Before continuing the prior entry, I'd like to give some props to Cedarburg, Wisconsin's quaint winery on the river--Cedar Creek Winery. I toured their facility, after dining on crab meat pasta salad and fancy bittersweet chocolates along the 'Burg's fancy little strip, and tasted all of their white, red and desert offerings with Meg (all of this undertaken after feeding baby goats at The Family Farm, of course). Although a few of the whites were a miss, their chardonnay, cab and syrah stood tall. The 2 year old Port was tasty, as well. We ended up taking home bottles of the chardonnay and syrah, to which the Brit-accented cashier remarked that we had an apparent taste for the "expensive" stuff. It's nice to know that you can get a great bottle of French-crafted wine for under $20.00 in this state!
Check out their winery if you're up for a great day trip <30 minutes North of the city. Pair up their chard with a big broiled hunk of lemon-butter sockeye salmon like we did for the most brollick of meals.
Monday, August 16, 2010
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Harvest Internships: the low-end-of-the-tottem-pole struggle
There's always been distinct, albeit quickly fading differences between mine and Greg's goals in the pursuit of wine. At the outset, my draw was oenology, viticulture, and what essentially amounts to farming. Romantic visions of the rolling green and orange landscapes, dotted with distant, sun-baked rock outcroppings and neatly-laid rows of vines from all vantage points; the oft oppressive midday heat of the California Sun, occasionally relieved by cool oceanic breezes carrying the sweet, earthy scents of grass, vines, hay and soil; long, laborious days of field work that would reward me with bucketloads of grapes, loosely packed into a small, but sufficient Gator-driven work cart, primed for one-way trip to the destemmer and crushpad. A whole lot of dirt under my fingernails that I wouldn't care to clean out anytime soon. This West Coast farmer-cum-cowboy wanderlust barely takes my passion for the red and white stuff into account... It has a joyfully unstable potential to bloom into full-on obsession any day now. The x-particle, quietly locked away inside a mass of steel and wire, forever dancing, and eagerly awaiting it's curtain call, it's own fission reaction, to explode and become all-encompassing. All will know it.
Greg's passions were never far from this, but his interests in owning an operating a wine bar held priority. He's an econ geek, so these bar dreams never surprised me. He knows money and wants to make money. When we start our business, he'll make sure we're making money. And short of having my unofficial "accountant" from NYC run the numbers, the only person I'd ever trust on the money side of this endeavor is Greg. It's not that he didn't share my viticultural interests... Make no mistakes: this guy has a real problem when it comes to his overwhelming love of wine. But it's my belief that his good business sense pushed him more towards an outlet that could actually generate money right away, as opposed to the loftier plan of harvesting for a while and then taking it from there.
So, after months of planning, meeting, applying, and most importantly, drinking, our goals naturally coalesced into a hybrid pursuit. Now hell-bent on attaining harvest intern positions, we both hope to learn the wine-making process from the ground up, and then plan to roll it into further business ventures that could entail a wine bar, a bar-bar, or full time vineyard work in some capacity (tasting room, operations, or owning that motherfucker). He helped me realize that I too have a burning desire to sling wine, charcuterie, and gobs of satisfaction to our soon-to-be customership.
But it's not that simple... Come to find out, we pressed ahead with a bit of green naivete, not realizing that throngs of other like-minded individuals of a young and similarly distressed ilk, miserable about the thought of wasting another day at their god-awful desk jobs, also happened to be clawing away for the same jobs we wanted. Stay tuned for my next entry, in which I explain why a California vinter states "You want to be a migrant worker? Migrant workers don't even want to be migrant workers..." when asked about harvest internships.
Greg's passions were never far from this, but his interests in owning an operating a wine bar held priority. He's an econ geek, so these bar dreams never surprised me. He knows money and wants to make money. When we start our business, he'll make sure we're making money. And short of having my unofficial "accountant" from NYC run the numbers, the only person I'd ever trust on the money side of this endeavor is Greg. It's not that he didn't share my viticultural interests... Make no mistakes: this guy has a real problem when it comes to his overwhelming love of wine. But it's my belief that his good business sense pushed him more towards an outlet that could actually generate money right away, as opposed to the loftier plan of harvesting for a while and then taking it from there.
So, after months of planning, meeting, applying, and most importantly, drinking, our goals naturally coalesced into a hybrid pursuit. Now hell-bent on attaining harvest intern positions, we both hope to learn the wine-making process from the ground up, and then plan to roll it into further business ventures that could entail a wine bar, a bar-bar, or full time vineyard work in some capacity (tasting room, operations, or owning that motherfucker). He helped me realize that I too have a burning desire to sling wine, charcuterie, and gobs of satisfaction to our soon-to-be customership.
