#they actually did sell some of them for wine connoisseurs to drink

[geturasstomars]

champagne bottles found on the ocean floor at the wreck of the titanic under 4000 meters of water with their corks still in. who's popping that ghastly shit with me

[rabbitrah]

@man-and-atom

I was working on a response to this that went something like "Sarsi in Southeast Asia is actually sarsaparilla, which is flavored with the sarsaparilla vine instead of sassafrass," but the more I tried to factcheck myself, the more contradictory and confusing information I found. What really differentiates sarsaparilla from root beer? Is it the ingredients? The time you're living? The country you're in?

In honor of the many hours I just wasted in search of an answer to that question, here is a helpful guide to drinks that are a lot like root beer, but aren't, except maybe they are, but maybe they aren't, but maybe they are:

Bundaberg Root Beer / Sarsaparilla (Australia)

Flavor: sarsaparilla, ginger, liquorice root, vanilla

They sell this drink as "Sarsaparilla" at home and "Root Beer" in the United States, but it's the same recipe. There is no sassafrass flavor. I've actually tried this one recently and I liked it! Very similar to root beer, but I could definitely tell that the sassafrass wasn't there.

Sarsi (Philippines)

Flavor: sarsparilla (artificial)

I think it's interesting that the modern can says "root beer," although I was able to confirm from some online soda nerds that the taste is definitely still sarsaparilla, not sassafras.

Sarsi (Singapore and Malaysia)

Flavor: sarsaparilla (artificial)

I saw a review where a guy called it "the wine of the root beer world." No, I don't know what that means. A food writer and root beer connoisseur had people try various root beers and sarsaparillas, and most of them said this one was the best.

Badok Sarsaparilla (Indonesia)

Flavor: sarsaparilla

This brand has been operating since 1916 and parents commonly used it to disguise the taste of medicine from their children.

HeySong Sarsaparilla Drink (Taiwan)

Flavor: probably artificial sarsaparilla but this one seems to have a lot going on, so who knows.

Descriptions I've found compare it to other asian sarsaparilla drinks, root beer, coke, bubblegum, and irn-bru(!?) I haven't had irn-bru but I've never seen it compared to root beer so I'm. Hm.

19th Century American Sarsaparilla (USA)

Flavor: sources vary

"Sarsaparilla" is a drink that used to be popular in the United States, but fell out of favor and seems to have been replaced by root beer. There's kind of a stereotype of it being a wild west, cowboy sort of drink, but like most cowboy things, I think that's like 80% myth. It was probably just sold in pharmacies alongside or instead of root beer. But what did it actually taste like? What were the main flavors? This was definitely the most frustrating thing to research because I kept finding sources that confidently contradicted each other. Possible answers:

Unlike sarsaparillas abroad and the name implies, "sarsaparilla" in the US did not use the sarsaparilla plant. Instead, it used sassafras, making it basically root beer, as well as birch oil.

Like sarsaparillas abroad, sarsaparilla in the US was a different drink from root beer. The sarsaparilla plant was used instead and it did not contain sassafras.

Sometimes sarsaparilla was flavored with sassafrass and sometimes it was flavored with sarsaparilla and sometimes it was flavored with both. The reason it was sometimes called sarsaparilla and sometimes called root beer is a mystery.

Modern Sarsaparilla in the United States

Flavor: usually"natural and artificial flavors" with no elaboration

If you look hard enough, you can find domestically brewed sarsaparilla, but most of these use artificial flavors without a hint as to what they're trying to artificially taste like. It's basically just a picture of a cowboy and a "trust us, this is old timey and authentic" wink. I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that most of these sarsaparillas are basically just root beer.

Maine Root Sarsaparilla / Root Beer (USA)

Flavor: spices, including wintergreen, clove and anise

While trying desperately to find out whether or not American Sarsaparilla actually used the sarsaparilla plant, sassafras, or a secret third thing, I found out that Maine Root's root beer isn't technically root beer either. Because the company doesn't use any artificial flavors and it's illegal to use actual sassafras, we can deduce that Maine Root's root beer does not taste like sassafras. By my pedantic standards, that means it's not root beer. The ingredients include "supporting flavors" from classic root beer recipes. Their sarsaparilla is described as a "lighter bodied brother" to their root beer, with less clove and more wintergreen. Is there any actual sarsaparilla plant in it? I don't think so. I've definitely seen this in stores before but never tried it, but now I'm curious.

Moxie (USA, exclusive to New England, especially Maine)

Flavor: gentian root, wintergreen, anise, sassafras(!)

Several people in the notes dared me to try this. Apparently Moxie is root beer's evil cousin? The after taste is supposed to be really bitter. The fact that it has sassafras means that it could qualify as a root beer in my book, but it's never called itself that. Nest time I'm up north I guess I'll have to try it. It was the first bottled carbonated drink in America and was supposed to heal mental ailments like anxiety, depression, and the desire to commit crimes. Here's something weird, the word moxie as in "she's got a lot of moxie," meaning like spirit/nerve/guts, actually comes from this drink.

Roots Drink / Herbal Drink / Roots Wine / etc (Jamaica)

Flavor: recipes vary, but can include sarsaparilla, sassafras(!), cherry bark, dandelion, mint, chaney root, ginger, hops, and more.

This one isn't a soda. It's sometimes fermented, but not always. These are medicinal drinks commonly taken as an aphrodisiac. I'm really intrigued by how much overlap there is here with common root beer recipes.

Birch Beer (Northeast USA and Newfoundland, Canada)

Flavor: birch sap/birch oil. Other potential ingredients include wintergreen, cinnamon, vanilla,

Birch Beer can be both a carbonated soda or a fermented drink. Birch sap sometimes pops up in sarsaparilla and root beer recipes, and birch beer recipes often include common root beer supporting flavors.

Dandelion and Burdock (UK)

Flavor: in addition to dandelion root and burdock root, recipes may include ginger, anise, birch sap, cassia bark, vanilla, wintergreen, vanilla, cinnamon

Okay so unlike some of these other drinks, no one is getting Dandelion and Burdock confused with root beer or calling it root beer. That being said, I couldn't leave it out because it's in the weird medicinal herbal soda club and I've seen plenty of other people draw comparisons. I have had one of these ONCE, many years ago, before I gained all this insane root beer knowledge. I remember telling a friend that it tasted like dirt, but in a good way. I'd never heard of dandelion and burdock when I tried it and a root beer comparison didn't occur to me. I had Fentiman's brand. I actually remember because I hung onto the bottle for like a month because I thought it was pretty. From what I've read, it seems like some recipes might taste more or less like root beer or sarsaparilla based on which "supporting" ingredients they use. Recipes wintergreen will taste more like root beer, for instance. I guess it could go the other way as well. For instance, the root beer I'm drinking right now (olipop) has burdock root in the ingredients list.

A continuation on my post about unloved foods, specifically this is my in-depth defense of root beer.

Root Beer isn't inherently gross, it's just one of those weird local flavors that's off-putting to people who didn't grow up with it. We all like different things and also we all tend to like flavors that are similar to what we grew up with. That's okay! But honestly root beer is pretty unique and, in my opinion, delicious.

One of the main complaints against root beer is that it tastes like medicine. Funnily enough, it was originally marketed as medicinal! This is true for most OG sodas actually. Pretty much as soon as carbonated water was invented, people were drinking it to soothe various ailments. A lot of the original soft drinks were actually invented by pharmacists. I just think that root beer is especially cool because the main flavor came from the root bark of sassafras, a common North American shrub. Because it's so widespread and aromatic, all parts of the sassafras plant have been used in food and medicine by many different Native American tribes throughout history and was subsequently picked up and used by European colonists. In the 1960s, some studies indicated that that safrole oil, which is produced by the plant, can cause liver damage. Whether or not this would actually remain true after it had been boiled and added to root beer is unclear, but it was really easy to replicate the flavor, so the sassafras in commercial root beer these days is artificial. Another fun fact about safrole is that it's a precursor in the synthesis of MDMA. None of this information has stopped my childhood habit of eating sassfras leaves right off the shrub whenever I walk past it on a hike. I'm like 85% sure it's safe and also mmmm yummy leafs go crunch.

Another root beer complaint is that it tastes like toothpaste. I think this is probably because another key flavor in most root beer recipes is wintergreen. I'm assuming that the people who think this are the same people who think mint chocolate chip ice cream tastes like toothpaste. I can understand and even respect that some people don't like mint and associate it only with brushing their teeth, but like. Mint is a pretty common flavor. I mean I think it's safe to say that humans have been eating mint flavored stuff for longer than toothpaste has existed... anyway!

Other common flavors in root beer (real or artificial) are caramel, vanilla, black cherry bark, sarsaparilla root, ginger, and many more! There's not one official recipe, and root beer enthusiasts often have strong opinions about different brands. Some root beer is sharper, with more strong aromatic flavors, and others are mild and creamier.

Another thing I think is cool about root beer is that it's foamier than most sodas. This was originally because sassafras is a natural surfactant (and why sassafras is also a common thickening agent in Louisiana Creole cooking.) These days, other plant starches or similar ingredients are added to keep the distinctive foam. Root beer foam > all other soft drink foams. That's why root beer floats kick more ass than like, coke floats.

If you've never had root beer before, imagine if a sweetened herbal tea was turned into a soda, because that's basically what it is. If your first response to that is a cringe, fair enough. That's why lots of people don't like it. If your first response to that is "interesting... I might actually like it, though" then I encourage you to track down a can of root beer today, hard as that might be outside the US and Canada. Next time you see an "ew, root beer tastes like medicine/tooth paste" take, know that there's a reason for that, but also the same could be said for literally any herbal or minty food/drink.

My final take on root beer is that it would be the soda of choice for gnomes. Thank you and good night.

[simonfarnabyslegs]

What would the ghosts’ reaction if their was a history fair at button house and there are so many people in period costumes from their time period?

robin

- fucking with whatever technology people have set up (lamps, fans, food truck heating mechanisms, etc.)

