Saying Goodbye to 2009

Piña Vineyard Management (PVM) had their end of year harvest party yesterday (Friday, Oct 30).  At this annual event, all the employees are given a shirt & a hat. My brother, John C. Piña, designed this year's shirt. He wanted to say Goodbye to 2009.. or maybe it would be more appropriate to say: Go Away 2009!   

  

Rosa models John's shirt

2009

Recession

Poor Wine Sales

No Grape Buyers 

Swine Flu

Rain

Come on 2010

Clair Palmer - Sewer Pipe Sailor

Clair Palmer

(That's Clair, front & center)

All of our wine educators are interesting people. For that reason, I've encouraged each of them to share their stories with us.

The (short) Autobiography of Clair Palmer

Born in Culver City, California, but lived all over the state in interesting towns like Turlock, Oakdale, Modesto, Tracy, Manteca, Alameda & Oakland – All in 10 years. I saw a lot of different grade schools. My father was a carpenter and went to where the work was during the depression. Finally Oakland, he drove to Richmond to build Victory/Liberty ships. He was a Joiner Supervisor. But we moved during WWII and it took us four weeks to drive to Seattle because of the wartime gasoline rationing - The coupon book.
Grew up in the Seattle area and fortunately the Korean conflict put me in the Navy, and I spent 10 years, most of the time in submarines - Sewer Pipe Sailor. I was stationed in Pearl Harbor on a submarine and I met my true love, Audrey on Kalua Beach. She was in the Islands going to the university of Hawaii for a Public Health Degree. We were married at Mare Island in the beautiful St. Peters Chapel, which was the second oldest chapel in the Navy. We had three daughters over time, and we are still married after 54 years.
When I got out of the Regular Navy, the GI Bill got me through the University of Washington with a forestry chemical degree.
I stayed in the Seattle area working for a chemical company for six years, but like my father, moved on. I got interested in Agricultural Chemicals and spent the next 35 years working in the industry. I was hired in New York city as the first American in BASF’s United States group – Myself and a German Ex-patriot. My job was placing experimental agricultural chemicals in all state universities that had an Ag-Chem program, and setting up an Ag-Chem research farm in Greenville Mississippi. From that job, I then moved into Product Management and Sales Management. I worked all the states either in R & D or sales except Alaska. But a clever head-hunter convinced me there was gold in them hills, and I moved on. This time my job was the World Ag Chem market. I had an office in Brussels, Tokyo, and Sao Paulo with people who could communicate with the business, because I do not speak any language besides English. Working rice in Asia was a challenge since not one word was close to anything I have heard before, so I smiled a lot. Bananas in Mindanao, Central America, the Caribbean and South America for protection from Nematodes, was probably the most interesting business. But this all came to an end with consolidation of the Ag Chem business. I ended up in Florida at an Ag-Chem research farm ten houses later (if you move enough, you don’t have to paint the house).
I retired from three companies. Finally the odyssey is over and I transferred myself to Napa, California, and now I will have to paint a house… besides play a lot of tennis.

Blue Skies

Blue skies shining on me,

Nothing but blue skies, do I see…

Things are looking better today for getting some grapes harvested.
The above picture was taken this morning. This afternoon the temperature is in the high 70’s throughout most of the valley.

Hung out to dry

That was quite a little storm we had and there are still lots of grapes hanging in the vineyards. The weather forecast that I had heard for yesterday was partly cloudy, but no rain. Well, we did have some precipitation in the morning, and only caught the sun peeking out a bit for brief periods in the afternoon. The humidity will foster rot in the grapes still out there.

But yesterday, I passed a vineyard in the Rutherford area where they were fighting back. They were removing leaves and canes in the vine fruit zone to promote better air circulation. Look at that picture above and you will see LOTS of vegetation on the ground. This is labor intensive work in an effort to save the crop.

The vineyard foreman said they would be picking on Sunday or Monday. Innocently I asked "You mean if we don't get any more rain you'll pick on Sunday or Monday? He looked at me with an expression that asked "What didn't you understand?". Then he restated that they would be picking on Sunday or Monday.

Buena Suerte, Mi Amigo!

... educated by nuns & soldiers ...

So what kind of person sports a license plate bracket like the one above?

I'll tell you.

This is Ross Workman. Ross works in our tasting room. On second thought, that statement is not very accurate. We don't really have a tasting room - We have a small tasting bar that we can roll around our cellar. We need to keep moving it around to make space for things like pumps & forklifts. And to say that Ross "works" in our tasting room may not be accurate either - You can decide after reading this post.

Ross is an interesting guy with an interesting past, so I decided to make him the subject of one of my posts. The problem was, I didn't know enough about Ross to tell his story, so I asked him to tell it. And he did. The only thing better than the story, is the way he tells it.

