Hidden Charms

Yesterday we bought a beautiful used bar from an IRS auditor in Albuquerque. She was moving to Phoenix and didn’t want to haul it to her new apartment. It’s a solid wood bar that looks like maple. There are deep scratches on the counter, but I think we can color them in and buff down the surface. It took my neighbor Joe and I…along with all our strength to carry this bad boy into the tasting from – its new temporary home until I finish the private event room above the winery.
Speaking of the private event room…that is my Christmas break project. I am running the wiring and starting to insulate. I am close to finished with the south wall. This wall is 70% glass. The design of the glass is obvious to some visitors but escapes the imagination of others. When you visit, see if you can tell what the glass is supposed to represent.
There is so much glass in this wall that I had to reinforce it by screwing 5/8 inch subfloor OSB to the wall. It took me all day Monday to cut all the custom pieces and screw them up. Today I will put up six sheets of dry wall and build my hidden storage area…see if you can find it when you visit our winery.

Blue Moon Wedding

Blue moon and the 7th of December.
Any wedding couple would call that luck.
Warm and calm inside
while outside a torrent blizzard of emotion swirls
the snowscape into inescapable blindness.
Any wedding couple would call that…
their wedding day.

Day in the Life

We just purchased a new bottling machine that does not work and our latest batch of Blue Corn Vodka mash is happily fermenting in the distillery next to a space heater. We had to cover the fermenting tank in blankets so the yeast could stay warm. Fermenting in winter is not the best time…especially when its been so cold. But is it is the best time to distill if you want to go green. In winter, Mother Nature can cool the circulating water that we use to convert alcohol vapors back to liquid. In summer I have to use two cooling tank each with a 2-ton chiller attached. Here's something you may not know, when you ferment blue corn, it turns pink....wonder if there is a message in that?

Olha is busy labeling bottles for the tasting room. When we bottle our wines we do not label or put the foil seal over the cork. This is in part because we want to focus on bottling when bottling but also because we sell private label wines and those are done on an “on-order “ basis. This is not the most efficient process. For one thing you have to handle each wine case an additional time. As a small winery, we can afford some process inefficiency. There’s an old expression at the Los Alamos National Laboratory where I work, “any job worth doing, is worth doing twice”.

Of Mice and Men

Who is God to the lowly Deer Mouse?
Is it the drew covered grass that provides
nurturing water, shelter from the sun, and protection
from the raptor circling above…
Or is it the raptor who decides if he lives or dies.

The Uncarved Block

It's 4:00am…my usual time for that first draw of caffeine. In warm weather I usually jump out of my predawn bed and hit the day with excitement, eagerness, and a delusional belief I will actually chip away at my incessantly growing “to-do” list. In late December though, it's too damn cold. So today I wait for the low arching sun to warm the loft above the winery where my most current construction project calls for attention.

We all have talents gifted us by God. The challenge in life is figuring out what our talent is. To Ying that Yang though is that we also all have vices. While I'm still not certain about my talent I know I'm cursed with an inability to finish projects. My home and my winery/distillery are littered with unmistakable signs of nearly completed projects. I jokingly tell people the reason I never finish projects is because I want to live forever...and I know that when I finish all my projects I will die.

The true reason I never finish probably has more to do with ADD...I just loose interest. There's an old Taoist allegory about the “uncarved block”. According to the story, an uncarved block is the most beautiful sculpture there can be because it contains an infinite number of possibilities. With very chip taken and every piece removed though, there's that much less the block can be...until the final chip is removed and the block is down to the last possible thing is can be.

Projects are the same as uncarved blocks...in the begining they are new and full of possibility...which is very exciting. As the projects progresses there are fewer and fewer possibilities until near the end all questions have been resolved and all creativity removed...at that point I lose interest. What is the point in investing time and energy into something that has been complete resolved???

What does that say about me...

Old Endings....New beginings

Websites, facebook, myspace, journals...where does a writer write in the post-modern world of instantant information? To be honest, I spend a lot of time on the computer but I still carry a journal I bought at Berkeley years ago in my backpack and I enjoy writing with a fountain pen. Like the ceromony involved in uncorking a bottle of wine, I think writing with a fountain pen is cathartic.

I am a writer, an Engineer, a husband and a father. As time goes on you will also learn that I am a distiller, a dreamer, and at mid-life, not completely sure what it is I am all about....or supposed to be doing. But as 2009 winds down and 2010 looms on the horizon all I know for sure is that I have a full day of chores ahead me and in six months I intend to run with bulls in Spain.