Category Book, Film, App Review

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Russian River Valley’s Unique History: From Obscurity to Excellence, a Documentary Review

Nov 16, ’12 2:35 PM

From Obscurity to Excellence: The Story of Grapes & Wine in the Russian River Valley, A Documentary

a map of the Russian River Valley AVA, approved in 1983; image from Russian River Valley Winegrowers

In 1997 Maurice Joe Nugent began planting grapes in the Russian River Valley, having found his calling, in a sense, after leaving a professorship in Chemistry in order to fulfill his hope of living in California. Within a few years the fruit had proved to be reliable and he found himself enjoying his days driving a tractor about the property, pulling leaves to moderate sun exposure, and simply enjoying his new career. While walking through the vineyard he began to wonder about the history of the place–how did wine in Russian River Valley get so good?

That initial question set Joe off on a quest of talking to people on film–asking them to tell their stories about their life of wine in the area of the AVA founded in 1983, but reaching back to a history of wine production established well before Prohibition. What is remarkable about the project is that Joe succeeds in recording interviews with men that not only lived through Prohibition, but also helped jump start the California wine industry immediately after its demise.

The interviews have been brought together in a documentary film to tell the story of what is now called the Russian River Valley. What this film does well is bring together a wealth of information with the intimate insights of genuine story telling. The interviews shown throughout capture men in the revelry of their memories, offering a glimpse at the lives the people of the area have lived, while eliciting the history of the place itself. In this way, one can’t help but be charmed with how the history is told. At the same time, the movie offers clear insight into details of the industry’s trajectory, along with some, perhaps, illicit implications into the founding of one of the larger producers of wine in the area.

Where the movie limits itself is in a few interviews filmed with less polished technical effect. What becomes clear by the end of the documentary, however, is that those moments offer irreplaceable recordings of men sharing history. The rougher interviews are included for this reason–they are irreplaceable. Some of the figures shown in the story are no longer alive. In this way, the movie is an opportunity to hear from our elders in the wine industry, those any of us in Sonoma County are, in a sense, indebted to.

From Obscurity to Excellence: The Story of Grapes & Wine in the Russian River Valley shares the history of pre-Prohibition immigration and migration to the then-remote area of Northern Sonoma, the post-Prohibition boom, and the quite recent move from bulk wine to a focus on quality, resulting in the development of Pinot Noir and Chardonnay as the area’s grape figure heads. Best of all, the movie manages to share this history alongside the charm of real people that impacted the success of the wine industry in Sonoma.

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From Obscurity to Excellence: The Story of Grapes and Wine in the Russian River Valley will celebrate its release on December 1, 2012 at the Wells Fargo Center, 50 Mark West Springs Road, Santa Rosa, CA.

For more information about the movie visit the movie’s website: http://www.russian-river-valley.com/

To purchase tickets for the December 1 screening (some of the people interviews in the film will also be present at the screening): http://events.pressdemocrat.com/santa_rosa_ca/events/show/293052645-russian-river-valley-grapes-and-wines-movie

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Thank you to Joe Nugent for including me in the pre-release screening, and for taking time to talk with me.

Thank you to Kanchan Kinkade.

Copyright 2012 all rights reserved. When sharing or forwarding, please attribute to WakawakaWineReviews.com. WakawakaWineReviews

 

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Being Delectable: How a Data Guru, and Entertainment Engineer Went Deep Into Wine

Nov 1, ’12 2:51 PM

Building Delectable: Alex Fishman and Aaron Vanderbeek Brainstorm

“What Can We Do To Make the World a More Delicious Place?“ The conversation started over breakfast in May a year ago, at Gramercy Park, in New York City. Alex Fishman had just returned from half a year working in Dubai, and his long time friend, Aaron Vanderbeek, just happened to be visiting the city on vacation from San Francisco.

Alex Fishman: How Big Data Operates Behind Learning & Loving Wine

Alex Fishman, Delectable co-founder, enjoying life on the go

Not all that familiar with wine at the time, Alex Fishman and his girlfriend had happened upon a bottle in the Dubai duty free shop that they enjoyed. They wanted to remember the wine to purchase again later, but reading the label to sort out the basic information–producer, type, vintage–was daunting. How could they learn more about a wine, if it was hard just to identify what wine they’d enjoyed? It occurred to Fishman that other consumers likely have similar trouble. He was struck with the challenge of how to make it easier.

