Piña vs Pina – The Typewriter years/Casket Factory

Isn’t it sad, in a way, that many young people would not be able to identify what is in the picture above? Click here for more information:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Typewriters.jpg#file

So Joe (No, the structural engineer, NOT the plumber) tells me that he ran into somebody that knew me from high school. But that guy knew me as Ranndy Pina (pronounced pee-nuh), not Ranndy Piña (pronounced peen-yuh). So, what’s that about?

Piña vs Pina – Let me explain. My grandfather left Spain as Juan Mena Piña. He accepted the first name change to John in America, but he would never give up the Piña. But slowly, over the next half century, the name Piña would evolve into Pina for nearly all written communication. Some might say that was the expected Americanization of a foreign name. I think it had more to do with the typewriterization (yea, I just made that word up) of a foreign name. You see, that little squiggly thing (~) over the n in Piña is called a tilde.
Tilde is defined as: “a diacritic (~) placed over an n, as in Spanish mañana, to indicate a palatal nasal sound”
Tildes may have found their way onto typewriters in Spain and Mexico, early on, but not here in the good ‘ole U. S. of A. So without the tilde, folks had a tough time typing Piña and it would come out as Peenya, or something equally as bad. So for many years, we just accepted Pina. Eventually, typewriters and word processors added the tilde and we started the transition back to Piña. Using the tilde got even easier with the development of computers, but it also created some problems. Searching this document or the internet for “Piña” will yield different results that searching for “Pina”. Even now, some fonts & document formats can’t deal with the ñ, and will substitute some other symbol or just leave it out altogether. So even though Piña is the correct spelling, we will frequently just use Pina.

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12-29-08 - I just stumbled on another example of the digital difficulties of displaying "PIÑA":

But we thank The Cork Board for giving it a try. Now that's a blog worth reading. If you haven't checked it out, I recommend it.

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Most online dictionaries will interpret Piña as Spanish for Pineapple, but we prefer the less common interpretation to Pine cone, or fruit of the Pine. After all, we’re talking Spain.

We even incorporated pine cones into our first 2 labels.

This was the label we put on our 1st wine, a 1979 Chardonnay:

Note that 14.9% alcohol

We upgraded our label a few years later and the
Pine cones were embossed on the label

Yes, our first wine was a 1979 Chardonnay. We made it in a bonded winery on Action Ave. in Napa, of all places* (see my related story at the end). We were making some great wines through the 80’s, but even great wines don’t sell themselves. The Pina brothers did what they could, but the vineyard management company was growing too quickly and requiring too much time. After several years, we realized it was unrealistic to think our one employee could handle the winemaking and the sales. We had to let our one employee go and take a break from making (commercial) wine for several years. We leased space to other startup operations through the 1990’s. When we realized just how good the Cabernet was from the Howell Mountain Buckeye Vineyard, we decided it was time to get back into wine production.
Below is the original sign for Pina Cellars. Yes, some of you will recognize it as our current tasting bar. It was made from the barrel staves of a large redwood tank.


For Piña Napa Valley (AKA Piña Cellars 2.0), we decided to use
a tilde, or more specifically a red tilde, as our trademark.

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The Winery under Construction

Summer 1982 - Placing the 48’ long main beam (Davie on the forklift, Dad, John C.)

July 3rd, 1982 – Davie on the scaffold, Ranndy on the roof

Here is the story that I alluded to earlier:

It was a Wednesday morning in October, 1979 and I was waiting outside the winery on Action Ave for the owner to show up. His converted warehouse was right next to a casket factory that employed several special needs people. The special needs people started showing up for work and were waiting outside the building for it to open. I sat in my car facing away from these folks, but monitoring their arrivals in my rear view mirror. Then I saw him approach. He appeared severely disfigured, but I continued to look on as many folks do when passing a bad accident on the highway. I felt so sorry for him – That poor guy, having to go through life looking like that. As he approached the waiting group, they didn’t seem at all upset by his appearance – In fact they seemed quite happy to see him. They laughed and gave him high fives! I’m thinking: Wow, is this the reception he gets every morning? Then he put his hand up to his face and removed his mask. I felt duped. How could I have forgotten it was the 31st of October – Halloween! And then I reluctantly accepted the possibility that he was enjoying life more than me. It was a very humbling experience that I remember vividly 29 years later.