- ends up hanging out around some wwi and wwii reenactors outside until the cap finds his way to that group and makes it about war instead of just bros being dudes

- if anyone's brought any dogs he's probably gonna go hang out with a dog or two outside as well (there's always at least one dog at any kind of historical event, i've found. i don't know why. but every time i go to a living history museum or a festival, there are dogs. which i love.)

humphrey

- someone put this man's head on his body because he deserves to witness more than just the shoes!!!

- he really seems to me like someone who appreciates fashion (probably because of his spiel about shoes, and the fact that he's a very well dressed tudor gentleman), so he'd enjoy seeing all the different clothes and hairstyles from all the different periods.

- watches people doing a wine tasting under a big tent. sniffs all the glasses offered by the attendants for attendees to drink, just to see what they smell like or if he can even smell them. makes a lot of comments about the wines like some kind of connoisseur before admitting at some point before leaving the tent that he knows nothing about wine whatsoever.

- walks past the tudor booths and wonders why nobody's eating the peacock (some wealthy people in the tudor era ate whole peacocks and had them sitting on the table looking very much like they did when they were alive), until someone knocks it over and he learns it's just a decoration and it's made of styrofoam. then his reaction's probably just a, "oh! huh. weird."

mary

- sees someone outside dressed in a brightly coloured jester's outfit breathing fire or juggling or doing some kind of contortionist act and deems it witchcraft

- checks out what's going on in the kitchen or in the food trucks and is impressed but confused by the technology and increased speed and efficiency of food preparation, as well as by all the dishes she isn't familiar with.

- watches a group of school children in costumes or festival t-shirts learn how to weave baskets, then excitedly follows their class to a tapestry making demonstration on a reconstructed loom.

kitty

- hangs out with humphrey in the wine tasting area and listens to his commentary, smiling and nodding. he finally admits he doesn't know anything about wine and she just goes, "oh."

- picks one handsome man to fixate on and talk about how handsome he is the whole time, but then spends most of her time complimenting alison on the dress she wore for the event or oohing and ahing at a bunch of other ladies' dresses.

- spends some time making up her own little songs set to the music played by the chamber orchestra.

thomas

- sees a woman he says looks like isabelle (she in fact looks nothing like isabelle, but she is pretty) in a regency lady's dress and follows her acting all dramatically depressed the whole time because she can neither see nor hear him. yet another beautiful woman who cannot return his affection. *siiiiiiigh*

- spots two people in star trek costumes and is Very Confused. alison explains to him that it's a thing. at every historical festival or ren faire there's always at least one small group of star trek cosplayers. they think it's funny. it kind of is. he's not amused.

- listens to the chamber orchestra inside playing a soft, sad song and tries to make it into some dramatic, poetic, brooding moment, but is thwarted by the ghigeon (ghost pigeon) flying past him too quickly, which makes him scream.

fanny

- sees a woman wearing a regency dandy's outfit, or a woman in medieval armour and is quite offended, but manages to keep it down to a disgusted look and an "i never!" whilst the captain or humphrey or pat or somebody walk past like, "oh i thought she looked nice. and she looks like she's having a great time :)"

- sees some victorian and edwardian ladies having lunch and LOSES IT at their posture/the way they're eating.

- develops an intense and hella awkward crush on some random visitor dude in a victorian suit

the captain

- spends approximately five minutes with the soldiers before determining they're NOTHING like soldiers. gets quite offended, and leaves.

- ogles some strong looking men down by the lake who are offering leisurely afternoon boat rides.

- develops a crush on the same random victorian fair attendee as fanny

pat

- stares longingly at all the food, knowing he'll never get to try it. then sees something that grosses him out (probably from one of the tudor booths) and decides maybe it's not so depressing after all that he can't try the food.

- watches the group of school children learning to weave baskets with mary, and offers some tips even though he knows they can't hear him.

- finds his way over to where the cap is watching the men rowing their boats on the lake (cue the captain acting very suspicious at having been caught staring at these strong handsome men on their boats) and reminisces about how he used to teach the scouts how to paddle canoes and one year held a race to see which team could row across the lake the fastest. the captain tells him that on their days off his troops used to do something similar.

julian

- ogling ladies, obviously. trying to guess who's wearing bum rolls or bustles and who isn't (jokes on him, most of them are wearing some form of backside padding).

- peeks into what he assumes to be dressing rooms for the booths selling historical clothing; it's actually the toilets. he still hasn't learned his lesson.

- sees people placing bets on some form of scaled down race or games of strength and gets wrapped up in that for the rest of the day.

the plague ghosts

- blissfully unaware of what's going on upstairs and outside.

- bonus points if they see alison walk downstairs to get something dressed in some kind of fancy dress and none of them even think twice.

- (crowd noise upstairs) "did you hear something?" "no." "okay. probably nothing then."

[skvaderarts]

Hiraeth Chapter 53: Connoisseur

Masterlist can be found Here!

Chapter Fifty-Three: Connoisseur

Notes: I had way too much fun with this chapter. Even use the voice to speech editor!

(-~-)

After what felt like a lifetime, Sirrus had finally made good on his promise to cook dinner.

When he had shown up with groceries, he had done so with a vengeance, bringing what had to be an entire vehicle’s worth of them despite the fact that he had seemingly brought them there on foot. No one had seen a vehicle of any sort. If he’d had them delivered, they hadn’t noticed, and unfortunately it had only occurred to them after he’d brought everything in that he’d had quite a bit to carry.

Much to their astonishment, he was actually capable of cooking, despite the fact that he showed very little interest in actually cooking what he had just made. He’d brought himself a bottle of wine that he had no intention of sharing, and then he had made himself comfortable, more interested in knowing if they enjoyed the meal than actually tasting it for himself. Had they just been poisoned?

“You know, this is pretty damn good,” Nero said as he went back for a second plate of whatever pasta he’d been digging into. It wasn’t something that he’d had before, but whatever it was, it was great. He made sure to set some aside for Kyrie and the kids to taste when he went back home tomorrow. He needed to check and make sure that everything was okay back at home. Then he would return and spend a bit more time with his older sibling. “Were you just not hungry or something?”

Sirrus looked up from his bottle of wine, more than halfway done with it but still not seemingly intoxicated. He’d been silently drinking for about a half-hour, enjoying every moment of it. It seemed that his alcohol tolerance was quite strong. After all, that was some dark wine, and although it wasn’t the biggest bottle Nero had ever seen, he couldn’t help but notice that he was probably going to finish it off in one sitting.

“Hm? Oh. I appreciate your concern, but I will have to pass. There is an ingredient in that pasta that I simply can’t abide by.” Sirrus topped off his drink, being the only person that any of them had ever seen drink wine out of what seemed to be a round, flat-bottomed drinking glass instead of a full-sized one. It was strange, to say the least. He would slosh it around for a moment before taking an occasional sniff and drinking it, nodding to himself. None of them understood why, but they simply assumed that he really liked that wine.

“But… then why not leave it out? Then you could eat it.” Nero was genuinely confused as to why he made something for them to eat that he would be allergic to. It seemed like a hazard. And what in the world had he even put in the pasta that he was allergic to? It didn’t seem like an exceptionally complex dish. Did Sirrus ever eat?

“I find that people seem to like it better with that in the dish. It gives it a good flavor.” He shrugged slightly, taking another sip of his drink. “It’s kind of like leaving salt out of your food. You just don’t do that unless you have to.”

Nero sighed and shook his head, amused. He could have just made them something else for dinner if that was the case, but he was grateful either way. He didn’t really need to understand it. “I swear, if it’s garlic or something… ” The youngest descendant of Sparda froze in place, his brain jamming like a faulty gear. “... Are you a fucking vampire?!”

Much to both his and V’s surprise, Sirrus burst into hysterical laughter. He barely managed to sit his drink and the bottle down on the coffee table before leaning over continuing to laugh, gagging slightly. He continued that way for almost two minutes before wiping the tears from his eyes and standing up, clearing his throat. He was clearly flushed and seemed almost embarrassed to have reacted in the way that he had.

“That’s not a bad guess, but no. Not quite, I’m afraid.” He took a few deep breaths, clearing his throat further. Once he had shaken off the residual urge to continue laughing by stifling a short flurry of chuckles, he reached down and took another sip of his drink, using it to coat his throat. That had nearly wrecked his vocal cords. “But I can see why you might think that. Unfortunately, I think my ability to not burst into flames during the daylight hours disqualifies me.”

Shrugging in defeat and opting to return to his food, Nero silently admitted defeat. Sirrus had a point, vampires did burn in the sun. At least from what he knew. And all of this was hypothetical, after all. Vampires weren’t a real thing… were they? After all, he was a quarter-demon. Who was he to say what was and wasn’t valid on the supernatural spectrum? It wouldn’t be the craziest thing he’d ever heard or the strangest thing he’d ever experienced. “Yeah probably.”

Clearly realizing that he had probably made things somewhat awkward, he sat down again, unable to remember why he had just stood up. He truly had been turned around by Nero’s comment. “But that being said, I genuinely can’t remember the last time I laughed that hard. So thank you. I think I needed it more than I realized.”

Returning to his food in an effort to finish it before it got cold, Nero nodded. They were going to have a busy day working on this plan, and he wanted to enjoy the simple things before anything major happened. And while this pasta wasn’t the simplest thing he’d ever had, it was much simpler than basically everything else going on. Why ruin it?

Seemingly considering something, V turned to face both his brother and their companion. He’d only been half-listening, but he had been fully amused. Dante and Vergil had left about an hour ago, and Lucia was asleep upstairs. Flora and Morgan had joined her not too long ago, and Bren had joined the twins at Vergil’s request, the eldest of the group unwilling to allow him to linger around everyone else without himself present. “In order to keep them from being easily tracked by the summoner who is actively hunting V and Morgan,” he’d said. And to be fair, that made sense.

