open bottles early any more. People just seriously underestimate the amount of time you typically spend tasting per winery. Right around the time of the appointment I get a call - same person letting me know they're running late but that they still plan on being there. (Note to anyone making an appointment at a winery - we love status calls. Let us know if you changed your mind and aren't going to make it or you're running late or whatever, we really appreciate those.)

So around an hour later, two ladies and a gentleman arrive. Turns out that Irene who had made the calls is a native of Caracas, Venezuela and is visiting her friend Carolina (originally from Venezuela, but now in Seattle) and Carolina's new husband Juan Antonio. That's Carolina on the left in the picture above and Irene on the right. More amazingly, Irene had found and selected Twelve for a visit solely through the web while she was still in Venezuela. Irene knew our story, our labels, and which wines we no longer had. I've never had a more prepared visitor.

So we tried a 2007 Pinot and a vertical of the 2005, 2006 and 2007 Pinot Noir 144 (our reserve) and then Irene asked me about the "ooh-ooh". I figured out that she meant the "Uh-Huh" (which comes from the KC and the Sunshine Band lyric "That's the way uh-huh uh-huh I like it") Just the fact that she knew about that wine meant I had to go find a bottle and open it. I have maybe three cases total of that wine left, but you have to reward people who do their homework. Then we did a little barrel tasting of the 08s.

We shared war stories - Carolina told me about her mother pouring her $200 super high-end Malbec for her friends (who would have been just as happy with a $6 Malbec) and I told her about my wife accidentally using a $90 Chardonnay as a cooking wine. And we compared last names. Irene and Juan Antonio's were pretty easy. Mine - Lenyo - is very rare in the US and so consistently gets butchered (Lenno, Len-ee-o, Leeeno, etc...) that it was immediately ruled out as a name for the winery. But Carolina topped me - her last name, Uzcategui, looked pretty close to something you'd get out of a random letter generator. It is pronounced yoose-kah-tey-ghee and it's a Basque name.

So we took pictures and they headed out to dinner at Tina's. And I can now chalk off Venezuela as a country from which Twelve has had a visitor.

Classic England part 2

The restaurant was right on the river shown in the second picture of the last entry. Food was excellent. Wine list was typical for England - Australia, Chile, Argentina, France and South Africa well represented, nothing from Oregon. Check out the picture above of the amazing carving that's on the walkway to the restaurant. Didn't even notice it on the way to dinner (jet lag). Found it at breakfast the next morning.

Classic England

The day job took recently took me to a small city in England about 45 minutes west of London. Here's some pictures of the a classic English country hotel - The Newbury Manor. An aged but well-preserved pile of bricks in an immaculate garden setting. They even have real keys for the room doors. The grounds were in excellent condition in mid-July. More in the next post.

Vintage 2009 - Looking good (so far)

The vines are looking great. We had a solid fruit set and we're back to what looks like a more normal target date for harvest - early October. We set a personal record last year when we didn't even begin picking grapes until October 22. We had never picked any other vintage after October 18.

So here are a couple of pictures. The second shows some rows and you can see how we manage the vineyard. We till every other row and leave a cover crop in the rest. This is one method to manage vigor in the vines - you want your vines to focus on ripening fruit, not growing long shoots.

We do a lot of work on the canopy. We position the shoots vertically in the trellis trying to eliminate overlapping leaves. We want a very thin canopy with the max sun per leaf we can get. We pull leaves on one side of the canopy to let more air circulate around the clusters. This is targeted at reducing the possibility of powdery mildew. And finally we hedge the tops of the shoots - again to slow shoot growth and improve fruit ripening.

The first picture shows some clusters. Since the set was good, we actually have to go through and do a 'green harvest'. The plants in a typical year will set more fruit than our target yield. In Oregon, most premium Pinots are harvested at yields around 2 tons per acre. It's all about ripening and developing flavors. Too high of a yield runs the risk of not ripening enough at harvest. So we're in the process right now of cutting off clusters to get to our 2 tons per acre.

So far so good, but Oregon harvests always come down to the weather in the last week of September and the month of October.

Tons of Great Food

Had a week of vacation and spent it enjoying lots of good food near home.

We had a wonderful meal at a brand new restaurant in McMinnville - Thistle. I think we were there on their third night. The owners are Emily and Eric, who also happen to be the only employees. Food was really impressive - I had the beet salad and flatiron steak. There's four or five appetizers and main courses plus a couple of desserts. The menu choices change every day.

We did a whole day in Portland during vacation. We had lunch at my favorite lunch place in Portland - Wildwood - a super consistent, high quality eatery with a great bar area and great lunch menu. Didn't even drink any wine, I went for an updated version of something my late father-in-law introduced me to about 27 years ago - the rye (usually Seagrams) and ginger ale. They made a version with raw ginger that was really refreshing.

Then we wandered around the Mississippi Street fair for a couple of hours (first time and would definitely go again), crossed back over the river to see the movie Away We Go and would up having dinner at one of my favorite dinner restaurants in Portland - the Veritable Quandry. They cooked some Alaskan wild salmon to perfection, but I was blown away by the handmade truffle that we had for dessert. It was simply unbelievable. It clearly highlighted the difference between something fresh and something you get out of box that was filled months ago. Just decadent with a stunning creamy texture.

We closed our vacation week with a experience that I would hesitate to make public if anyone was actually reading this blog. Nick's Italian Cafe in McMinnville - an institution in Wine Country - has started a family dinner on Sunday. It's one seating served family style. You can even bring your own wine. I won't even put the price in this blog - lets just say if it was twice as much no one at my dinner would even have blinked. There was wood-fired flat bread pizza with porcini mushrooms as one of the appetizers, and then huge plates of fettucine with mushrooms and peppers, followed by salad, then a sublime lamb stew, and finally Fred Flinstone sized piles of ribs. Ridiculously awesome, insane price and there was dessert too.

