Petite Sirah: Survivor Grape

There is nothing dainty about Petite Sirah. Inky and peppery, this wine packs a wallop of tannins, that astringent quality that is not so much a flavor as it is a sensation.  Like a scrappy wrestler who is more sinew than flesh, Petite Sirah will muscle down a steak, a stew or an earthy sandwich of Portobello mushrooms.

If you think wrestling is an odd metaphor for wine, you should see the Youtube video in which Petite Sirah is likened to a muscle car. Wrestling, muscle cars, wine, you get the picture.

Petite Sirah is not Syrah, it’s a hybrid of Syrah and a variety unto itself. It is distinctly Californian. Called Durif in its native France, it isn’t grown there much, it likes our drier climate.  Petite Sirah was one of the first grapes imported to California to replace the so-so tasting Mission variety, a grape planted by the padres for sacramental and (I hope) recreational purposes.

In the early days people were less snooty about wine and more casual about the pedigree of their grapes. Growers confused this grape as a small-berried version of Syrah, thus its name. The small grape size is important for another reason. The skin of a grape gives wine its color and tannins, therefore the high ratio of skin to juice in Petite Sirah give it a punch of black-tinged color and lip-smacking tannins.

During prohibition this mighty little grape was prized for its portability.  Many California wine growers, such as the Lanza family in Suisun Valley, survived prohibition by shipping grapes to home winemakers in the east. There was a loophole in the law that allowed home winemakers to make up to 200 gallons a year.  Do the math: 200 gallons, 365 days a year, would a daily half-gallon ration of wine be enough to keep you happy?

Later Petite Sirah was used in blends to give oomph to the color and structure of other wines. Many single varietal wines are in fact blends, a wine needs to be only 75% of the variety on the label to carry that name. For example, your favorite Cabernet may in fact have small amounts of Merlot, Malbac or Petite Sirah and still be correctly called a Cabernet.

The advocacy group for Petite Sirah (yes, even grapes have advocacy groups) is called P.S. I Love You. Yes, Suisun Valley Petite Sirah, I do love you, let me count the ways. You bring the warmth of the valley to my table. You make my hamburger sing. You fill my glass with rich color, my mouth with big flavor. Most of all you remind me of a little girl who grew up near Suisun Valley, my daughter Sarah. Need I go on?

Horns of Plenty: BD 500 Gathering

Sean Mooney at Full Moon Farm and friends are hosting a Biodynamic Prep making gathering on Saturday November 19 from 10am-1pm.  Joey Brinkley will join us to demonstrate how to make BD 500 preparation, which we apply as a soil spray to encourage beneficial microorganisms, stimulate root growth, humus formation and fertility.  If you can attend please call 707.494.7869~~please bring a dish to pass and your helping hands!  The address is 2000 Smith Lane in Kelseyville. 

Biodynamic agriculture arose in response to industrial agriculture and synthetic fertilizers in the early 1920s, offering holistic land stewardship practices to express the individuality and potential of a growing site.  Today Biodynamics can be found in many parts of Europe, India, and Australia.  It is rooted in creating self-sufficiency and generating on-site fertility through the application of home-made compost and the use of nine preparations described by Rudolph Steiner to restore soil ecology, promote plant life and replenish etheric and astral life forces.  The concentrated preparations come from mineral, plant and animal kingdoms, each aged uniquely and added to soils to revive beneficial microbial life and restore the evolving dynamic cycles of living fertile soils. These are applied in homeopathic amounts to compost, soils and plants after dilution and stirring--procedures called dynamizations. 

Sail(s) to Remember

Today is my birthday, let me tell you how I celebrated my ongoing joy in being alive.

 
I went sailing for the first time on the San Francisco Bay this Saturday.

 
Sailing on a real sailboat has been on my bucket list for a long time. I grew up in Indiana, smack dab in the middle of the Midwest, about as far from the ocean as you can get. But we had a lot of lakes near my home, and my family had a Sunfish, which is the smallest sailboat you can get, if you can even call it a boat, it is basically a surfboard with a mast stuck in it.  Because my father was either too cheap, or too mistrustful of driving with a trailer, we traveled with it on the top of the car.  That means that if my dad wanted to sail,  he needed at least one person with him, not necessarily to sail, but to manhandle that boat off the top of the stationwagon and into the water.  

 
I guess he invited me on those Saturday sails because my brothers were playing sports or burning down the garage – that’s another story. I was the surly teenager moping around, watching TV and hating everyone. So my dad would take me sailing.

 
Those days were my best days. The wind, the water lapping the boat, the sun baking my shoulders after a long,long, gray, dark winter. Sometimes we would go slow and easy, and I could tan my legs on the bow and trail my fingers in the water. Sometimes we would go fast, and to keep the boat from tipping we would have to lean way over on the other side as the wind whipped my hair.  I trusted my father about 98% not to tip the boat, but that 2% of unease equaled an intense rush of adrenalin that has hooked me ever since.

Occasionally we did tip over and capsize.

When that happens,  I learned you just flip your boat and start again. And that it's easier if your father is there.

When my dad would ask me if I wanted to go sailing, I could not refuse him because I knew how much he wanted to go.  Now I know what an exceptional experience this was. Fathers in those days didn’t spend a lot of time with their kids, and daughters missed out most, since we generally didn’t play sports.  At least I didn’t, I thought sweat was disgusting.

Sailing was something my father and I shared when we shared almost nothing else.

Fast forward to my birthday. Every year, since being released from the whirl of dance recitals, wrestling tournaments and college tuitions, I try to do something, challenging, new, and “bucket listy” for my birthday. Two years ago I skydived for the first time, last year I hiked Half Dome.  My goal for this year was to learn to ski better- and I failed.  But Providence provides.  I met someone with a sailboat just in time for my birthday.

