As adults, we all learn to love ourselves more and forgive imperfections. In fact I’m wearing horizontal stripes as I write this (bitty, thin ones). But every now and then something triggers a flashback. It might be the glimpse of newspaper photo, the thread of a song, or even a smell. For me, it’s the inability to smell. After 20+ years of vanquishing my snot with daily nasal spray and allergy eye drops, my allergies have emerged from hibernation with a new vengeance.

I’ve never spent a May in Sonoma County. With the kid’s school schedules, I’d spend the requisite April spring break week up here and then wait to decamp for summer. If I had to come north for work, it was for a day or two at most. And I was not in a vineyard or a garden or frankly anywhere outside. May is spectacular here, don’t get me wrong. Pink sunlight breaks by 5:20 am. The days are long, and everything is verdant and blooming. I can actually see pollen in the air. It’s thick and sticky and following me, like a swarm of bees singularly chasing Charlie Brown in a comic strip. I am serially congested. Just plucking some herbs from my backyard garden incited a sneezing spasm. And locals say I still have around 4 weeks to go. But this is a wine blog, not the Archives of Allergy.  Let’s talk vines.

Down below, you’ll see a terrific picture of a baby shoot emerging from a bud. Mark Pisoni snapped this picture from one of the Bruliam blocks at Soberanes around the third week of April. In grapevines, flowering normally occurs within 8 weeks of bud break. And the vines self-pollinate. When the pollen is mature and most allergy worthy, the fused dome of petals ruptures and dumps a deluge of pollen into the stigma. Scientists can measure pollen levels in the surrounding air and extrapolate to predict fruit yield (Cunha et al). In fact, Jackson notes, “warm, sunny conditions favoring aerial pollen dispersal correlate with the conditions that favor self-pollination (pg 70). Well, duh. My post nasal drip and weepy eyes are a predictive barometer, too. This May has indeed been gorgeous, dry, warm, and sunny, with gentle breezes to intensify those punishing pollen allergens. By the time I emerge from my Claritin haze, fruit set will be over.

 Works Cited:

1. Cunha, Abreu, Pinto, and de Castro, Airborne Pollen Samples for Early-Season Estimates of Wine Production in a Mediterranean Climate Area of Northern Portugal Am. J. Enol. Vitic. 2003 54:189-194

2. Jackson, Ronald, Wine Science Principles and Applications, 3rd ed., Elsevier, 2008.

The winner of the poll gets $250 for the charity of their choice!!

To vote all you need to do is: (1) click on the bullet next to the person’s name and (2) click the big VOTE button at the bottom of the poll. The poll will instantly update the tally and show you the most current results. If the system works properly, you will only be able to vote once. But, you can forward the link or this e-mail to as many people as you want to get them to vote for you.

The poll will only be open for voting until 8am on Friday May 18th so get voting!

If you can’t see the poll or vote properly through the e-mail, please CLICK HERE and you can vote on the website.

If you have a Bruliam t-shirt, send us a picture for a chance to win some money for your favorite charity. And if you still don’t have a t-shirt, click here and register to become part of the Bruliam Brigade.

Finally – don’t forget to share this with your friends through the Facebook and Twitter sharing options on the top or bottom of the page!

There were over 300 submissions from 24 countries for this year’s awards.  A panel of judges reviewed all the entries and selected the finalists for each category. 

The two posts are:

Insulfurable – Kerith’s ode to the use of sulfur in wine.

Born to Sell – A tribute to Kerith’s salesmanship.

The winning post will be announced on May 24th in London at the London International Wine Fair.  Sadly, our nomination does not include an expensed-paid trip to London.  But, we’ll be sure to update you with the results as soon as we are notified.

For more information and to register for the party, please click here.

This is your chance to taste our delicious 2010 Rockpile Zinfandel (along with a little pink side project)! It’s the perfect way to kick off the summer BBQ and beach season. To accompany the wines and the gorgeous view, The Shores Restaurant will be serving up some scrumptious nibbles.

For those of you who loved our debut Rockpile zin last year, the 2010 is tasting even better – truly living up to it’s pedigree of a “zin for cab lovers”.

As with all of our release parties, there will be special release pricing (with no retail mark-up and no shipping cost). You’ll be able to pick up your wine and take it home that day.

Tickets are $30/person. Payment must be made through PayPal when you register. If you don’t have a PayPal account, simply follow the directions for the option to pay with your credit card without a Paypal account. Sorry, no kids. Parking is available in the Shores garage and they will validate.

Tickets are limited, so please RSVP early!

For more information and to register for the party, please click here.

We can’t wait to see all of you and share our new wines with you.

-Kerith & Brian Overstreet

Almost 18 months ago, I met the owner of an upscale, highly regarded restaurant and wine shop. We’d been seated side by side at a not-for-profit event and geeked out over wine. Despite a number of back and forth e-mails, I moved to Healdsburg before I could schedule a tasting appointment. Last week I finally secured a formal initiation to pour my wines. I’d be pouring not only for the owner but also the beverage manager and two retail employees.

We five tasted around a big table, as I formally presented each wine. Since it was barely noon, and is professional form, we all spit into one central silver bucket. The beverage manager was a real pro. A master spitter, she’d lean slightly forward from her hips and nail a perfect arc of expectorated vino into the bucket. I dared not lean. Instead I lifted up the bucket and brought it near my face, lest I sully another taster with my erratic peripheral spray. I was nervous at first and spit limply. But I gained momentum with each bottle, growing confidence and an adrenaline rush.