Fishman’s work history has sorted its way through the realm of big data. In illustrating the reality of such work, he references the success of Paypal. Fishman explains that what that company did better than any other ecommerce money exchange site at its inception (Paypal got started in the late 90s, becoming a subsidary of Ebay in 2002) was fight and prevent online fraud. At the time Paypal started, numerous online money exchange companies were in operation. The difference was that while other exchange sites relied on artificial intelligence to spot fraud activities, the people behind Paypal recognized that anyone determined to defraud consumers would be smarter, more innovative than a programmed computer. Paypal chose, then, to use computers for what they did well–querying and sorting vast collections of data–while people worked with those computers to exercise their human assets–spotting patterns and anomalies in online behavior. The combination worked, setting Paypal as a leader in online financial exchange and security.

The Paypal model led to applications in other forms of security as well, including national security and border protections. The company Palantir, where Fishman worked, was born. What Palantir did was extend the financial security model that Paypal had delivered, into national border defenses to fight terrorism, increase the safety of international monetary exchange, and track crime. Included in Fishman’s trajectory with the company was six months working in Dubai, developing security solutions appropriate to the social environment there. But after several years of working in the realities of border security both in the United States and abroad, Fishman began wanting to use his skills to improve the richness of everyday life within a country’s borders. He decided to return to New York.

Aaron Vanderbeek: The Life of an Entertainment Engineer

Aaron Vanderbeek, Delectable co-founder, on the verge of infectious laughter

After completing an undergraduate education in a Music and Mechanical Engineering double major, Aaron Vanderbeek began developing nano fabrication techniques for the production of memory cards, or d-ram, with the company Samsung. Though he did incredibly well at the project, he realized his heart wasn’t singing from the work, and he decided to return to graduate school to move his career in a direction that tuned in closer to his interests. Carnegie Mellon offered a Master’s Program in Entertainment Technology, offering their advanced students the opportunity to dive into deep study of multiple avenues of entertainment from Theatre to Amusement Parks to Video Games to Television, in order to learn the fundamentals behind creating entertainment. The result of the program was to give successful students the confidence to design all different types of entertainment through all different mediums. That is, what Vanderbeek learned through the program were the foundational skills needed to design experiences.

In completing his Master’s, Vanderbeek made it his goal to find his way to San Francisco to live and for work. The move led to him working for companies in the city first to design hard-core gamer entertainment, like Dante’s Inferno, and then after, mobile social media games. The experience led to Vanderbeek applying his skills with building entertainment systems to the realm of interactive software and social media. Then Fishman called.

A little over a year ago, in May, back in the United States, Fishman decided to call his friend, Vanderbeek, hoping to schedule a Skype chat to catch up. By coincidence, Vanderbeek was actually visiting New York at the time so instead of video conferencing, the two met for breakfast. Fishman began relating his interest in working for the sake of life within borders, while Vanderbeek talked about his work in video game design. By the end of breakfast the two had realized a common goal–to make life more delicious–and brainstormed the early stages of an answer to the question of how to do just that. As the meal came to a close, Vanderbeek made Fishman a deal. If Fishman would move to San Francisco, Vanderbeek would quit his job so the two could work together. By September, a year ago, the two had incorporated their new company, Delectable.

Delectable: The Wine App, 2.0

a screen capture of my recent Delectable wine diary as the system identifies a Vermouth I posted. I’ve been trying it out and been acting tricky, posting pictures of other drinks besides wine and images with lots of corks or multiple bottles. Delectable’s id’ing softwear really does always work. Amazing. This image shows only one screen within the program. Other page views of the app show what friends have been drinking, or recent activity, among other things.

Together, Fishman and Vanderbeek built their iPhone App, Delectable 1.0, offering a way to help users identify and remember wines. The original design allowed users to take and store a photo of a bottle of wine to build a kind of wine diary for bottles to be remembered later. The remarkable element of the app though went beyond simply storing images–the app identified and named the wine for you, recording the producer, vintage, and exact wine type–alleviating the kind of confusion originally felt by Fishman in the duty free shop in Dubai. Since the release of version 1.0, the pair have gone on to develop a Delectable team with other engineers, both from the tech and the wine side, to assist in expanding the functionality of the app.

Today, November 1, marks the official release of version 2.0. With the upgrade, Delectable expands the program to a more community based experience. Much like Instagram, a user on Delectable can share an image to their online community with comments as desired. However, while on Instagram you simply post a picture, on Delectable the wine in the image is identified for you. But further, what Delectable 2.0 does differently is not only identify the exact wine, but also offer a simple rating system for that wine with room to type in comments, and a way to purchase it again. The Delectable team works with the best possible source for locating requested wines at no additional cost to the user. What the Delectable 2.0 app does, then, is combine Image-identifying software with the benefits of social media and online retail, all in your phone.