Yawning, V stood up from the armchair that he’d made himself comfortable in and headed towards the hallway. As amusing as this conversation was, he felt an immense desire to take a nap and rest. There would be time enough to go back and forth with them over the fascinating and diverse mythological history of vampires and demons another time. For now, he would be satisfied simply getting a good night’s rest.

“If I may, I bid you farewell. I am far past my prime, and I believe it is now time that I retire to my bedroom.”

Nero scoffed playfully. “V, you're, what, barely in your early twenties? You haven’t even gotten to your prime yet. Don’t sell yourself short.”

Pausing for a moment, V took that into consideration. He then smirked and tilted his head in Nero’s direction, peering at him over his shoulder with his back still turned to him. “I’m sorry Nero, but while I am aware of this, the rest of my body doesn’t seem to agree with you. I’m afraid those decisions come from a bit further up the ladder.” He barely resisted the urge to laugh to himself. It was true, but that didn’t make the joke any less compelling in his mind. But he appreciated his younger brother’s support.

Sirrus simply held up his glass and nodded, his mouth full of more wine. It seemed that he had no interest in holding V up. He wasn’t going to stop him from heading off to bed, it seemed. And V was sure that whenever he got up in the morning Sirrus would be there to greet him. He couldn’t pinpoint how, but he just knew that that was the case. He wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon. He still had work to do.

(-~-)

One of V’s least favorite phenomena had just occurred. And of course, it would pick a time like this. So often when he found himself tired and excited to get a good night’s rest, something like this would occur, absolutely throwing off his entire routine and disturbing what would otherwise be a relaxing time. But considering everything that was going on, he couldn’t say that he was surprised that his own body would betray him in such a manner. At least it wasn’t demonic in nature for once.

He had never been able to put a name to the sensation, but he had felt it all his life. For as long as he could remember, the sensation had occasionally plagued him when he started to drift off to sleep, disturbing what would have otherwise been a peaceful night’s rest. But it had managed to creep its way back into his subconscious yet again, just as it always did. The sensation of falling was unwelcome, but it happened from time to time. He knew it wasn’t all that strange, but he still didn’t enjoy waking up that way.

Wiping the sweat from his brow and panting slightly, he decided that the best course of action in this situation would be to get something cold to drink. Perhaps that would calm his frayed nerves. He would normally brew a cup of tea, but he simply did not feel like putting in that much effort into it right now. He would have a cold drink and return to his bed. It was as simple as that.

Laying there in the bed reclined against the headboard, he found himself actively telling himself to get up and head downstairs, but to his surprise, his muscles didn’t move. No matter how much he tried, he simply couldn’t will himself to move even the slightest amount. A heavy sigh escaped his lips and he cursed his sedentary state. He was quite literally getting nowhere like this.

After several minutes, his leg suddenly moved, his brain subconsciously registering the fact that he had apparently been dozing off without realizing it. He’d actually zoned out, thinking about nothing in particular, and it seemed that he had suddenly regained the willpower necessary to do something; anything that he’d been trying to do. It was a small victory, but an important one. Or, at least he thought so. He was positive that he could actually make himself get up and head downstairs now. He just hoped that he didn’t manage to wake anyone up when he was doing it. He was in a haze.

Endeavoring to make his way out of the bed and over to the door to his bedroom, he sighed and tossed the covers to the side before standing up and heading over to the door. This wouldn’t take long, and then he could come back. Just the act of heading to the kitchen was exhausting enough to tell him that this plan was probably going to work just fine. He just hoped that he didn’t wake anyone up as he rounded the corner and headed towards the steps. But on his way over, something caught his eye.

Just out of the clear line of sight, he was certain that the back balcony door was open. The bright moonlight shined through as the curtains blew in the chilly night air, cooling that floor of the house and letting in the pleasant aroma that only hung in the air after it rained or snowed. But as lovely as it was, perhaps it was best that he close the door and go get his water so that he could head back to bed. This wasn’t the time to stay up.

Cautiously making his way over to the door, he paused as he entered the crosshairs formed by the glass in the windows. It was almost entrancing, the sight of the autumn moon lingering over a blanket of fresh snow. If he hadn’t been so tired he could have stood there forever, just enjoying the cool silence and the tickle of cold air on his exposed skin. But he knew that it was not the right time for something like that. He had been ordered to get plenty of rest, and this wasn’t the way to accomplish that. So with a heavy heart, he decided to turn back and head to his room. 

And he stopped dead in his tracks as soon as he did.

Standing before him was Sirrus, silent, and admittedly scary as hell to him in a manner that he had never experienced before. For a brief but frankly terrifying moment, he’d made eye contact with the other man, his icy gray eyes turning from their normal color to a spine-chilling black. And not just the pupil. The entire eyeball. But then after what felt like a lifetime, he slowly blinked, tilting his head a centimeter at a time to the right as he seemed to register V’s presents for the first time so slowly that V wondered if he was possessed. And after what felt like the passage of a century, he blinked. Slowly and deliberately in a manner that reminded him entirely too much of the way that a snake or a lizard might. There was entirely too much control behind the gesture for his tastes, and he was positive that he never wanted to see it again for as long as he lived.

He hadn’t registered his companion’s approach, and he most certainly hadn’t been prepared for this glimpse into what he could only assume was his true nature. It reminded him of the way that the other members of his own family’s eyes changed color when they entered their Devil Trigger state, except somehow several measures creepier. Perhaps it was purely because of the fact that although yellow and red were not normal eye colors by any metic, black was just sinister. What on earth had he just discovered? V refused to believe that this wasn’t something that happened regularly. It just seemed like something that had an actual reason behind it. After all, he was sure that he’d actually seen that just now and that he hadn’t been hallucinating. 

“Honestly, it’s so rare that anyone ever sees me under moonlight that I forget the effect it has on me. Forgive my startling visage and my inability to announce myself when I enter a space.”

The young summoner continued to stare blankly, rooted to the spot. For whatever reason, he just didn't seem to be able to form any meaningful thoughts at the moment. He still felt like he had just stared into the abyss and it had stared back at him. Or perhaps more appropriately into him. The nature of his companion’s powers and, to that extent, his very being, we’re still a mystery to him, so to say that this had taken him entirely off guard would be an understatement. But it wasn’t so much that he felt threatened by Sirrus as it was that he simply had no ability to understand what had just happened between them. He now had a better understanding as to why Nero had been so surprised to see him up this late in the kitchen on a few occasions. It was, indeed, very distressing. But he had a distinct feeling that this was somehow worse.

“I could be mistaken, but you seem to have something on your mind.” Sirrus was clearly trying his very best to make an uncomfortable situation seem less so, but he clearly understood that he wasn’t getting anywhere and fast. A part of him genuinely wished that he hadn’t seen him doing that, even if it was only for V’s sake. People tended to react poorly to that aspect of who he was. “I assure you that I have not been possessed or otherwise influenced by the darkness that seeks to consume us all. This is simply just what my eyes do at night under the cover of a full moon when I am outside. The curse of what I am. That is why you didn’t see this before now. They do just the opposite on bright sunny days, though that is a bit harder to notice.”

“… Yes, I see that.” He honestly didn’t know how to feel about this situation. But he could try and break the ice. “Is it uncomfortable? It seems as though it would give you a bad case of photosensitivity.”

“As a matter of fact, it sort of does.” Sirrus shrugged, walking over to the rail and sitting down in the thin layer of snow that coated the balcony. “But again, I am sorry that I disturbed you. Darkness and light are present in different measures in all beings, but during certain natural phenomena, it takes a much more literal hold over me. There is no danger in it. I have full control over my abilities. I’ve worked my whole life to ensure that… but the full moon still seems to have some wicked hold over me. It possesses an allure that I cannot deny. And so from time to time, I indulge in its presence. Even if only for a moment. That seems to satiate my nebulous desires.”

V nodded, leaning against the railing. He had felt his own version of that from time to time, but it didn’t seem to be as strong as what his companion had just described. It sounded as though it called to him in a way that he couldn’t explain away in the manner that V could. Perhaps that was a trademark of things that resided or originated in darker places? It seemed demonic in nature, but from what he’d inferred during Sirrus’s conversation with Hydrangea back at the Ludwig estate, Sirrus seemed to possess powers that dwelled firmly in the light side of the power spectrum. He didn’t know enough about the differences between enhancement and abilities to have a firm opinion on that matter, but he had to admit that this made him consider a few possibilities.

“You’ve been quiet. Have I startled you into silence?”

Glancing over at him nonchalantly, V quietly dispelled that notion with his now much more relaxed demeanor. He hadn’t been visibly distressed before, but what little fear that had been present in him had now entirely dissipated. “Forgive me. I was considering something.”

Sirrus nodded in understanding before he poured the last of his wine into the glass that he was holding. Whether this was the same glass or another one was unknown to him, but V was still somewhat surprised to see that he was completely sober. And although he wasn’t sure how he knew, he just knew that it didn’t affect him the same way it did everyone else. He himself had still failed to ever actually do more than taste a sip of wine. He couldn’t say that he felt an immense desire to drink it, using it for little more than cooking. But he did know that Sirrus should be at least slightly inebriated by now.

“Correct me if I’m wrong, but you are incapable of becoming intoxicated aren’t you?”

Looking up at him, Sirrus seemed to consider the question before nodding once in almost hesitant agreement. “Yes. You would be correct. And I do believe that that isn’t the only thing you’ve discovered about me tonight. I just think you lack the vocabulary and relevant knowledge to understand what you’ve unearthed. There is a name for what I am. It just isn’t one that many people know or believe to be true. I suspect that you will understand in due time. But for now, we need to make a plan, and you should rest.”

V agreed with his sentiments. “I had ventured out of my bed to get something to drink. I plan to return there soon, but now I wonder if I shall actually sleep. I’m very awake now, I’m afraid. But I suppose that’s how it always works when you are seeking a good night’s rest.”