By the time I poured the final wine, our 2010 Soberanes Vineyard Pinot Noir, I was in full form. I took a healthy gulp of pinot, swooshed and gurgled long enough to look legit and spit vigorously. In fact, I spit so forcefully that the residual pool of expectorant and discarded wine bounced back and sprayed me in the face. Picture the sprouting water feature at the Bellagio hotel in Vegas, an intricate swath of spittle spray, fat droplets coating the bridge of my nose. I casually tried to wipe away the moist purple rainbow with my hand. There weren’t any linens or paper towels at arms length.

“At least it’s 20% your spit,” offered up one taster, stifling laughter. His nostrils flared – a giveaway he was chortling on the inside.

“Happens to the best of us,” commiserated the beverage manager in her tidy suit and coiffed hair.

I made some lame comment about spraying myself in the face with the hose during harvest. I laughed it off, but it was pretty mortifying and kind of deflating. Who knows if they’ll ultimately buy my wine, but at least they’ll remember me.

I’m always good for a laugh.

If you’ve ever cried during a novel or spent a sleepless night obsessing over a fictional character’s bad choices, you’ve experienced firsthand the enchanted allure of prose. For me, the scent of honeysuckle is indivisibly bound to the fictional character Quentin Compton. That distinct, sticky, floral smell still evokes Quentin’s complicated, relationship to his sister, although I first read The Sound and the Fury over20 years ago. I suppose this is the inverse silhouette of Paul’s intention. Here the actual smell of honeysuckle invokes both my olfactory cortex and brain’s language centers. But the intent is the same. Expressive writing sticks.

Do you suppose the same neural pathways are stimulated by wine writing? How might mediocre wine writing compare to metaphor and adjective heavy wine descriptions? After all, wine notes are all about aromas, flavors, and lofty comparisons. I’ve read plenty of wine reviews comparing pinot noir to pine needles, damp earth, mushrooms, and trees. What if instead the reviewer had written the pinot “evokes the prickly, sap-sticky pine needles of an evergreen forest floor.” Would our enjoyment of that first sip be more intense? If our brain recruits not only our language centers but also olfactory (smell), memory, and sensory cortex (texture) might our drinking experience be richer or more nuanced? Does just reading about that wine rouse our brain as fully as actually drinking it? MRI studies suggest yes. These imaging studies map multiple regions of our brain responding to written stimuli, quantifying scientifically “why the experience of reading can feel so alive.” Sure the cozy smell of chocolate chip cookies makes my mouth water. Reading about it just makes me hungry and grumpy.

And how about a played-out metaphor? Paul notes that some idiomatic vernacular, like “a rough day,” is so overused that your brain processes the slang like any other verbage. The extra sensory textural punch is lost. I’m sure the same holds true for those generic pinot descriptors like “ripe cherry/berry.” Your brain codes those wine notes as linguistic spam, just another bottle of juicy blackberry pie and huckleberry brambles. Still it would be fascinating to set up an experiment that tracked which brain regions are stimulated by richly compelling (aromatic and textural) wine vocabulary compared to passive, generic wording. After reading the wine notes, you’d give test subjects a taste test. You’d offer the blinded taste testers two identical glasses of wine, each paired with very different tasting notes. I wonder how many blind taste testers would correctly identify both glasses as being filled with the same stuff?

By the way, if my super compelling tasting notes leave you craving a glass of pinot, don’t blame me, it’s your brain.

If you can’t see the video, please click here.

As this was our first public tasting of the 2010 pinots, it is very gratifying to see a positive early review.  The wines are being sent in for formal reviews in the next couple of weeks:

The rest of you will get your chance to try Kerith’s first ever Rose (along with the 2010 Rockpile Zin!) at our summer wine party, tentatively planned for the first weekend in June in San Diego.  Date and details to come. 

Until then you’ll need to live vicariously through Ted.

Earlier, I’d tried to quench my nerves by walking laps around the empty tents. Nursing my neurotic compulsion for preparedness, I’d allowed myself 119 minutes to set up one map, three framed tasting notes, and arrange a stack of business cards. That left me 113 minutes to obsess before the crowds converged. So I walked the tents. Besides, incanting the names on the winery placards seemed a better way to undermine my confidence. In another 109 minutes I’d be pouring my pinots alongside the best known, most delicious, and highest rated pinot noirs in California and Oregon. “Kosta-Browne, Pisoni, LaFollette, Domaine Serene…” I chanted my warbling invocations to Bacchus. In the final jittery moments before the gate opened, a reviewer from a national publication approached my table neighbor, Alta Maria. He ambled over to offer kudos for the well-loved cult pinot, Native9. But before he wandered away, he looked at me and said, “You know, I really enjoyed your wines in the media room. You ought to submit them to our magazine.” Brian, seeing me starting to tear up, punched me under the table and hissed, “There’s no crying at wine events.”

Over the next three hours, many incredible, talented, passionate (and even famous) winemakers stopped by the Bruliam table to taste my 2010’s. Their assessments were overwhelmingly positive and complimentary. There were lots of “great job’s” and “keep it up’s.” By 6 pm, the sun had dropped behind the Pacific horizon, and the tents slowly cleared out. My clammy, nervous sweat was evaporating, and I was freezing. Incredibly proud, but damn cold.