Ridin’ Six White Horses (Welcome to Peoria!) There was a time in the mid-nineties when things seemed to run pretty smoothly in the operation of Edmunds St. John. Our wines seemed to be only getting better and better, the wine writers that knew about us all seemed to have nice things to say. We’d bottle […]

Hobo’s Lullaby An email popped up last night, just before I headed to bed, from CD Baby! I’ve gotten emails from CD Baby! before; I signed up with them to sell my recording Lonesome On The Ground through their site. But all the emails before last night were things like tips on self-promotion, and services […]

Might be Nothing but Words I don’t know where to begin. Now that the rain has retreated, it’s hard to dwell on it anymore, yet I know I felt, more than once, that it might never end, that, thousands of years of history to the contrary notwithstanding, Spring just might not ever arrive this year. […]

Seeing Things “Your eyes are playing tricks on you.” Ever hear that? I have this memory, from adolescence, perhaps, of looking at a photograph of some part of the moon that featured a great concentration of craters, and being instructed, by the caption for the photograph, to look at the photo upside-down, and to notice […]

Across the Great Divide For quite a number of years after I became involved in the wine business, I remembered the taste of every wine I tried, often vividly. I kept rigorous, methodical notes, for a fairly long time, in a number of different notebooks, since I often couldn’t remember what I’d done with one […]

Wild Card (When Worlds Collide) Last Spring, at a fundraiser for a professional Institute with which she’s affiliated, my wife made the high bid on an unusual auction item: a poker party for up to eight people, hosted by a couple of her colleagues, which included an informal dinner of home-made pizzas and salad, dessert […]

Just Another Whistlestop 2005 marks the 20th anniversary of Edmunds St. John’s first days. Though it never occurred to me in 1985 that I would ever write that sentence, the sentence itself, and the fact that occasioned it have now come and gone, and I’ve still got plenty of work to do. I keep thinking […]

Dead To The World It’s that time of the year again: “Wine is a bridge, between the two worlds, the living and the dead. Harvest is a story of death, of profound undoing. The grapevines, which began to grow as Winter faded, opened into the morning of Spring, and pushed forth green shoots, and the […]

Not a County Maintained Road So here we are, 513 years later, and some things aren’t going all that well. Even confining this lament to the proceedings at Edmunds St. John (20 years later), it’s been pretty bumpy lately. Today, for example, the septic system at the facility into which Edmunds St. John has relocated […]

Knock, Knock, Knockin’ I feel like a marked man. The circumstances were not extraordinary; I was checking in on the progress of a wine that had only been in the bottle a few months (since February this year), trying to get a fix on how well it had recovered from the shock of being compressed […]