But it's not that simple... Come to find out, we pressed ahead with a bit of green naivete, not realizing that throngs of other like-minded individuals of a young and similarly distressed ilk, miserable about the thought of wasting another day at their god-awful desk jobs, also happened to be clawing away for the same jobs we wanted. Stay tuned for my next entry, in which I explain why a California vinter states "You want to be a migrant worker? Migrant workers don't even want to be migrant workers..." when asked about harvest internships.
Monday, August 9, 2010
Getting out, just to go back in again... And probably get back out again.
If you're reading this, you've most likely happened upon Greg's blog and inaugural post already. It essentially outlines this wild wine thing I proposed we undertake months and months ago. Certain elements of our pursuit have recently kicked into high-gear, and at this stage, it's pretty clear that the concept has grown legs and is coming to fruition (did you catch all of those lame wine puns?). Of course, my part of the journey wont be as straight-forward as Greg's...
I'm now in another state of (what I hope is) temporary career flux... A seemingly perpetual line of great successes followed by spectacular burnouts. I suppose the perfect storm of non-ideal job situations, my lack of patience, and desire to finally do something tangible, pleasing, rigorously-demanding, and most of all, for myself (and not at the behest of and benefit for, say, an emergency room's accounting department or Ford Focus payment), has lead me to this path of resigning from my current role and taking yet another job within less than a year's time. If you know me, and chances are you do, and have already heard my endless litany of complaints relating to the outgoing career, I'll spare the gory details from this posting. In any case, it's my goal to make this latest and greatest position work to my benefit just as much as it will for the corporation. Just attempting to do my best at not giving 200% all of the time without expecting some reasonable compensation or benefit in return.
But besides all of that, my eyes are still on the prize. Breaking into the wine industry with what amounts to outsider status. No degree from UC Davis... No familial ties to a vintner... Just hard-ass work, dedication, the willingness to be flexible to learn the craft, and a whole ton of discipline. Something I tend to lack in a more long-term perspective.
Mine and Greg's successes and setbacks in the application process over the past couple of months have been a great learning experience. We now know where we'll need to go, what we'll need to know, and what it will really take to make the first dents in what I consider the most important element of the career goal: understanding the viticulture and oenology REALLY well. It's not something that can really be done outside of a formal education at Davis or Cornell, or working harvest internships at the actual wineries.
Whereas Greg is on the clear path to California and the hotbed region of the industry, I'll be hanging back in Milwaukee for now to pursue this mysterious new job for a bit (if you haven't noticed, I'm not leaving any opportunity for former or current employers to find this blog to chance, thus the lack of details there). It's a great opportunity to rebuild my reserves, continue to do research, and potentially keep a close tie to the region where we may decide to operate one day... This fabulous Midwest.
I'm now in another state of (what I hope is) temporary career flux... A seemingly perpetual line of great successes followed by spectacular burnouts. I suppose the perfect storm of non-ideal job situations, my lack of patience, and desire to finally do something tangible, pleasing, rigorously-demanding, and most of all, for myself (and not at the behest of and benefit for, say, an emergency room's accounting department or Ford Focus payment), has lead me to this path of resigning from my current role and taking yet another job within less than a year's time. If you know me, and chances are you do, and have already heard my endless litany of complaints relating to the outgoing career, I'll spare the gory details from this posting. In any case, it's my goal to make this latest and greatest position work to my benefit just as much as it will for the corporation. Just attempting to do my best at not giving 200% all of the time without expecting some reasonable compensation or benefit in return.
But besides all of that, my eyes are still on the prize. Breaking into the wine industry with what amounts to outsider status. No degree from UC Davis... No familial ties to a vintner... Just hard-ass work, dedication, the willingness to be flexible to learn the craft, and a whole ton of discipline. Something I tend to lack in a more long-term perspective.
Mine and Greg's successes and setbacks in the application process over the past couple of months have been a great learning experience. We now know where we'll need to go, what we'll need to know, and what it will really take to make the first dents in what I consider the most important element of the career goal: understanding the viticulture and oenology REALLY well. It's not something that can really be done outside of a formal education at Davis or Cornell, or working harvest internships at the actual wineries.
Whereas Greg is on the clear path to California and the hotbed region of the industry, I'll be hanging back in Milwaukee for now to pursue this mysterious new job for a bit (if you haven't noticed, I'm not leaving any opportunity for former or current employers to find this blog to chance, thus the lack of details there). It's a great opportunity to rebuild my reserves, continue to do research, and potentially keep a close tie to the region where we may decide to operate one day... This fabulous Midwest.
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