He shook his head for a brief moment, not having much to say about the matter. “You need not explain yourself to me, V. You are not a child. If you wish to wander the halls of your home and then sleep on the floor in the hallway. I have no say over that.” He took a moment to slosh his drink again, looking at it in the glass. It did have a wonderful bouquet, at least as far as he was concerned. “And if sleeping is what you intend to do, I would recommend the brandy I brought over. This wine would no doubt be revolting to you. It is basically every aside from a few close friends and relatives of mine.”

“Now I am morbidly curious as to what it actually tastes like.” V’s eyebrow arched ever so slightly. Sirrus would have had to possess very specific culinary preferences to be so certain that his drink would not be well received by anyone other than himself. Wasn’t the point of alcohol to be appealing to people?

Much to his surprise, Sirrus handed him the cup. It seemed that he was willing to allow him to learn from his mistakes. V took the glass and looked at it. It was thick and did indeed possess a distinct smell, although it was not one that he could pinpoint. Or more importantly, it possessed two distinct smells, both of which seemed extremely familiar to him but he was unable to identify. Something told him that this wine tasted the exact same way that it smelled, and he wondered for a moment if he wanted to actually taste it. For some reason, he still did, but something about it just nagged at him.

“OH PLEASE, V. This isn’t even nearly the worst thing you’ve ever stuck in your mouth. Remember Redgrave City? Because I know I do.”

“... You make a valid point, Griffon. It wouldn’t be.”

“When don’t I make a good point, V? That’s what I’m here for, after all. Now drink it. I just gotta know if it’s as bad as he’s making it sound.”

Admittedly surprised to hear Griffon chime in, he smiled slightly to himself as he answered his familiar in his head, something that didn’t go unnoticed by Sirrus. The other man leaned back slightly, unaware of what his companion was thinking, but sure that he was missing some sort of internal monologue. “You should do that more often.”

V looked up at him from over the top of the small glass, his eyes peering through his white bangs. His lips had very nearly been on the glass. Sirrus’s timing couldn’t have been better if he’d expected him to actually answer. “I’m afraid I don’t follow.”

“Smile, V. If you don’t mind me saying as much, you have a lovely smile. Especially when you smile genuinely. It carries to your eyes as well.” Although calm, he seemed entirely flustered to say that out loud. V simply stared at him, surprised to hear him say something like that. He’d never really considered what he looked like to other people aside from making note of the fact that his demeanor seemed to set everyone off and make them think he was up to something even when he actually wasn’t.

“Do I now… “ He paused, unsure as to what to really say to that. He wasn’t good with compliments. “I hadn’t noticed. I don’t do it very often, and I can’t say I spend much time in front of a mirror.”

“Then I am to believe that you just wake up in the morning looking better than practically everyone else I’ve ever met?” Sirrus cracked a genuine, self-satisfied smile at the statement, closing his eyes for a moment as he blinked slowly. “I suppose that makes sense. Some people are just naturally captivating, and It’s difficult to manufacture that look you get in your eyes. I don’t believe that’s something you can just fake. It comes from somewhere primal. I think it makes the person it belongs to that much more captivating. But on an unrelated note…  how’s the wine. I could wax eloquent about you all day, but if I’m not mistaken, you have places to be, and that isn’t something you want me to do.”

V just stared at him for a moment, suddenly very self-conscious for reasons he couldn't pinpoint. He really wasn’t good at receiving compliments, especially when he was the center of attention; something else that he admittedly hated to be.

“If I’ve made you uncomfortable, please forgive me. I simply wished to be honest. I do so as much as possible. And if not, I prefer to avoid the topic altogether.”

Now, that was something that the young summoner could relate to. “Likewise.”

Holding the glass back up to his face, he took a small sip, unsure of what to actually expect from something like this. And to his surprise, he was immediately and entirely overwhelmed by the flavor profile. It was the strangest thing he’d ever tasted, full stop. And he both loved and hated it. His concussion had probably been evident on his face as his brain attempted to process the strange menagerie of flavors that had just hit his taste buds. And from such a small sample size? How had Sirrus managed to drink an entire bottle of this extremely potent wine? Even if he didn’t feel its possible alcoholic effects, this was just, quite frankly, the most overwhelming thing that he had ever ingested. And that was saying something considering his track record.

“Rosa Sanguinum. It’s a vintage from a place I frequent with a very specific flavor profile. And an even more on the nose name. Thankfully no one understands Latin these days, so I don’t believe that the vineyard had anything to worry about. Although to be fair, I don't believe that they are doing themselves any favors with the braiding on the bottle.” Sirrus gestured towards the deep crimson red wax that ran the bottle in a bid to seal it. It was striking in comparison to the black glass.

 “Yes, I can see that. If I’m honest, I absolutely loathe it… But I feel an undeniable desire to keep drinking it.” He took a second sip, seemingly trying to mentally process the drink. But no, it still tasted exactly the same way. And he had to admit that it was actually starting to grow on him the longer he attempted to understand it. “But the name makes perfect sense in retrospect… Because this tastes exactly like its namesake. Blood and roses. Or more specifically, it tastes as though I just bit the inside of my mouth and fell face-first into a thorn bush. And I’m disturbed by how much those two overwhelming flavor profiles mix with one another. I have no desire to know how they flavored this.”

 Sirrus seemed genuinely shocked by that statement, his eyes widening considerably for a moment before he blinked the surprise away. It seemed that he was completely taken aback by that statement. “You're quite literally the first person I’ve met in ages that actually likes this. Most people simply spit it out or gag at how strong the flavor profile is. Exceptional.” He seemed to be genuinely shocked at this outcome, unable to process an even remotely favorable reply. “One can only imagine that it is a product of your demonic heritage. Perhaps I’ll venture out and purchase one for you.”

 V smirked and shook his head, absentmindedly finishing off the last sip in the cup after Sirrus brushed off the offer to take it back. That would actually make some sense. He then slid down the banister until he was sitting on the ground as well, hating that he couldn’t be bothered to disagree. It was the most literal case of “I hate it. Give me more” that he had ever experienced. Maybe one day he would explain to Sirrus that this wasn’t the first time he’d had a mouthful of something that had this strong of a blood taste. After all, if he didn’t, Griffon would no doubt rat him out at a moment’s notice. He’d been waiting for the opportunity to tell on him to someone for his Redgrave City eating habits for ages now. “That would be absolutely awful. I think I would love that.”

 The man with the red hair closed his eyes and shook his head, resisting the small smile that threatened to sneak its way onto his face. V truly was something else. He was glad that they had been given the opportunity to meet. It had been a lifetime since he’d had the opportunity to speak with someone this intriguing. One could only hope that V enjoyed his presence as much as he enjoyed his. He knew that it was unlikely, however. After all, he was a gigantic weirdo. But then again, this was the second time they’d spent a late night chatting aimlessly about gods knew what when everyone else was asleep and V should be asleep. It was probably best that he usher him off to bed before he fell asleep lead against the wall and he had to stealthily carry him back to his bedroom. Again.Though it would be easier to do here than back at the Ludwig estate. “Go to bed, V. I believe you may be drunk.”

 “Yes. I believe you may be right.” He chuckled quietly to himself. It seemed that he was something of a lightweight, at least when it came to this damned blood wine.

 (-~-)

 Okay, so your gonna laugh, but I had 400 words left to write today to hit my self-imposed and probably stupid chapter-length limit, and then I went and took a nap. Woke up at 5:30 pm, and I kid you not, I wrote 2.4K more words. This chapter is exactly 5k words, and that makes my OCD immeasurably happy. Like, this is 11 pages long! Normally it’s like 6, maybe 7! I know that’s insane, but it does make me excited! I just really enjoyed writing this conversation between V and Sirrus, I guess. They have a fun dynamic, and I like the idea of V making a friend outside of his family. After all, he doesn’t have very many. I think he considers the rest of the team as a sort of extended family, and Sirrus is sort of this odd exception because he still barely knows him in the grand scheme of things. But either way, it just made me stupidly giddy to write this chapter and both expand on two of my favorite characters and also sprinkle in a little bit of lore. The next chapter is plan time, so that’s going to be pretty fun, too. I hope you enjoyed this one!

 See you on Friday!

[wineanddinosaur]

VinePair Podcast: The Past Inspires the Future at Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars

In 1976, 20 French judges came together to participate in a blind wine tasting in what has come to be known as the Judgement of Paris. At the time, wines from France were expected to win across the board, given the country’s prestigious winemaking. When the results for the Bordeaux category were revealed, though, an unexpected wine from an American region took the prize. The wine came from the Napa Valley’s Stag’s Leap Cellars.

On this special episode of the “VinePair Podcast,” host Adam Teeter speaks with Marcus Notaro, winemaker at Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars in Napa Valley. Notaro discusses how he’s helped to continue Stag Leap’s legacy through innovation and hard work, all while striving to uphold the brand’s name as a leader in high-quality New World wine.

Tune in, and learn more about Stag’s Leap at https://www.stagsleapwinecellars.com/.

LISTEN ONLINE

Listen on Apple Podcasts

Listen on Spotify

OR CHECK OUT THE CONVERSATION HERE

Adam Teeter: From VinePair’s New York City headquarters, I’m Adam Teeter. I am so pumped today to be bringing you a special podcast. On today’s podcast, we’re going to be talking with Marcus Notaro, the winemaker of Stag’s Leap. We’re going to talk all about a really, really incredible event that happened a while ago now, but one that a lot of listeners may be familiar with. We’re not only going to talk about that event, but we’re also going to talk about Stag’s Leap as a whole and what’s going on in Napa. It’s harvest right now, so Marcus is giving us a bit of an update. Without further ado, Marcus, thanks for joining me.

Marcus Notaro: Hey, it’s great to be here, Adam.

A: I don’t want to keep people guessing for too long, so let’s jump right into it. You are the winemaker at Stag’s Leap. While I think many people who listen are very familiar with Stag’s Leap, they may not be familiar with one of the things that made Stag’s Leap super famous in the first place. It’s an event that happened in the ’70s called the Judgment of Paris. I was hoping that you could give us the background. For people who also listened to “Wine 101” at VinePair, there’s a whole episode about the Judgment of Paris that you can go back to and listen to if you want the full breakdown. But, Marcus, can you explain to people who are listening right now what that event was and why it is so important in the history of the winery where you now make the wine?

