Yalumba Galway Pipe Port. Anyone seen mine?

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Santa Ynez wine country. Gurgle, gurgle.

The last weekend during my trip to Cali (a week ago0 we went wine tasting in the Santa Ynez Valley (Santa Barbara County). Spent some time in Solvang with my friends Sam, Josh and Erica, and my family - the Nowak's (Grafton Uncle Bob's family). Hit some old wineries and some new. Had a limo (thanks, Sam), which is a convenient way for winos to travel. Beautiful weather. Good wine. All in all, an excellent time.

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Wine country. Santa Ynez Valley.

A sampling. It's gorgeous. More to come on our wine tasting excursion this past Saturday.

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"In vino veritas". Cedarburg "wine country".

We partook in some vino at the Cedarburg Winery and Ernie's Wine Bar Friday evening - my Aunt Ev and Uncle Bob and U. Bob's brother Tom, who's visiting from Santa Barbara. A+.

"The king sits in Dunfermline town Drinking the blude-red wine." Trad Ballad, 'Sir Patrick Spens'

"Wine gives us liberty, love takes it away. Wine makes us princes, love makes us beggars." Wycherly, The Country Life

"Drink wine, and you will sleep well. Sleep, and you will not sin. Avoid sin, and you will be saved. Ergo, drink wine and be saved." Medieval German saying

"I'm drinking some wine, eating some cheese, and catching some rays, you know..." Oddball in Kelly's Heroes (1970)

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Miso good.

Not moi - the soup. Miso soup. Had some on Friday and it was awesome. Don't think I've ever had it before. Sushi Mon in the West Hollywood area. And the sake - superb. Had sake once or twice and hated it. This stuff tasted like port. Port wine - which I love.

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Wine at The Alcove in Los Feliz.

I met a friend at The Alcove in Los Feliz last night for a couple glasses of wine. It's a place you visit and don't wanna leave. While standing in line to order, Val - who was sitting at our table outside to the left in the above picture - made this origami toy out of a napkin. Remember that game you played in school? There are numbers and letters and you keep choosing and opening flaps of paper until you get a special message?

My special message was "Klinggap" - and I made her laugh really hard.

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Aldo Luongo, "The Hawk" & 100th Posting on PASSION = TRUTH!

Yes, yes, thank you. Not that you've been keeping track but 'tis a milestone. Just need to figure out how to get PASSION = TRUTH out to more people. It's already been perused in over 20 countries and all over the U.S. and it's been a fun process. So I thought long and hard about the subject matter of my 100th post. And it's an interesting story.

The artist Aldo Luongo was born in Argentina to Italian parents. http://www.aldoluongo.com/ The character you see here is Luongo's, "The Hawk" - a character spun from the memory of his father and Luongo’s discovery of his future self.

According to the wine dude at Artiste, one of the wineries we visited last month in Santa Barbara, Aldo aged his father many years to come up with "Hawk". There are 14 paintings in this series - Hawk shooting billiards; Hawk sitting on a park bench; Hawk cooking and playing cards. You get the picture. Here's the catch: these vignettes of Hawk are representative of the last 15 minutes of his life. You see, he's just been told he has 15 minutes to live and he is caught on canvas doing the things he loves to do most before he dies.

Pretty cool concept. The portrait of Hawk here was commissioned for Artiste Winery and appears as a label on select wines.

So, a toast...to Hawk - and all of you. Thanks for hanging around these last few months. I hope you've enjoyed what you've read and seen as much as I've enjoyed bringing it to you.

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"...if anyone orders Merlot, I'm leaving. I am NOT drinking any fucking Merlot!"

That quote was from the movie, Sideways, which was quite a popular little film a few years ago. Having gone on my virgin winetasting tour, I can now say the movie perfectly captured the essence of the Santa Inez wine country near Santa Barbara. Tom Nowak (my non-blood uncle's brother), Jas and I visited five wineries on Friday: Sunstone, Lincourt, Firestone, Curtis and Artiste. Beautiful country - the poster close-up above from Curtis illustrates it fairly well.


"Hey Man, I'm drinking wine, eating cheese and catching some rays."
- Donald Sutherland as Oddball in Kelly's Heroes

Pinot. Chardonnay. Syrah. Viognier. So many wines; so little time. I wouldn't call myself a huge wine drinker. I prefer beer and a good mixer - brandy old-fashioned sweet. There are a TON of wineries in this area...and a ton of different wines. I thought we'd be tasting and spitting, but the spittoon was simply for pouring the wine out that you hadn't finished. After five wineries, I was pretty much full. Typically, you taste 5-6 different wines, going from driest to sweetest and ending with the winery's most recent, or featured vintage. I'm not a savvy winetaster so most of the time I stood there like a dope listening to the pourer go on about "subtleness", "palate" and "oakey taste". It was $10 per winery for the tasting privileges and you got to keep the glass (with the winery emblem - we didn't).

The wine urges me on, the bewitching wine, which sets even a wise man to singing and to laughing gently and rouses him up to dance and brings forth words which were better unspoken.
- Homer, The Odyssey, bk. XIV, l. 463

The vines are meticulously pruned, the air's a bit drier and it's warmer - such a welcome change from Los Angeles. People are picnicking - it made me think of what Tuscany might "feel" like. Below, Tom and Jason are imbibing (Jason's attempt-ing to "trill"). Tom knows quite a bit about wine - partly from living in Santa Barbara all his life and partly from the killer wine tasting party he throws every year during Fiesta.

Bacchus we thank who gave us wine Which warms the blood within our veins; That nectar is itself divine. The man who drinks not, yet attains By godly grace to human rank Would be an angel if he drank.
- Pierre Motin, drinking song

Tom's siblings - Greg and Laura - joined us at our last winery, Artiste. An artist was commissioned to paint a label for one of Artiste's wines. I will share the story with you on another blog. The other Nowak siblings - my uncle Bob, Chuck, Rick, Carol and Bev - were missed, as was the Ircink clan. Oh well, "more wine!" for us.

"Now, a clever man would put the poison into his own goblet, because he would know that only a great fool would reach for what he was given. I am not a great fool, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of you. But you must have known I was not a great fool, you would have counted on it, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of me..." - Vizzini in The Princess Bride

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Summer Solstice!, Jaybone & the Great Outdoors

So my brother Jason's in town from Wisconsin for Solstice! in Santa Barbara - we're headed up Thursday night thru Sunday. We always go to Fiesta! in August but we're Solstice virgins. Tom Nowak - my Uncle Bob's brother (not blood) - will be our host, as always. More to come from Solstice!.

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