As Fishman and Vanderbeek describe it, they believe wine is to be shared and enjoyed. Their goal, then, is to make every step of the wine finding-and-buying process easier for the consumer to help increase that enjoyment, while also helping the consumer to connect to smaller wine producers to share in unique experiences. In their view what differentiates Delectable 2.0 from many other wine apps is the source of information and income.

Other wine apps generally make their money, and therefore also direct their marketing, based on resources directly from a wine seller–be it a producer brand, an importer, or a distributor. The reality of that is that mostly larger companies can afford such efforts, and as a result it is often larger producers that direct what is marketed, mentioned or sold on other wine apps.

The difference with Delectable is that it is individuals that get to post for themselves the wines they enjoy, whatever those wines happen to be. Since each user also decides for themselves who they want to follow on Delectable, individuals on the Delectable platform are driving what wines anyone is or isn’t exposed to, rather than marketing companies directing such influence. It isn’t that users can’t post wines made or sold by larger groups–indeed users can share any wine they enjoy. It’s that what is posted is directed by the consumers themselves. In this way, Fishman and Vanderbeek see themselves as helping to fill a gap in the wine world–the opportunity for consumers to connect more directly with wine made from smaller producers.

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Congratulations to Alex Fishman and Aaron Vanderbeek, and the entire Delectable team on today’s official release of version 2.0!

The Delectable 2.0 app is free. Check it out!

If you are interested in downloading the app you can do so in the Apple app store here: del.ec/download?ew

Thank you to Alex and Aaron for taking the time to meet with me. Thank you to Julia Weinberg.

Copyright 2012 all rights reserved. When sharing or forwarding, please attribute to WakawakaWineReviews.com

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Opening Space for Complexity and Experience: Eric Asimov’s HOW TO LOVE WINE, A Book Review

Oct 16, ’12 1:17 PM

Eric Asimov’s “How to Love Wine”

My copy of Eric Asimov’s How to Love Wine: A Memoir and Manifesto has already been filled with folded down corners and marks on pertinent sections. The pencil appears where he shares ideas I want to reflect on further–like his consideration that a great wine moves in “a fragile ambiguity” offering experiences of doubt and tension (48). The dog ears hover over moments of prose I find enticing and beautiful. There is a sort of almost incongruity in this, as Asimov’s writing here focuses on a central thesis–wine is for ease and pleasure. Along with that thesis, is a common refrain recommending we move away from the tasting note culture of wine, in which apparently objective analysis seems to bear down on bottles, and to instead drink wine as integral to a culture of enjoyment. For me to mark the text, then, as an academic would, with notes of professional analysis, might seem to avoid Asimov’s point. The ultimate conclusion Asimov offers, however, supports that there is no one right style of wine, and no one right answer on what should be enjoyed. (There are some recommendations on how to enjoy it–over time, with a meal, etc., but not a limitation on those possible ways.) It is instead, simply, that if we wish, we should feel free to go ahead and love wine.

Asimov’s book brings together the journalistic tone we know of him already from his regular writing in The New York Times, with personal stories in which he invites us into some of the intimate moments that changed his view of wine. I found myself charmed at the flow of these remembrances, feeling for the younger Asimov that revels in the joy of discovering the power of a meal, that is, “the sum total of the event” (107)–the place, the mood, the food, the place settings, the wine. And especially for the Asimov that celebrates sharing these moments with others, including a 30-year Bordeaux with his parents on their 30-year anniversary. And that I believe is part of the point of this book.

Let me explain.

There are times in this read when I question the contrast between the more spare manifesto tone, and the memoir approach. The book begins with the sense that it needs to convince us of something, and at first I resisted what felt to me an opening with a defensive stance. After the first couple chapters, however, we step into a more relaxed voice that wants to share stories with us, and invite us into a more familiar understanding of Asimov’s personal connections with wine. By the conclusion it is clear Asimov, as he puts it, does not wish to proselytize. The early chapters, then, must stand for some other purpose. At first the move from the earlier, into the narrative reflection felt disjointed to me. In moving through the book as a whole, however, I recognize these first chapters are there to do what might be important work–that is, help us to clear a space for ourselves from the heavy assumptions of a wine culture that demands infallible knowledge and analytic tasting notes. In stepping out from under such weight, we can instead simply breath, relax, and enjoy as we read. Not only for hedonistic pleasure, but also for the sense of complexity that comes with no longer expecting an expert to deliver packaged and memorizable answers for us. The responsibility of authority comes back to us. In purposefully helping to create this kind of space, I believe Asimov is doing something to be appreciated, and that he can be thanked for.