M: You bet. Obviously, it’s an important part of our history. It’s also a huge part of the history of the Napa Valley. This tasting happened in 1976. If you transport yourself back there into the ’70s in the Napa Valley, it certainly wasn’t what you see today, where it’s kind of like this winery Disneyland. There were things happening in Napa Valley. It was still recovering from that great American idea called Prohibition from the ’20s that wiped out the industry. But, things were happening. There were some new wineries. There was some new energy and excitement. To put it in perspective, though, prunes were more valuable than Cabernet Sauvignon at this time. Our winery was founded in 1970, and our first vintage was produced in 1972. It’s the ’73 that really put us on the map. If you go over to Paris, France, there’s a gentleman named Steven Spurrier who, together with his partner Patricia Gallagher, had a wine shop in Paris. They noticed that a bunch of Americans and British folks were visiting their wine shop. They had been over to Napa Valley, tasted some of our wines, and had seen some of this energy and excitement. They thought that they could sell these wines to these folks that were visiting their wine shop. At this point in time, particularly for quality wine, there was only one place. There was France. There was Burgundy for Chardonnay and Bordeaux for Cabernet Sauvignon. It was completely an unknown place. They decided to organize a blind tasting. They brought in about 20 French judges. Mr. Spurrier said, “We want to come to the wine shop for a tasting of some of these wines from the New World, from Napa Valley. Once the judges arrived, he thought it would be a little bit more fun to throw in some of the finest wines of Burgundy and Bordeaux and do the tasting blind. The judges all agreed. First, they tasted through the Burgundys and tasted them all blind. When the results were revealed, it was the 1973 Chateau Montelena Chardonnay that had won in the Burgundy category. When they went to the Bordeaux category, it was the Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars 1973 S.L.V. — Stag’s Leap Vineyard — Cabernet Sauvignon that had won.

A: Wow.

M: Mr. Spurrier had invited a bunch of media to cover this event, and basically, nobody showed. At the last minute, he made a call over to Time Magazine, who sent a man named George Taber over to cover this event. Mr. Taber knew what the wines were. He knew about all the background stuff going on. He wrote this little article called “The Judgment of Paris” that appeared on, like, page 56 of Time Magazine. It was that little article that got picked up by news organizations around the world as this great American victory over what the French were most known for. It was almost a “going viral” type of moment for the ’70s, to put it in perspective. For vintners and growers here in the Napa Valley, it really validated what they thought. We thought that we could produce world-class wines here, and the results of the Paris tasting definitely show that the Napa Valley is a special place, and it’s capable of producing world-class Chardonnay and world-class Cabernet Sauvignon.

A: So, what did that do for Stag’s Leap specifically? Obviously it put Napa on the map. Can you look at the trajectory of the winery now and say, “Man, it was a rocket ship”? I feel like almost anyone who starts to get into wine learns the name Stag’s Leap. You’re one of the first growths of the U.S., to be very honest. I think that’s very fair to say. You’re one of the most famous wineries in the country. What did that do to the company? How did everyone react to that? How do you approach that today in your winemaking, understanding that you are now one of these wineries that people think about and say, “Man, this was the winery that put us on the map”?

M: Remember, this event was a very innocent event. Once the results were revealed, they made a phone call over to Warren Winiarski’s wife, Barbara Winiarski. Warren was on business at the time. When she was told that they had won a tasting in Paris, her response was, “Oh, that’s very nice.” She hung up the phone and then called Warren, who was on business back in Chicago. She said, “Warren, we just won this tasting in Paris.” His response was, “Oh, that’s very nice.” He hung up the phone and it wasn’t until a few days later when he actually saw what the other wines were in the tasting that they had beaten. That was when he realized the magnitude of this event. He actually tried to buy back all of the 1973 S.L.V., just knowing the sheer ramifications of this event. Certainly, to have one of your first vintages to have such a quality statement is huge. That really is what the winery has been about after the Paris wine tasting. What’s interesting is that everybody wanted to work at Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars. Everybody wanted to know what the secret was. What was it that Warren was doing where he was able to produce this wine that beat some of the best wines in the world? The reality is that the place here is so special. Whether it’s S.L.V., Stag’s Leap Vineyard, the FAY Vineyard — which is right next door where we also produce an estate wine — our area here in Stag’s Leap produces wonderful wines that have incredible potential for ageability. They have a real personality. That is really what Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars has always been about. We produce not only top-quality wines, but wines that are really expressive of our area and the individual personalities of the vineyards.

A: That’s amazing. So, when did you come to Stag’s Leap?

M: My first vintage, start to finish, was in 2013.

A: OK. When you came, did you understand, at the time, the gravitas of the place and the importance of it in American wine history?

M: Oh, for sure. My first trip to the Napa Valley was when I was right at the end of studying in college. I fell in love with wine in school. This winery was one of the first wineries that I ever visited as a young wine connoisseur. So, for sure. The winery has such a pedigree. As the winemaker today, it’s pretty awesome when we’re traveling around and doing winemaker dinners. Everybody’s got a story of a time that they visited, or they have a vintage in their cellar that they’re saving for a special occasion. To make the wines here today is very humbling, but it’s also a real honor.

A: Speaking of the wine specifically, a lot in the world has changed since 1976. Napa has changed. How have the wines at Stag’s Leap changed? If someone were to drink a bottle of the current vintage of Stag’s Leap, how much of what was happening in 1976 could they still find in that bottle? How much of what was happening in 1976 has informed what’s inside that bottle? Could you take the listeners through what defines a Stag’s Leap wine?

M: The wines come from the area, and the Stag’s Leap district as a whole is a very small sub-appellation. We’re about five miles north of Napa on the Silverado Trail. When the first Cabernet was planted here in 1961 by a man named Nathan Fay, at that time, our area was actually thought to be too cold for Cabernet Sauvignon or red varieties, for that matter. You know, the city of Yountville and north was for red grapes. South of Yountville was for white grapes. The way the weather works here is that, on a typical summer day, we wake up and the valley is full of fog or low clouds which burn off from the north — up in Calistoga — to the south, back out into our air conditioner, being San Pablo Bay. Then, it heats up. In the early afternoon, the sea breezes turn back on, coming up San Pablo Bay from the south, funneling up through the Napa Valley to the north. Depending on where you are north to south, you’re going to have different levels of fog or clouds and different times as to when that air conditioner comes back on. That’s why, back in the ’60s, it was thought to be too cold. Luckily, Mr. Fay took a chance and planted Cabernet Sauvignon here anyway. Later, when we were able to do some real measurements, we confirmed that our area is a little bowl. We’re surrounded by these rocky outcroppings called the Stag’s Leap Palisades. Those were named after a particularly large rock formation right above the winery. Back when the native Wappo tribe was living and hunting in the valley, they used to chase the deer up into these rocks. There’s a legend that a particularly large stag made it to one part of this V cut and leapt this incredible distance to the other side in order to escape. That’s how our area then has been historically known as Stag’s Leap. Those Palisades radiate the heat. Once the sun does come out here, temperatures in Stag’s Leap heat right up. It gets fairly warm, but because of our southerly location, the sea breezes hit us around 3:30 to 4:30 p.m. in the afternoon. That cools us back off. The fog does sit here. It lingers until around 9 a.m. We have these nice, warm afternoons and that warmth is what Cabernet Sauvignon needs to get out those nice ripe flavors, complexities, and ripe tannins. But, that extended cooling period really preserves a lot of the natural acidity. I think, combined, these give our wines what I call “soft power.” They’re wines that are wonderfully complex. They’re rich wines, but they don’t tend to be heavy or over the top. I find that style in our neighbor’s wines as well. That would be what I would call the Stag’s Leap style.

A: That makes sense. They’re powerful, but they have some acidity. They’re approachable. That’s really interesting. I never really thought about that in terms of the description of the style of that entire district. It’s really interesting.

M: You bet. It’s very cool to be at a winery that has 50 years of history and a wine library where we have some of the historical vintages. As the current winemaker, I think it’s really important for me to understand history, how the wines have evolved, and the individual personalities of our vineyards. So S.L.V., Stag’s Leap Vineyard and our first vineyard, for example, to taste the wines from the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, and today, is incredible. Sure, every vintage is a little bit different. What I find in the wine is this signature personality that, to me, is S.L.V.. It’s this dusty cocoa powder, it has graphite, this dark fruit character, this violet character. It’s a richer wine. It’s not over the top, as I said, but it has a backbone. It has a beautiful structure. You see that in the older wines. That is what I try to get out of the grapes in today’s wines. Things have changed through history. A lot of the vineyards themselves, here in the Napa Valley, needed to be replanted in the mid-’80s and early ’90s, due to phylloxera.

A: That thing.

M: Yeah, that thing. So, the vineyards are different. They’re different rootstocks for the most part. Different spacings, different clones. Every time you replant or you do something, you want to make it better, right? You take from what you’ve learned, and when you have a replanting, you take with what’s worked and then you try to make it better and try to make the vineyard better. The same thing goes with winemaking. Do we make wines today the same as they were made in the ’70s? No. We have the same goal, which is to make the best-quality wine we can. That is expressive and brings out those personalities that I see in these vineyards. For sure, though, equipment is different, winemaking techniques are different, barrel aging is different. It’s all constantly evolving. You can’t, as a winemaker or as a viticulturist, sit back and do the same thing every time. Our goal is to make the best wines we can for the vintage. Every vintage is different. We don’t necessarily do the same thing every year, as well. Warren Winiarski, our founder, is still a grower for us. He grows Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvignon, and he lives on the property. It was really great to see his curiosity and excitement when I would bring something new. When this winery was founded, this place was that. This was something new. This was the innovator. This was the new thing in Napa Valley. It is OK to innovate. It is OK to try new things, as long as I’m respecting the characters and the qualities of the vineyards and staying focused on producing the best quality wine I can.