Summer is the Time for Tasting

Continuing the previous post, when I went up to the winery, I was expecting it to be pretty quiet. I rent space from ADEA Wine Company in Gaston, OR, which is about 12 miles north of the vineyard. Six wineries currently make wine there (ADEA, Biggio Hamina, Bishop Creek, Cancilla Cellars, Matello, and Twelve).

I was quite surprised to see about 30 motorcycles parked outside the front door and a bunch of leather-clad people hanging out having a picnic. Turns out it was the second annual Poker Run for a local bike club and we were the lunch stop. Dean from ADEA was hosting. It's always something - on Memorial Day we had a group with four Pontiac Solstice convertibles.

While I was barrel tasting I got a call from another winery asking for directions for a couple that was tasting there. Long story short, their daughter had attended a Twelve tasting in North Carolina and insisted that they stop at the winery while they were in Oregon. So I met a very nice couple from Tennessee who were at the beginning of a two month RV trip through the northwest.

One of the things I really like about the wine business is the ability to talk to people about wine in the winery. So if you're in Oregon this summer, call and make an appointment to come visit. I guarantee you'll get a host who is deeply knowledgable about the wine and the vineyards (process of elimination - there are no other employees besides me) and likes nothing better than spending time tasting and talking about wine. The appointment hotline is 503-358-6707.

Tasting the 2008 Vintage

The day after I returned from my around the world trip, I went up to the winery and tasted through some of the 2008 wine that's still in barrel. This is going to be quite an interesting vintage. The wines smell and taste great.

We fermented some lots with completely destemmed fruit, and for the first time ever we did some with varying percentages of whole clusters. Adding in effects of the new barrels from three different barrel producers (Cadus, Damy and Francois Freres), the three clones (115, Pommard and Wadenswil), and the range of ages of the plants (8 to 25 years old), we have a lot of blending choices. We expect total Pinot Noir production to be slightly over 1200 cases.

Trip Around the World - Coolest Airport Wine Shop

Between Delhi and Cairo I changed planes in the eighth wonder of the world - Terminal 3 in Dubai. People talk about Heathrow being a huge shopping mall, and the Seoul airport has quite a collection of shops, but the Dubai airport is ridiculous. And in the middle of it is an amazing wine shop - Le Clos. It's not very big, but this series of pictures shows it's pretty special. A little weird to be standing in the middle of a bunch of first growths and grand crus in an airport.

They had one of my favorite Burgundies - Comtes Lafon Volnay Santenots Du Milieu from the incredible 2005 vintage, so I picked up a bottle of that along with a 2005 Chateau Montrose. Prices were even lower than in the US.

Trip Around the World - Kimchee

Kimchee is the national dish of South Korea. I've never had a meal there where it wasn't served. I actually found the Kimchee Museum (yes, there is a kimchee museum) which wasn't large, but was very informative. There is an amazing variety of kimchee across the country. The one fact I remember (was still recovering from the previous night's soju experience) was that hot peppers weren't native to Korea, so kimchee didn't get spicy until someone brought them in.

Like wine, kimchee is fermented and the Koreans talk a lot about the health benefits - low calorie, high fiber, rich in vitamins and lactic acid bacteria. Regardless, it tastes great. Here's picture of one of the displays in the museum. They had over 60 different kinds.

Trip Around the World - Seoul part 2

It was pretty cool seeing thousands and thousands of South Koreans out celebrating their Memorial Day. Above is a picture of a display of the flags of all the nations that helped during the Korean War. But talking about Korea with out talking about the national dish would be criminal, so that's the topic of the next post.

Trip Around the World - Seoul

I just returned from an eight-day trip around the world for my day job. I was in Seoul, Delhi, Cairo and Manchester. That's a lot less sexy than it sounds. But I did have a few wine experiences. For example on the left is a picture of the small wine rack outside of my hotel's bar in Seoul. They clearly take their wine seriously in Korea.

The sad thing was I didn't even drink any wine in Seoul. I attended a dinner with customers and drank the traditional soju, which is "wine" made from sweet potatoes. It's similar to sake - about 19% alcohol, clear, packs an enormous punch in large quantities. Following the usual custom of drinking a shot with everyone from the customer's party, let's just say the next day wasn't a whole lot of fun. It also happened to be Memorial Day in Korea and the square outside of my hotel was ground zero for the Seoul celebration. The (very) amplified speeches started at around 8AM.

Introduction

I've finally decided to take the plunge into Web 2.0. As usual, I'm several years behind the curve - I was late into CDs, late into DVDs, late into big screen TVs and still don't own a Blu-Ray. The odd thing about this is that my day job is in one of the most geeky, high-tech areas of computer software. That's right, I still have my day job.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. First things first, my name is John Lenyo and I live on my vineyard in Carlton, Oregon. We moved into the vineyard in 1998 (two weeks before harvest - not recommended) and our first vintage of Twelve was 2003. We only make Pinot Noir and Pinot Blanc and currently all the fruit is sourced from our vineyard.

I was bitten hard by the wine bug in 1992. I do remember the bottle - 1982 Dunn Howell Mountain Cabernet and the restaurant - the now closed Cypress Club in North Beach, San Francisco. (My previous wine experience had been limited to things like Liebfraumilch and the $1.99 Bulgarian or Romanian brand Trakia - not that there's anything wrong with that of course). Once I tasted that wine, I started down a very slippery slope that involved lots of classes, tastings, some collecting, a preference for Pinot Noir and too many mailing lists, culminating in the actual purchase of 23 acres with a house and a small vineyard.

So welcome to my blog and I can only hope that there'll be lots of interesting content.