My Days as a Winery Cellar Rat or How I Spent my Summer Vacation

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Sep 232012
 

Today, Facebook is awash with photos of the grape harvest across the northern hemisphere. I look forward each day to beautiful pictures of grape clusters, men and women picking grapes as the sun rises across the vineyard and free-run juice on the winery crushpad that will soon be the wine in my glass. As a wine-writer in Colorado and Texas, I dream of being more than a chronicler, I want to be part of the action. This desire is never more pronounced than when I see harvest pictures posted by my winemaker friends in California and Texas.

This year I decided enough with the wine dreaming. It was time to get dirty and pitch in a for a few days with winemakers Chris Brundrett and Bill Blackmon of William and Chris Vineyards in the Texas Hill Country near Fredericksburg. Chris is regarded as one of the real up and coming young Texas winemakers while Bill offers the hand of experience from many Texas grape harvests. They make a hell of a winemaking team creating predominately blended wines with 100% Texas fruit using a minimal intervention approach. Together, Bill and Chris have a sort of yin and yang quality. Chris is full of energy and a “get ‘er done” approach while Bill has a very calm Zen-like quality about him.

Before you say, Texas, wine, what? Texas now is home nearly 250 wineries (up from only 45 a decade ago) making it the 4th or 5th (depending on who’s counting) largest wine producing state. The Texas Hill Country AVA sits behind only Napa and Sonoma as the most visited wine region in the U.S. Continue reading »

A Passion for the Grape – Reboot Your Life in Wine Country

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Apr 102012
 

Would you leave a secure job for a shot at working with a winery?

Advice from six who successfully made a wine-stained reboot

Each year millions of enthusiasts visit California wine country. In fact, Napa Valley is California’s second most popular tourist destination, behind only Disneyland. While many tikes dream of life in the Magic Kingdom, many like me, dream of a life in wine country.

What is so alluring about the wine country lifestyle? Certainly there is the idyllic vineyard landscapes, the sweet aromas of oak barrels and the chance to create liquid art that brings pleasure to so many. But the one thing above others that seems to engage most wine country visitors is the passion they feel from winemakers, tasting room folks and locals they meet during their visit. The passion for the grape is so contagious that many wine lovers leave wine country wishing they could reboot their lives or “do it over again” and somehow create a new wine-stained life.

Of course we have all heard the stories of the rich and uber-rich that bought or built the winery of their dreams. While those stories are wistfully intriguing, most of us will never have that kind of money, short of acquiring that lucky Powerball ticket while filling up the aging Toyota. The passions of wine country however are not limited to the uber-rich and those with viticulture and enology (winemaking) degrees. Wine country is filled with people who sacrificed established careers, good jobs and in some cases friends and family to chase their wine-stained dreams.

During my time as a wine blogger I’ve met quite a few people who found their lives unfulfilled until they took a leap of faith and landed an hourly winery job. Though I share their dream, so far I have not been willing to quit my secure real life job, to be an $8 an hour harvest intern. Am I missing out on the adventure of a lifetime? Continue reading »