A: That’s amazing. How many wines does Stag’s Leap produce?

M: What you’ll see out in the marketplace, is that we have our three estate wines. We have a single-vineyard from S.L.V., a single-vineyard from the FAY Vineyard, and our top wine, which is a blend of the best of the best of the two. It’s called Cask 23. We also have three Napa Valley wines. We make a Sauvignon Blanc that we call Aveta. We make a Napa Valley Chardonnay, which we call Karia. Our most popular wine is our Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon, which we call Artemis. Those are the six wines that you’ll see out in the marketplace. Here at the winery, we have a very active wine club that I produce some other wines for, as well.

A: Some special wines that you can only get if you actually join.

M: Exactly. Or, when you stop by the winery here.

A: Right, exactly. Clear one thing up for me. You get this question a lot. You’re not the only winery named Stag’s Leap. That’s another one, too. People get confused. You both have an apostrophe in your name, but one is in one location, one is in the other. Can you tell me why that is? Can you tell me what listeners should look for to ensure that they’re actually buying the Stag’s Leap that won the Judgement of Paris, from the winery founded by Warren Winiarski? How do you ensure that it’s that winery and not the other Stag’s Leap?

M: Yes. This is very confusing. It’s been confusing for 50 years. Basically, both wineries were founded at the same time as grape wine-producing wineries. You actually have to get a bond in order to do this. Both tried to capture this name of Stag’s Leap. The other winery — completely different ownership, completely different founding — was more excited about Petite Sirah than Cabernet Sauvignon. In good American fashion, this, of course, resulted in about a 10-year, $1 million legal battle. The solution was that no one winery can lay claim to a place like that. Winiarski’s winery is Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars, with the apostrophe before the “s” and the other one is Stags’ Leap Winery, with the apostrophe after the “s.” This, of course, has resulted in another 40 years of confusion, particularly for consumers, but they have completely different ownership and completely different wine. On the labels, our deer is standing still and their deer is leaping away. They make very good Petite Sirah. If I had a nickel for every time I’ve been told how good our Petite Sirah is —

A: That’s amazing.

M: Their winemaker is actually a friend. They also get told all the time about Cask 23 and Artemis. Frankly, that’s the reason why, on our Napa Valley wines, they do have a name like Artemis, Karia, or Aveta. That’s so that, when you’re at a restaurant and have a wine list, the restaurateur may only have so much space to write out Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon. If they put even just Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars Artemis, people will really recognize that. It’s very recognizable for the consumers and helps to keep you straight and make sure you’re getting it from the right one.

A: Are the three Napa wines the wines that people will most easily find out in the market?

M: Yes. Aveta, Karia, and Artemis.

A: OK, cool. The S.L.V., Cask 23, you can find those at, probably, the finer restaurants and higher-end shops.

M: Exactly.

A: Very cool. Well, Marcus, it has been really interesting to talk to you about Stag’s Leap, the Judgment of Paris, the wine as a whole, and the region. To be honest with you, I actually didn’t know that it was named for a stag jumping over a rock outcropping. I just always thought it was named because there were lots of stags that had been seen leaping in the area. That’s a super-cool story. I really appreciate you sharing.

M: Well, I’ll tell you what. The descendants of that deer that got away have a voracious appetite for Cabernet Sauvignon. As harvest is going on here right now, I’m constantly chasing these things out.

A: Oh, lovely. I don’t want to take up much of your time because I’m sure you are super busy with harvest. So, I want to thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today and talk to us more about Stag’s Leap and what’s going on in Napa. I appreciate it and I will talk to you soon.

M: My pleasure, Adam. Awesome being here.

Thanks so much for listening to the “VinePair Podcast.” If you love this show as much as we love making it, please leave us a rating or review on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever it is you get your podcasts. It really helps everyone else discover the show.

Now for the credits. VinePair is produced and recorded in New York City and Seattle, Washington, by myself and Zach Geballe, who does all the editing and loves to get the credit. Also, I would love to give a special shout-out to my VinePair co-founder, Josh Malin, for helping make all of this possible, and also to Keith Beavers, VinePair’s tastings director, who is additionally a producer on the show. I also want to, of course, thank every other member of the VinePair team, who are instrumental in all of the ideas that go into making the show every week. Thanks so much for listening, and we’ll see you again.

Ed. note: This episode has been edited for length and clarity.

The article VinePair Podcast: The Past Inspires the Future at Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars appeared first on VinePair.

source https://vinepair.com/articles/podcast-marcus-notaro-stags-leap-wine-cellars/

[johnboothus]

EOD Drinks With Francis Ford Coppola

On today’s episode of “End of Day Drinks,” we’re talking with the iconic director Francis Ford Coppola. He’s known for his amazing movies, but he’s also just as well known for his amazing wine. While many know him for Francis Ford Coppola Winery, Francis owns many other wineries. We’re going to talk about all of them. We’re going to find out how Francis first fell in love with wine, thanks to his Italian heritage. We’ll also hear the story of how he decided to use his earnings from “The Godfather” to buy a winery.

Listen Online

Listen on Apple Podcasts

Listen on Spotify

Or Check out the Conversation Here

From VinePair’s New York City headquarters, this is “End of Day Drinks,” where we sit down with the movers and shakers in the beverage industry. So pour yourself a glass, and listen along with us. Let’s start the show.

K: Everyone, my name is Keith Beavers, and I am the tastings director of VinePair, as well as the host of VinePair’s “Wine 101” podcast. Welcome to “End of Day Drinks.” Today, we are joined by Francis Ford Coppola, film director, producer, writer, winery owner, vintner, I’m sure there’s more. Francis, thank you so much for joining us.

FFC: My pleasure.

K: And as always, today, we are joined by members of the VinePair editorial team. We have VinePair co-founder and CEO Adam Teeter.

A: Hi, Keith. Hi, Francis.

K: We have VinePair senior editor Cat Wolinski.

C: Hello, Francis. Thanks so much for joining us.

FFC: My pleasure, Cat. My pleasure to meet you.

K: We also have VinePair associate editor Katie Brown.

Katie: Hey, guys. Excited to be here today.

K: We also have staff writer Tim McKirdy.

Tim: Hi, guys, how’s it going?

FFC: Doing good.

FFC: And VinePair executive editor Joanna Sciarrino.

Joanna: Hi, everyone. Hi, Francis.

FFC: Hello, Joanna.

K: So, Francis, thank you again for joining us. You’re out on the West Coast? Are you doing some wine out there?

FFC: Well, I’m here in the Napa Valley in Rutherford, actually up in the mountain overlooking beautiful nature. I’m so fortunate and blessed to be able to be here during this difficult pandemic era.

K: You have a passion for wine as much as you have a passion for film. I was just curious: Did one come before the other, or how did that work out?

FFC: Well, you know, I think you can say I have a passion for everything. I have a passion for life. It’s such a privilege to even be alive. All of us can feel that way. But being an Italian American, I was raised in a household on the East Coast, in Long Island. And from the dawn of my consciousness, I never saw a dinner table that didn’t have wine on it. All my uncles, and my father, and my mother, as the children of immigrants, were all born in the United States, but they still spoke Italian. They didn’t teach it to the kids, so I didn’t learn. I was named after my grandfather, Francesco, but they wanted to call me Francis. So we were really new Americans, but the tradition remained. We drink wine at the table. As I said, even the kids, we didn’t drink glasses of wine shoulder to shoulder with our parents, but we were allowed a little wine and we would put 7Up or ginger ale or cream soda in it. Wine was part of that family ritual of dinner for me. As I grew older, I eventually traveled to Europe, and I collaborated on a script. I was a film person by then, and I collaborated on a script in Paris with the great Gore Vidal, and I had this opportunity to meet him. He was a very brilliant person. He knew Europe, and being with him, I had the chance to taste some great wine. I said, “My goodness, this is so delicious.” I mean, the wine we drank— the wine my father and my grandfather drank— that was good, honest wine made by some of the immigrant families, like Gallo. There were plenty of them. They made their own during Prohibition with grapes supplied by the Mondavi family. But this was a different story, having the wines of Bordeaux, Romanée Conti from Burgundy. I tasted wine from Rhône, and I thought, “My God, this is more delicious than Coca-Cola.” Coca-Cola was my standard as a kid. I had great luck and good fortune to taste some great wines. I remember when I had the opportunity to have a little bit of money — because most of my life I was really penniless, and I was a starving student with barely enough to eat — which is why I gained weight, incidentally, because every night I used to have the Kraft Macaroni & Cheese dinner, which cost 19 cents when I went to college. So when I made “The Godfather” film, and for the first time I had money, I said to my wife, “Let’s get a little summer house in the Napa Valley. It’s only an hour away, and the kids — I have two boys — we can all have fun at the summer house. But maybe we can have an acre of grapes, and then we can make wine ourselves, and for Christmas, we can give it to all the relatives.” So when I went there, the real estate agent said, “Oh, this isn’t for you, but they’re going to auction a great estate.” I said, “Well, what’s that?” They said it was part of the most beautiful estate of all, which was the Inglenook Estate, which has been all broken up by the corporations that owned it. But the family was auctioning the home. My wife and I went and saw it, and it was just an incomparable beauty — we couldn’t believe it. It was 1,700 acres. We made a bid on it. We didn’t get it. But then I said, “Gee, we should get a bigger place.” But the story is actually that the people who bought it did sell it to us, and we started to live here.

K: Wow, you started living there, and now you’re surrounded by wine.

FFC: Yeah, well, when you live in Napa Valley, all your neighbors and friends all make wine, and they make very good wine. You guys are much more connoisseurs, probably, than I am. I was never one. I went out of my way to not be someone who would sip wine on its own and discuss its various aromatics. I like to drink wine with food. I’m not a savant when it comes to that. I know what I enjoy, and I always like to learn more. Your panel of your associates, I’m sure that they’re much more sophisticated than I. But I will tell them from my perspective what I think about wine, and wine and food, and film, and life. I’m really interested in everything. I think of all the pleasures of life, the greatest one is learning. That’s what I like to do. That’s the key to how I got involved in the wine business — it was an accident.