Ross Workman in his own words:

I grew up in Carlsbad, CA and was educated by nuns & soldiers. Nuns at a convent school next to Mission San Luis Rey. And soldiers at Army & Navy Academy. Continuing to avoid conventional education, I went to Claremont Men’s College, notorious for politically incorrect rowdiness. It was a format that could not survive, however, and it became co-educational and changed the name, leaving me a man without an alma mater.
Stanford Law School in 1960 was almost as totally masculine because the females were so blatantly discriminated against. As a result, the few who were admitted were so scarily intelligent they couldn’t be kept out. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor was a few years ahead of me at Stanford.
Pacific Gas & Electric Co. hired me in San Francisco to help raise utility rates and get nuclear power plants built. After 7 years, another (much smaller) utility company in SF hired me as Financial VP. That lasted until the President dropped dead at his desk and they foolishly made me CEO of a NYSE company at age 34. But the company was an anachronism selling gas, electric, water & telephone services in small towns in 5 states. Like my alma mater, the company was doomed by its format and I couldn’t agree with the Board of Directors on how to save it or dismember it.
So they fired me and I went off to Florida to be General Counsel of a natural gas pipeline company -- the first place I worked for Ken Lay. It was takeover time in America and the pipeline got bought by a can company which didn’t understand it. So, since I was not going to be building any new pipelines for the can-mentality owners, I went off to Houston & worked for Ken Lay again at another company as his Senior VP of Government Affairs -- actually his lobbyist. Commuting to Washington DC on the same schedule the Congressmen kept was exciting. Most of the stuff you have read about lobbyists is true, but largely toned down for public consumption. It was a lot like a Men’s College all over again.
Next Ken Lay got hired by another Houston gas pipeline company, which eventually became the kernel around which Enron was built, and I joined him there. Seven years at Enron was a wild and crazy ride during which I wore lots of different hats, spending the last few years mostly trying to get Peru to pay us for a $400 million offshore oil property they had expropriated at gunpoint. When that was nearly over, I agreed with Ken for him to fire me so he could give me a consulting contract and I could damn near retire. All the really juiciest Enron shenanigans happened after I left in 1990.
But nobody seems to retire and move to Houston (except George H.W. Bush), so I saw no reason to stay there, but didn’t know where else to live. We sold our home, stored our possessions and tried living in Germany (in my wife’s Black Forest home town) for 6 months, but it seemed to be more trouble than it was worth. So we came back to Houston, bought a travel trailer and a bunch of books and maps and set out to find a new home. After most of a year on the road looking, we ended up in Napa, near my 2 Bay Area children.
I found that there were about 200 wineries to get acquainted with in Napa Valley, although there had only been 20 or so when I had left California in 1979. And they all seemed to have retired people working in their tasting rooms. So I started pouring wine in a number of wineries and have been doing that ever since 1996. Plus I have taken 6 or 8 wine related classes at Napa Valley College. Mainly what I have learned is there are dozens of mistakes you can make trying to make wine and, although I could make something drinkable, it would never be nearly as good as what I drink from the professionals.
I’ve spent over 10 years pouring Caymus wines for Chuck Wagner, who is a first cousin of the Pina brothers. And I started also pouring and talking about Pina wines last summer. This is a dream job because I deal with the public at its best. Millions of people come to Napa Valley each year to eat well and drink well. They love to taste, talk about and learn about wine and they are invariably having fun. Sometimes they even come with their own wives or husbands and it is heart-warming to see how many older men bring their daughters or nieces to the valley for a short visit.
So now I’ve lived in Napa longer than any other place and have been doing this job longer than any other job I have ever had. Had I known how much fun this is, I might not even have gone to Law School. But it is not bad to introduce yourself as a Recovered Lawyer who got into and out of Enron early enough to never even get investigated. It starts a conversation. I enjoy the Mediterranean climate here and the proximity to San Francisco which I visit about 30 times a year for music and plays. Skiing at Lake Tahoe is two and a half hours away & I go there mid-weeks in January thru mid April, but I’m always back in Napa Valley on weekends, pulling corks. What’s not to like?

Cheers!

Ross Workman

It's a cold Fall morning

In an earlier post, I talked about the frost warning lights we have in the vineyards. They allow us to monitor the temperatures from a distance. As I traveled to work this morning just before 5:00 AM, one of our lights on the Yountville Crossroad was green. The temperature was between 34 & 37 degrees. Traveling down the Silverado Trail, I could see the glow from at least 3 sets of lights where night harvesting was underway. Hand harvesting of grapes is hard work even when the temperature is not in the extremes. Earlier this harvest we had to deal with high temperatures, and now we're dealing with low temperatures.

And in the quiet of the morning, I could almost hear Willie Nelson singing:

"Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Farmers... "