U.S. wine culture often appears as intimidating, pretentious, and alien. Novices and connoisseurs alike doubt their own ability to successfully select a bottle of wine, as if it is a test not only of ones knowledge, but perhaps too of ones value as a person, or as a professional. There is, in other words, a fear that when it comes to wine it is far too easy to screw up. Eric Asimov, with his job as the Wine Critic of The New York Times stands as one of the arbiters of taste for the nation, and the world of wine at large. With such a position, then, if there are people qualified for delivering the test results of appropriate wine knowledge and value, Asimov is one of them. From that position of authority, Asimov avoids announcing what wine it is right for us to drink, and instead invites us to relax and enjoy whatever we drink with greater ease and freedom of pleasure. In this way, the stories he tells us are not only wonderful anecdotes about a person I love to read. They are also invitations for us to see that he (and by implication, the other arbiters of taste in the wine world too) is simply a person. Any experts in wine have ample knowledge, yes (and that should no doubt be respected), but the knowledge they have arises from their own experience with wine over time. Wine knowledge, then, is dynamic, changing, and, at its root, personal. If we want to love wine, we can develop our relationship with it ourselves too, just as Asimov or any other expert has.

By sharing his memoir with us, Asimov accomplishes the manifesto portion of his text by example. In the midst of what might otherwise seem alien, or intimidating (the world of wine), what Asimov’s book does, is invite us in to the experience.

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Eric Asimov‘s book How To Love Wine: A Memoir and Manifesto was officially released today, October 16, 2012. It is available in the United States from William Morrow.

Thank you to the William Morrow division of Harper Collins for sending me an advanced copy of this book.

Most importantly: Congratulations and thank you to Eric Asimov for this excellent book, and for all his important work. May we all strive to bring such humility, grace, and clarity in excellence.

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To hear more on the book from Eric Asimov himself, check out this interview by Levi Dalton on his podcast series, I’ll Drink to That! “Episode 33″.

Asimov, Eric. How To Love Wine: A Memoir and Manifesto. ISBN: 9780061802522; ISBN10: 0061802522; Imprint: William Morrow ; On Sale: 10/16/2012; Format: Hardcover; Trimsize: 5 1/2 x 8 1/4; Pages: 272; $24.99

Copyright 2012 all rights reserved. When sharing or forwarding, please attribute to WakawakaWineReviews.com

 

 

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A Strange Sort of Book Review, My Confession: Jay McInerney’s Book THE JUICE: VINOUS VERITAS

Jun 12, ’12 12:02 AM

image from www.randomhouse.com

The conflict of growing up in Alaska defined life for me well into my thirties when I warned a friend, “this summer I’m likely to start speaking as if I want to move back. When you hear this, you have to remind me, don’t.”

The place for me carried the intense devotion of family, or family like connections. Our ancestors and the people my parents knew spread across the entire state, and even to every stop along the West coast of the United States we ever took (we’d bump into people my dad knew in the middle of no-where-we-knew California as likely as we would in downtown Anchorage). It felt as though family was everywhere. When it came to literal family, my great grandparents were the people I felt I’d do anything to help. They’d cared for me every summer till I was 10 when I started commercial fishing full time. Their presence also provided a constancy and sense of protection that comes with having older generations near by. When they entered their 80s still living alone, though by then one blind and the other almost deaf, I called the high school in their town of less than 600 to find out what it would take to graduate there so I could move in with them and help. (They moved into Anchorage with my parents and I instead.)

At the same time I grew with a deep thirst for science, literature, art, and culture that I felt was deeply alien to Alaska. That was likely unfair on my part. It’s not that these things weren’t there, but the ways I wanted to find them I couldn’t locate in my hometown. I had a hunger to travel and live elsewhere that wouldn’t leave me. The truth is, though I feel devotion to my sisters and parents too, when my great grandparents died in my early 20s I realized one of my primary goals was to stay away from Alaska long enough to find for myself a sense of clarity  amidst the tension the place had established inside me.

Something I strove to articulate during my graduate work in philosophy, and my brief tenure as a creative writer too, was the formative attachment to place that arises out of living a culturally Native lifestyle. Though my family spent 3/4 of the year in Anchorage, we based the foundations of our lives in the force of the land–not just the simple ground but the broader environment of climate, and seasons, and tidal influences, and people too. It is not that only Native people live this sense of place (indeed the French idea of terroir I take to be something partially resembling it), but that this robust sense of place is somehow definitive of what it means to really understand the term indigenous. That is, indigenous as a claim of being fully both from and of somewhere.