K: That’s great.

C: Francis, this is Cat. It seems like the one thing that ties all of your passions together, whether it’s filmmaking or winemaking or otherwise, is your family. How important is family legacy to you in your businesses?

FFC: Well, I think I have to go one step further and tell you that in my personal philosophy, the highest level of something to have would be friends. Friendship, I think, is the most valued possible goal. It’s not money, it’s not billions of dollars, it’s not possessions. It’s friends. Family is a subset of friends. It should be, because these are the people who you are the most intimate with, and the most invested in their well-being, although I feel that way about all friends. In fact, all people — because, as you know, the human race, the Homo sapien race that we’re part of, is all one family. You and I are actually related by a grandmother if you go back far enough. We’re all family, and if you think of it that way, friendship is like family. All of us on the phone right now are all part of the same family.

T: Hey, Francis, this is Tim here. I’ve got a question for you. We’ve been talking about your early life and early days, and then moving on to your early life in wine. So you bought a property in Napa in the ’70s. What was that like then? Because we’re talking pre-Judgment of Paris. I imagine it was very different to how it looks now, or is that wrong? What was the landscape there?

FFC: I think Napa Valley, and the vineyards, and the wine business was in the middle of a turning point. There had been the glory days right after Prohibition. Inglenook Wines was under the supervision of their second generation — I never met him, but he was a wonderful man named John Daniel, who was the great-grandnephew of the founder Gustave Niebaum in 1870. At any rate, there was a transition, and people didn’t really know what was going to happen. In fact, the corporations started sniffing around the thing because families didn’t know quite what the next generation was looking at. It was a very damaging time because corporations bought both Heublein, which was in Connecticut, and bought both Inglenook and BV, which were two of the real reasons why Rutherford is such an important region. They dismembered them; they broke them apart and sold them. They made one into a supermarket wine, and made another into their luxury wine. They did a lot of damage. That’s why a kid from Great Neck, Long Island who had just made some money off of “The Godfather,” was even able to buy a property— the real knowledgeable people were very unsure of whether or not something like the property I bought was really a white elephant. It was sort of like what happened to the movie studios after the ’70s, when people bought MGM, or these great, wonderful studios (that in France would have been preserved by the cultural laws) and just broke them apart and sold the property. And Century City was built on the incredible back lot of 20th Century Fox — all the extraordinary props, the famous ruby slippers, everything was just sold and monetized in a way that I guess American industry does. As you know, we have a secretary of culture here. Nothing protected it. For that reason, my wife and I were really strangers to running wineries, and we were able to have that opportunity and the blessing of such a magnificent property. Interestingly, I began to feel very much as though I was the exploiter of this wonderful heritage — it was originally called Niebaum-Coppola, and we were starting to do very good business. People would come and look at my Oscars and the film memorabilia. We had a very popular product that was not really from the grapes here, called Claret. And to this day, Claret is tremendously successful, and a good bargain. It’s an $18 bottle of red wine that never lets you down. So I began to feel embarrassed. I announced at the time that I’m going to take everything out of Niebaum-Coppola — my awards, my name, the Claret, any wine that wasn’t made there because I wanted it to be pure, and I wanted it to be what it really was. I said we’ll find some other winery in Sonoma or somewhere, and we’ll call it Rosso & Bianco, and I’ll move my Oscars there because I really felt embarrassed. I didn’t want the property called Niebaum-Coppola to be a temple for myself. I didn’t even want the other winery to be called Francis Coppola. I wanted to be called Rosso & Bianco, in the name of one of our wines. But I was making a movie at the time, and when I came back, the Niebaum-Coppola Claret had become the Francis Coppola Claret, and the winery in Sonoma was called Francis Coppola Winery. In terms of making money, it might have been a good decision, but it embarrassed me tremendously. I’ve seen my name on so much stuff, and it only embarrasses me. Incidentally, the now Inglenook Winery is absolutely disconnected. They are two separate companies. There’s nothing that connects them other than the fact they’re owned by the same family. There’s nothing that connects them, which I feel is very necessary when you’re making a premium wine. Their business philosophy is different. If you tell me a couple of wineries that we’re making 5,000 cases of a certain wine, and if we add this other component to it, we can have 8,000 cases that’ll be almost as good, you’re likely to say, “OK, do it.” But if at Inglenook, you say, “OK, we have the same thing: 5,000 cases and if we add a little of this to the batch, it’ll be almost as good.” You say no. It’s a different ownership proposition, and that’s why the two companies have to be totally separate.

A: So, Francis, it’s Adam here. I have a question for you about the Claret. It’s actually one of the first wines I ever had. It’s one of the wines that helped me fall in love with wine. In all seriousness, when I was just graduating college (I’d actually been a film major). I knew your movies and then came in contact with your wine. I think it helped a lot of people discover wine. When you created the Claret, did you have the idea then that it would become such an ambassador for wine in general, and for everything else in wine that you would do? Or was it just a wine you were looking to create at the time because as you were saying it was something that the Valley really hadn’t experienced before.

FFC: Well, to tell you the truth, when I was your age, when I was a young guy— and I have become used to drinking wine, especially when I have the opportunity to have certain foods, like a steak, or something that seems to demand it. There was an Australian wine. I don’t remember the name of what it was called. It was a Shiraz. It’s a very famous one, and it was the only wine that you would really see — I made a movie called “The Rain People” driving across the country. We would get great steaks. You couldn’t get wine, but there was this one wine, and when I saw that wine, I knew it would never let you down.

A: Was it Lindemans?

FFC: No, it was ubiquitous. It was everywhere. It was very, very much available. And it was good. And you could trust that if you bought it you were OK. So with Claret, that was my image. I wanted to make a wine that would never let you down, that wasn’t too expensive, and gave you a really enjoyable wine-food experience that you could count on that you wouldn’t have to doubt. I’ll remember that name and I’ll tell you what — I’ll send an email with what it was called, but that was the inspiration. A wine that wouldn’t let you down.

A: Amazing.

KB: That’s awesome. And speaking of access and accessibility, you guys were the first winery, or at least in modern history, to put wine in a can. Can you tell us a little bit about what led to that decision? And then as a follow-up, I was curious, do you recommend drinking Sofia in the can, or pouring it into a glass first?

FFC: Well, the story there is this, when Sofia was a little girl, like 7 or 8, she was living here on the estate. In fact, she was a very feisty little girl. At one time, I was in the middle of a bankruptcy, and the process servers would come on the property just to try to serve at the property, which they’re not allowed to do because it’s a big estate. They’re not allowed to trespass. And of course, when one would come, my wife and I would hide, but little Sofia would stand on the porch and say, “Stop, you have no right to be here.”

K: That’s awesome!

FFC: “Leave immediately!” She was quite a kid. And I used to tell her when she was 7 that when she was married, we were going to serve a wine that was going to be like Champagne — of course, we can’t make Champagne, but we used to enjoy a blanc de blancs wine in Paris. And so we made this sparkling blanc de blancs wine called Sofia. It was an innovation, I know now there’s a big trend of people towards Prosecco and stuff like that. But back then, no. So Sofia was the early incarnation of a domestic sparkling blanc de blancs. Not Champagne, not at that level, of course, but at that time in the clubs, the kids were starting to drink with a straw, little bottles of Pommery Pop. So we said, “Well, why don’t we make a small container of four for Sofia?” Sofia, herself, and her brother said, “Well, why don’t we put it in those long, tall, Japanese cans?” One of the beauties of my family is that whenever I went anywhere for work, if I was going to be gone for more than two weeks, I took the kids out of school and brought them with me. So as little kids, they got to live in Japan, they got to live in the Philippines, they got to hang out with movie crews. I thought their schooling was more important than the experiences they were having, and I put Sofia in a Chinese school. Their academic thing was a mess, but it was very stimulating, and they knew about Japan and stuff like that. Sofia said, “Call it a mini,” and we put this type of Champagne, not Champagne but blanc de blancs in these little minis and had a straw attached to it.

And the idea was it would be something for kids that were going to clubs. We were copying, remember the Pommery Pop?

A: I do, yeah.

FFC: So we put them in little cans. I wouldn’t drink it out of the straw. I like to drink wine out of a glass, and I like to drink everything out of a glass. I love beverages, and I love the enjoyment of drinking a beverage in a pretty glass, a nice glass — simple but pretty.

K: Speaking of pretty glasses and wine, that reminds me of Pinot Noir, because Pinot Noir smells so good in a nice glass. You have a new venture, and you’re in the Dundee Hills in Willamette. It’s where it all began, so you decided to start something there. That’s really exciting. Do you want to let us know about that?

FFC: I love the Willamette Pinot Noir, I’m an admirer, and I heard there was an opportunity to buy a property right next to the wonderful — and I hope I can pronounce it right — it’s the Domaine Drouhin.

K: Yes.

FFC: They’re the family who really started that style of Pinot Noir in a Burgundy fashion in that area. Then it was copied by a few other people. But it’s like Napa Valley, where all your neighbors make wonderful things. But I love the Domain Drouhin, and the wonderful French family. We were able to buy this property. I think forget what it was called now, but I wanted to give it — I’m very interested, I’m passionate about sciences and businesses, and I always loved this young nobleman de Broglie who won the Nobel Prize and was part of the group that were really essential in quantum physics — and the idea that he was a prince. Now you think of a prince as a guy who has a life and he’s got good clothes and girls like him ’cause he’s a prince? And yet here was one who was devoted to science and was passionate, and was a very shy prince. I wanted to honor him as I have honored the great scientist Archimedes, so I called it Domaine de Broglie and it’s in his honor. I also have certain connections. I took some of the props from the movie “Is Paris Burning?” that I put up there. And I made it with things that I’m passionate about, in this case science and quantum physics. It’s a beautiful place, and the wine is wonderful and fragrant. I’m very proud of the Domaine de Broglie, I really am.

