Organolepticians Number 77 How the seasons roll round! I wrote a song called “April Starlight” in 1977, when I was a tour guide at Mondavi, and my younger daughter was still waking up nights, needing a little snack. Just by sitting up with her for half an hour, in the wonderful silence of a chilly night, […]

Organolepticians Number 76 November 5, 2008 One January morning, at roughly age 10, part way into Dwight Eisenhower’s second term as President of the United States, I got my first look, on our primitive black and white television set, at the Harlem Globetrotters, and I’ve never been quite the same since then.  How could anyone […]

Late Winter Offering There’s snow on the tallest hills around the Bay Area this morning, and I’m wearing a few extra layers, trying to keep the PG&E bill down. As cold and wet as it’s been lately, we’re still way down on seasonal rain, and hoping for a few more storms as Spring moves closer. […]

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 […]

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 […]

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. […]

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 […]

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 […]

Me and My Shadow 2002. A numeric palindrome, the kind of year that makes you feel like you don’t know if you’re coming or going. That’s how the harvest seemed for us, that year. At first it seemed everything would be early. Then again, we had ten days in the middle of the month when […]

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 […]