This was no Sunfish, this was the kind of boat I told myself I was going to buy for my dad, before I learned the lesson that not all our dreams come true.  This was a real boat, not a surfboard and a mast, and it was a boat for the San Francisco Bay.

Yet the elements that make life so worth living -  the piercing blue sky,  the lazy clouds, waves kissing the boat as they rush by and the sunlight that dances like so many fairies on the water, were just as alive on Saturday as they were on all those Saturdays so far away and so long ago. The only thing that could have improved that birthday sail was to have shared it with my dad. 

I did this for a Toastmaster speech today - funny how you can say things aloud that sound rather schamlzy in print. 

Biodynamic and Organic Farmers: I'll Have What They're Having

There’s a famous scene in When Harry Met Sally when Meg Ryan, in a crowded deli, proves that women do fake orgasms, often and convincingly, with a 90 second gasket-blowing, table-thumping, orgasm imitation, oh-oh-oh-OHhhhhhhh-YES,YES, YES!  

The punch line comes when a middle-aged woman glances at her and then the waiter and says “I’ll have what she’s having.”

Well I’ll have what they’re having, THEY being organic and biodynamic farmers.  I attended a biodynamic study group last year for no reason  other than I was interested. At the time I wondered, are these people beautiful just because they are young or are they beautiful because they are connected to the earth, eating good food and doing what they love? Whatever the reasons for their beauty, their peace, their earnest but practical care for the land,  I’ll have what they’re having. 

I recently attended a workshop on organic farming, again because I was interested. Kudos to Solano County’s Agriculture Commissioner and the county’s U.C. Davis Cooperative Extension for doing this two hour panel discussion to help farmers and landowners learn about paperwork, subsidies, soil samples, inspectors and so much more to do with getting started farming organically.  

Matt McCue and Lily Schneider, Suisun Valley's Shooting Star FarmThe panelists were not the kind of folks who save the earth by sitting in trees and stirring up publicity. They are young men and women, working within the system, through conservation programs and community supported agriculture groups, to improve our health and our world.

Once again, I don’t know why,  but they were beautiful, and not a mascara wand among them.

I’ll have what they’re having.

Women of the West: Freedom, Adventure And An Awful Lot of Dirt

Here's a little something I wrote for Fairfield CA's Daily Republic.  The assignment was to write about inspirational books for women. I'm not sure what was expected- self-help in the Dr. Phil genre perhaps, but I chose to write about four books that told the stories of women of the west. What does that have to do with wine? Not much except that for these women, the soil, the sun and the seasons were as primal as they are for anyone who loves wine.

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It was the way she evoked the nature of the prairie that first drew me to Willa Cather’s “My Antonia,” a story of Nebraska pioneers, and so much more. You smell the grass as it ripples across the prairie, and hear the wind hum through the lonely landscape.  Antonia’s childhood friend Jim, who narrates the story, goes on to college and career; Antonia must stay on the prairie to support her family. When he finds her again, it is the prairie that inhabits her, making her a character to admire and savor. “She was a battered woman now, not a lovely girl; but she still had that something which fires the imagination, could still stop one’s breath for a moment by a look or gesture that somehow revealed the meaning in common things. She had only to stand in the orchard, to put her hand on a little crab tree and look up at the apples, to make you feel the goodness of planting and tending and harvesting at last.”
        

"Women of the West" by Cathy Luchetti in collaboration with Carol Olwell is a book of photographs accompanied by stories of women, told in their own words, through journals, letters, and diaries. The book’s photographs, are truly worth a thousand words, depicting lives of freedom, adventure and an awful lot of dirt. These are the real life counterparts to the fictional Antonia. There’s a teacher in Texas, her school a shelter made of trunks and twigs, a sour-faced woman with her house of sod, and an Alaskan prospector jauntily posed with everything she needs: her man, her dog and her pipe. The book is dedicated to “those women of the West whose stories will never be told.” I have had this book over twenty years, and I never tire of scouring the photographs for clues to their stories.
        It was in “Women of the West” I first encountered Elinore Pruitt Stewart, a woman who came to a Wyoming to be a housekeeper on a sheep ranch and married the rancher six weeks later. That did not deter her from realizing her dream of homesteading a claim in her own name. You can read her full story in “Letters of a Woman Homesteader” which is free, not only in the library but online, as part of Project Guttenberg’s free online book collection.  “Heartland” is the movie of her story, featuring Rip Torn as the gruff rancher. Apparently living in a cabin on a Wyoming sheep ranch was not sufficiently “ roughing it” for Elinore, because when her husband goes off on a roundup, she gets restless an takes her daughter on camping trip.

“I wish you could once sleep on the kind of bed we enjoyed that night. It was both soft and firm, with the clean, spicy smell of the pine. The heat from our big fire came in and we were warm as toast. It was so good to stretch out and rest. I kept thinking how superior I was since I dared to take such an outing when so many poor women down in Denver were bent on making their twenty cents per hour in order that they could spare a quarter to go to the show.”

If you prefer a more local heroine, check out Luzena Stanley Wilson’s story, “My Checkered Life,” presented by Vacaville author, Fern Henry.  Wilson’s husband had gold fever and she insisted on going with him to the mines. There were so few women in the camps- in six months Luzena saw only two other women- that men would pay top dollar for a meal  “cooked by a woman.” The Wilsons lost everything in a Sacramento flood, where rats so infested the city that “they bit it at each other, and gnawed the legs of chairs where we sat.” They traveled on to Nevada City but lost everything again in a fire. Once again they picked up and started over, traveling to Vacaville and opening a hotel there.
Whether an autobiography, a book of letters or a classic from a master, these are the stories we are fortunate to read and read again.  They stand for the stories of women we will never know, stories we can only imagine.