Picturing Todd Pickering

Meet Todd Pickering.  Or as I liked to call him, Todd Picturing.  He is a professional photographer my winery hired to chronicle an entire year at the winery.  I really enjoyed having him all year pop into the lab and point his giant camera at us.  His year ended this January, I've just been lazy about posting this.

Here he is taking pictures of my lab intern Gilroy processing a maturity sample.

Here he is taking a picture of a tasting set up.

This day he took pictures of dirt, in tubes.

Then intern Aaron took a picture of Todd taking a picture. And I took a picture of him.

Then Gilroy took a picture of me taking a picture of Aaron taking a picture of Todd taking a picture of dirt in a tube.

It's May and I am all alone in the lab this time of year.  I miss my 2012 Harvest Team very much.  This is one of my favorite pictures that Todd took:

Aaron, Kelli, me, Gilroy (Natalie).

Anyway, check out Todd's pictures on his website.  He normally has more interesting subjects!

-L

Bottle Rock 2013

"Enjoy your bottles and your rocks" 

    - Security Lady who patted me down.

This is me very excited to have a music festival come to my town!  It was a five day affair (Wednesday through Sunday) but I only attended Friday.  I bought my ticket months in advance (like a sucker) but if you procrastinated until the week before the event, there were awesome 50% Off deals.  Oh well, lesson learned for next year.  Procrastination for the win.

 It was a big deal to Napa because the expected crowds made everyone nervous.  I was surprised by a  few of my friends who I thought would be into the festival say they were going to "avoid it like the plague" because "it's going to be a nightmare/shit show".  I was curious how the parking situation was going to play out but I shared none of my friend's feelings.

 

This was one of the adorable ways the event tried to fuse music and wine.

All the restaurants in Napa showed up which meant the food was delicious and crazy mad crazy expensive.

 

Beautiful eating area away from the stages.

These wine pouches were one of my favorite things at Bottle Rock.  I didn't pay $15 for one, but I'm a HUGE fan of alternative packaging.  I need to talk to someone about how to get my wine into these pouches.

No glass, no cork, no foil, label built in.  What's not to love?

  There were 3 stages, this one being the biggest.


The weather was pretty darn perfect.

 I found fellow fun-sunglasses-lover Chelsea soon after arriving.  Do I really look that small in real life?  In my head I am a normal size person.  To be fair, Chelsea is also very tall.

 The other component of the music festival was comedy.  I saw Sarah Tiana and Natasha Leggero, both very funny ladies.  I missed the other two comics I wanted to see because the theater was full.  I think they really underestimated how many people would want to go.

 After the funny ladies, went to see one of my bucket-list artists: Andrew Bird.  I was a little ambivalent about the festival until I saw that Andrew Bird was playing.  I would have been happy to go home after seeing him.

 The lyrics, the violin, the whistling, the pedal looping; such a pleasure.

 A few hours later, on a different stage we waited for The Black Keys.  This time I was a little further away from the stage.

 But I was still in front of all these people.  Later I read that attendance on Friday was 30,000 people.

 I cringe at the quality of night pictures on the iphone, but what can you do? What's that you say - buy a real camera? Nonsense.

 The Black Keys were a fireball of energy and awesomeness.  Overall I think the day and the festival as a whole was a success and hope they can get their act together and do it again next year.

-L

Healdsburg Visit

I made a resolution this year to visit two new wineries a month.  So far I've failed to keep it up, but I have made it to a few.  And these two wineries were in Healdsburg, not Napa, so I think that should give me at least double points. 

Quivira was a recommended stop.  I was interested in visiting this winery because they make a Grenache.  This is the wine I wanted to make (but couldn't find last year) so I made Barbera instead.  The wine here was tasty and refueled my ambition to try to find some Grenache.

Next stop was Williams Selyem.  Fantastic pinot.  I had seen pictures of the beautiful architecture in a magazine and really wanted to visit the winery.

The stacked barrels by the window were only a display.  That much direct sunlight is a winemakers nightmare.

The building and it's surrounding were truly impressive.  But I was disappointed to learn that this building was mainly a storage facility.  The wine is made elsewhere.

So I enjoyed the beautiful scenery instead.

There was a gigantic stone pad on the back side of the building.  I'm curious what they use it for since it's not a crush pad.

On another note . . . .

Today is my Friday and I am very excited for this weekend.  Napa is hosting a very epic (for Napa) music festival called Bottle Rock.  It started today and goes till Sunday.  A 4-day pass was a little out of my budget but I will be going for one of the days. I will report back on how bad the traffic was, how hot it got and mostly likely a few stories of dumb things tourists did. 

So excited! YAY!

-L

P.S. Anyone else going?

How it's Made: Wine Bottles

Last week I felt like I was on an episode of How It's Made.  Two coworkers and I went to Tracy, California to a glass plant to better understand that side of packaging.  Safety first!  Hard hat, eye and ear protection and a sweet vest.  Susan (Production Coordination) and I were very excited to be there.

The first thing you notice is the heat.  There are 4 giant furnaces working all day every day to melt the components to make glass.  It may look like this picture has a filter, but this is pretty close to the colors in the plant.  It's upwards of 90F in there, they said sometimes in the summer for a few days it has gotten up to 135F.  They have to take frequent breaks to combat heat exhaustion.

They let us go up to look into the furnace.  You can see the tiny round yellow hole in the picture.  It's what it must be like to look at the surface of the sun, undulating waves of molten glass lava.  You can't look at it directly, they gave us a filter to look through.  When I got up there it was so hot I think I singed my nose hairs.  For about 2 seconds I felt like the air was taken out of my lungs and then I felt a strong tingling sensation in my nose like severe allergies.  Totally worth it.  

This part is the mixing chamber.  I think.  It was so loud and very difficult to hear the explanations sometimes.  Anyway, some sort of mixing happens here.

This picture did not turn out well.  But what I was trying to illustrate (besides my stylish footware - they made me wear giant man shoes because my shoes were not appropriate) was how everywhere you walked the floor was covered with shards of glass.  There is just too much to ever clean up, so no one does.

The furnaces give off the most heat, but the freshly molded bottles (like the ones here) give off a lot of heat as they travel through the factory. 

 In this picture he is taking two bottles from the line that touched and were fused together.  He picks them up and sends them to be re melted and formed again.  In the video you see him demonstrating how malleable the molten glass is at this stage.

This machine preforms the QC by using lasers to examine the bottles for any defects.  They spin around and a computer searches for any bubbles, blisters, chips, cracks, stones, glass thickness and roundness.

Here is a conveyor of glass that has been approved and is on it's way to be packaged in cartons and pallets.

Between the walls is cullet.  Cullet is what they call recycled glass.  It has to be ground up before it can go back to the furnace to be melted and made into new glass.

I was so excited I got to take pictures this time.  Last year's visit to a different glass plant was mostly pictures of my view from the plane, what I had for lunch and an airport picture of me with Seattle swag for proof.

I still have more Portugal pictures to write about, but this was a nice break.

-L