Organolepticians #100 Sometimes you wake up in the wee hours, for one thing or another, and hard as you try to settle back into slumber, you find yourself wide awake, or it seems to feel like wide awake, except that your mind, somehow, spans that gap between asleep and awake more easily than might normally […]
Exiles On Main Street
Organolepticians #99 It’s been 8 months since the last Organolepticians installment (I Got Those Fisherman’s Blues!, March 26, 2020), which coincided with the beginning of Shelter-In-Place at the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, and it seems, now, more like a couple of years. The narrative of a life, generated, and refined, over more than 72 […]
I Got Those Fisherman’s Blues
Organolepticians #98 It’s Wednesday, day 9 of Shelter-In-Place here in Berkeley, day 11 since the last time I was in a building other than the house where I live. (Day 361 since I was struck by a pickup truck in a crosswalk in North Berkeley, out on a walk a short while before sunset. What […]
Same Old Dog
Organolepticians #97 February 26, 2020 I made a Pinot Noir, back in 1989, and shot myself in the foot several times when I did. First of all, the grapes came from the Washington side of the Columbia River Gorge, which created the problem of only legally being entitled to use the designation “American” on the […]
Did You Ever Have To Make Up Your Mind?
Organolepticians #96: end of January 2019 As 2019 begins, Edmunds St John embarks on year number thirty-five, at a time when I feel we’ve just begun making, perhaps, some of the most enjoyable wines we’ve ever made. Of course, there are multiple ways to think about that, I suppose; it’s nice to think that I […]
Where There’s Smoke
Where There’s Smoke Organolepticians #95 We’ve been truly fortunate, this year, to be the recipient of some very nice press. First, in March, the San Francisco Chronicle’s Esther Mobley wrote a lovely article on Edmunds St. John, which focussed a great deal of very positive attention on us, and coaxed a lot of curious folks […]
La Plus ça Change/ Goes to Show You Never Can Tell
LA PLUS CA CHANGE/ GOES TO SHOW YOU NEVER CAN TELL ORGANOLEPTICIANS #94 MARCH 2, 2018 Even without climate change, farming is a crapshoot. Eventually something goes awry: a frost right after bloom, a tractor axle gives out, ground squirrels girdle vine roots, virulent microbes, wildfire… Locusts! Zombies! Still, somehow, every year, grapes get picked, […]
January Sunshine (Singing To The Ghosts)
Organolepticians # 93 In early December, in 2000, I released a CD called Lonesome On The Ground, which I’d recorded in March of that year, featuring 11 songs I’d mostly written some 20 years earlier, during a period when my daughters were quite young. They’d literally heard these songs coming into being, and I wanted […]
Let the Wild Ruckus Begin!
Organolepticians # 93 Back in May of this year, I wrote of our new wine project, the Iberian-inspired blend from grapes grown at Shake Ridge Ranch, in the high, sunny hills east of Sutter Creek, in Amador County, Sierra foothills. It’s a project that has inspired me; the grapes Ann Kraemer grows at Shake Ridge […]
EL JALEO (There’s A Party In The Basement!)
Organolepticians #92 (El Jaleo, the painting which hangs in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, just a few blocks from Boston’s Fenway Park, is the work of the American painter John Singer Sergeant, who painted it in 1882. It is a very large painting, and as compelling a work as any I’ve seen in my lifetime.) At […]