So, for someone with my particular background, setting a goal of staying away from a place that so thoroughly defines my roots and way of being is a kind of personal abuse even as it is simultaneously a demand for personal freedom.

In dealing with the continual pull I’ve felt through my adult life to return to Alaska, I’ve developed too a fault of arrogance–a sense of pride in being the one member of my family that has lived away for decades.

It’s funny, then, now to finally take my sister Melanie’s advice and read Jay McInerney‘s recently published book of wine writing in the style of wine travel memoirs plus smart wine reflection. Funny because, in my arrogance, I consistently rebuffed her suggestion, skeptical I’d like it, and she steadily encouraged me to consider it anyway. Funny too because it is in realizing she was right, I’m forced to see the pride, and, in the same moment, watch it de-puff a little (thank god).

(To be fair to myself, my resistance to his book largely arose out of my own need to recover from over a decade of life spent in intensive textual analysis because of my career in philosophy.)

In reading McInerney’s book, The Juice: Vinous Veritas, I found myself smiling, intrigued, and lured in by that projective fantasy offered by the best writing, of imagining I somehow know the person. In his brief accounts (each based on columns from the now defunct House & Garden, or the more recent Wall Street Journal), McInerney manages that delicate balance of narrative focus blended with intelligent revelations of the wines themselves. To put it another way, he presents a collection to be enjoyed from which any of us can also learn.

The truth is, McInerney’s book has also earned scathing critique, much of it reading as a sort of retaliation against his perceived cult of personality, rather than as substantial disagreement with the quality of the book itself. Though moments when the critique has verged on disagreement with the quality, I’ve been inclined to push the question of the book’s purpose. That is, it is only in recognizing what sort of book McInerney is offering that we can really judge how well he’s succeeded in the project.

There is some portion of The Juice that is likely possible because of his well-known personal history, and other portions dependent on his own thirst for the rich side of American life (cars, travel, and attractive women, though honestly what’s wrong with any of us that don’t appreciate at least two of those). That said, what works in this writing is its narrative focus. McInerney’s style is not that of a wine textbook, or even that of a wine critic. Instead, he invites the reader to share in his experience of discovering new wines, or going deeper with others he’s encountered before. In his version of the experience, the context deeply counts. The point here is not to remove himself from the story to give an apparently objective analysis of wine, nor to teach the reader wine knowledge, but to go another other way by delving further into the subject and subjective both–McInerney drinking wine. It’s, as I said already, wine memoir. What makes this approach work though is the narrative’s grounding in wine facts. While heavily taking that memoir approach, McInerney is sharing, what my sister would call, kernels of insight into each of the regions, or varieties, or wine makers he writes about. You leave each column charmed, and with at least a piece of information too to take away. If your goal is to learn everything you can about wine, this is not the right book. If your goal is to read about wine, and also take it easy, McInerney is for you.

McInerney’s stories here include a full section of wading into Burgundy; an escape from the big names of Napa through visits with more cult-like figures of the region including Schoener of Scholium Project, and his buddy up the road, Matthiasson, along with the steady figure Petroski; a charming reflection on a career of travels with fellow House & Garden alum Lora Zarubin; a visit through the seemingly contradictory stylings of Santa Rita Hills chardonnay–and that’s when it hits me…

I’ve planned my entire summer of writing about wine, and its regions in the United States, for my own sake, surely, but more deeply out of some sort of devotion to Melanie, and her very particular loves in wine. Most of the trips I’ve decided to take are those she’s either lived in herself, or wished to better understand in wine. I’m even returning to my family’s fishing grounds in Bristol Bay, the home of my great grandparents, to walk (and weep, I’m sure too) in the quiet place of half my family’s history all the way back. I’ll be there during the fishing season, to take pictures and write about the work my family still does, now five generations deep.

Growing up, Melanie would excitedly give me a gift for a birthday, or holiday, or whatever, and she’d tell me just after I opened it that she’d chosen it, yes, because she thought I would like it, but also too because she knew she did. I always understood this as a deep compliment to me on her part. Still, it took me years to be able to explain it to others. For Melanie, the joy is in the sharing of appreciation, even if the person isn’t physically there with you right in that moment, though often better if they are. Just like in wine. Just like in McInerney’s approach to wine writing.

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McInerney, Jay, 2012. The Juice: Vinous Veritas. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 304 pages. $26.95 hardcover.

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Thank you to my sister for putting up with me.

Copyright 2012 all rights reserved. When sharing or forwarding, please attribute to WakawakaWineReviews.com

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