K: Yeah, it looks really great. I love the sparkling wine and Pinot Gris, which is very exciting in Oregon. When I was looking at the website , I really can’t wait to taste the wines. Does your family still call you Science. Is that still your nickname?

FFC: No, Science was not said in a nice way. When the kids at Jamaica High School called me Science, they went “SCIENCE, SCIENCE.” It was an insult.

C: Oh my God, no! That’s awful. Jokes on them.

FFC: It was to put me down. And in New York Military Academy, I was very skinny in those days, they used to call me Ichabod.

K: Ichabod Science.

FFC: Those were different schools. I was always taken out of school or put in another school for reasons I don’t even understand. My father was always moving. I went to about 22 schools before college, so I had what I realized was a benefit. No school ever got a hold of me and brainwashed me because I was in and out of school. Once I went to three junior high schools in one year.

K: In one year!?

FFC: Yeah, I went to six high schools. I went to Jamaica High School, University High School, Bayside High School, Great Neck High School, and New York Military Academy.

C: You had a very well-rounded education growing up.

FFC: Well, there is a theory. There’s a great philosopher, educator — for those of you interested he’s named Ivan Illich — who came up with in the ’70s this idea that school was actually a danger to children because it tended to brainwash them into thinking that the kind of society we’re in where you get a better job and you make more money, and you get all the accreditation, and the grading, and the grades — was to brainwash good, obedient little cog in the wheel of our society, and that the best thing would be to abolish school and to institute learning in a totally different way. I’m reading this book and said, my God, I got away with de-schooling because they never had me for more than two months! A school in New York in those days, which was the early ’50s, a school in New York was totally different than a school in L.A. They were very different styles, and one of the most embarrassing moments of my life was when I came into a class late in L.A. and the teacher said, “You’re tardy.” And I said, “I’m not tardy, I’m Coppola!” Because  in New York, they never said you’re tardy, they said you’re late. I didn’t know what tardy meant. But the happy thing is, I really think that the fact that I had not gone through regular schooling was that I was, in the words of this philosopher, getting de-schooled, it probably was an advantage to me. And I know my children, Sophia and Roman, my eldest son Gio — they didn’t do well academically, but in life they learned all about a lot of things, about exotic countries and different kinds of people and movies. And they’ve all benefited in a funny way. I think putting your kid in a regimented school with kids of their age going for accreditation and their prescribed curriculum is ultimately damaging. I would recommend a different system of learning. I don’t even want to call it education. We have a secretary of education, and I wish, of course, in addition, that we had a secretary of youth, because education is just about ideology and budgets. It’s not about young people. But our young people are the most valuable people in our whole country, and we never listen to them, we never ask what their aspirations are. I would split the secretary of education, and a second one, the secretary of youth that really brings young people into having a say about the society that’s going to be theirs.

K: Yeah, life experience is everything.

J: This is Joanna, one last question for you: What is next, in terms of expansion. Are there more properties in Oregon or any other regions that you’re interested in?

FFC: Well, a region that I absolutely love and that I think has wonderful wines and is very affordable would be Argentina. Certain countries have a region which is considered the wine region, like Napa Valley. Argentina has a region in Mendoza, which people think is the wine region, but really, that’s just the region where a lot of people settle down. In fact, most of Argentina is a wonderful wine region and all along the mountains there, if you have water, Argentina is a natural vineyard — the whole country, practically. Argentina has made great wine, but they’re not as well known as Chilean wines, which, of course, is on the other side of the mountains. Because the Chileans are basically descended from Germans and they’re very good at business and selling and stuff whereas the Argentine people are more so descendants of the Italians, and so they make the wine, but they drink it. I know when I go to a wine list and I don’t want to go broke, I always look at the Argentine selection because, again, you get wonderful wines for very fair prices. I think the Chilean wine is OK. But to me, the great wine from south of the border is in Argentina. And if I were a younger man or if the opportunity fell on my lap, I would love to have a place there or maybe even with a hotel, a place you can go visit. Who’s the gentleman who has a beautiful place in northern Argentina, what’s his name? He also has a winery here.

K: Well, Tim McKirdy who is on right now, he is our staff writer, but he also was a chef in Argentina for a couple of years.

TM: Yeah, I was out in Buenos Aires for a while in San Telmo. I believe you may be familiar with the neighborhood.

FFC: I love San Telmo. So when you say horse, you say gabacho?

TM: I say gabacho. I like to think of Italians, speaking Spanish.

FFC: Well, that’s exactly what it is! On the list of the top hotels in Argentina, the first one. What’s that great big, beautiful hotel?

T: The Faena? I think it’s the Faena, maybe. I’m not sure.

FFC: Well that’s a more hip hotel. But there’s a classic hotel there that’s wonderful. But our hotel, which is called Jardin Escondido, is No. 5, and it only has about eight rooms. It’s really, really lovely.

K: That’s beautiful. Well, Francis, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us. This was an awesome conversation. It was so great, and I’m so glad we got everything to work. Thank you again!

FFC: It was my pleasure. One thing: You know, I’m 81 years old, about to be 82. But, you know, the truth of the matter is— it’s not just “I have a passion for film.” I have a passion for everything. I think a human being is a wonderful entity with kindness. We’re a much kinder and more friendly people than we think. It’s just that we’re all addicted to news now, which scours the world looking for something bad to say. All of you, I know, are younger than me, and I want you to have some of my enthusiasm for living, learning, friendship, and the future, because the future will be beautiful. We’ll share meals with our friends, with wine, and we’ll see beautiful works of art. And your children — it’s important to have that to look forward to. That’s my sincere belief, and of course, my hope, for a blessing for all of us.

C: That was beautiful.

ALL: Thank you so much.

FFC: Bye bye. Nice to meet you.

Thanks for listening to this week’s episode of “EOD Drinks.” If you’ve enjoyed this program, please leave us a rating or a review wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps other people discover the show. And tell your friends. We want as many people as possible listening to this amazing program.

And now for the credits. “End of Day Drinks” is recorded live in New York City at VinePair’s headquarters. And it is produced, edited, and engineered by VinePair tastings director, yes, he wears a lot of hats, Keith Beavers. I also want to give a special thanks to VinePair’s co-founder, Josh Malin, to the executive editor Joanna Sciarrino, to our senior editor, Cat Wolinski, senior staff writer Tim McKirdy, and our associate editor Katie Brown. And a special shout-out to Danielle Grinberg, VinePair’s art director who designed the sick logo for this program. The music for “End of Day Drinks” was produced, written, and recorded by Darby Cici. I’m VinePair co-founder Adam Teeter, and we’ll see you next week. Thanks a lot.

Ed. note: This episode has been edited for length and clarity.

The article EOD Drinks With Francis Ford Coppola appeared first on VinePair.

Via https://vinepair.com/articles/eod-drinks-francis-ford-coppola/

source https://vinology1.weebly.com/blog/eod-drinks-with-francis-ford-coppola

[texanredrose]

Served

Yang took a deep breath in and let it out slowly, trying to calm herself. The lunch rush brought with it a seemingly endless stream of customers and that proved true every single day she worked, yet today the demands of her job seemed to wear on her more than usual. Being a server at a high end restaurant in downtown Vale brought with it all sorts of upscale types, each with some sort of previous knowledge that either proved to be wrong entirely, greatly exaggerated, or simply misunderstood, yet she could only politely explain that so many times before it drove her over the deep end.

“Remember why you’re doing this. Rent is due in a week and you need the tip money,” she said to herself, reaching up to straight the long black tie she wore around her neck and adjusting the stifling collar of her crisp white shirt. As far as work uniformed went, it tended towards the plain side, with black slacks and matte shoes, but at least she’d gotten out of that dive bar on the south side of town. The pay here was better, even if the uniform kinda sucked, but the customers always seemed the same. Not as crude, not as dirty themselves, but really no better for it. “Just. Get through. This shift.”

“Psyching yourself up, Yang?” Emerald, one of the other servers, breezed past her on the way to the pick up station, a small smirk on her lips. “That table giving you problems, huh?”

“Bunch of yuppies who can’t tell a lager from a porter; if they weren’t so chatty, I’d be fine.” Rolling her eyes, the blonde followed her coworker to the station, grabbing one of the serving trays and loading it up with plates for another table. “I’ll be fine.”

“They’re really giving you problems over beer?” The other woman grabbed an appetizer but paused before taking it out. 

She shook her head. “Nah, they’re trying to ‘impress me’ with their ‘experienced taste’ because they’re a bunch of ‘beer connoisseurs’ apparently.”

“Okay, why does every group of twenty-somethings flirt with you?”  Her coworker chuckled, obviously taking a bit too much amusement from her misery. “They think just because you’re their age, they have a shot?”

“I’m willing to bet it’s because they have money and they think that’s impressive.” With a fully loaded tray, she set one edge on her shoulder and balanced it aloft while grabbing one of the fold out stands. “Whatever. Sometimes, it gets me a nice tip, so I’ll let ‘em have their fun.”

“So you’re not going to punch anyone today?”

“I make no promises,” she replied with a smirk before setting out, navigating her way through the dining area. Thankfully, the layout of the restaurant gave her more than enough room to maneuver between the tables, reaching a booth tucked away in her area and setting down the stand, putting the tray on top of it and handing out the plates with a smile. 

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the host bring over more customers to sit in the booth two down and mentally kicked herself; now she had a completely full section and those brats at the table were snapping their fingers for her again. She swore, if she ever met their mothers, she’d give ‘em a piece of her mind.

“Alright, everything look right?” She flashed a smile at the customers in the booth now positively salivating- in a very classy way, she admitted- over their food. “How about you cut into that steak for me, Sir, to make sure it’s right.”

The man did as requested, popping the little piece he’d cut off into his mouth before giving her a nod. “It’s perfect.”

“Great!” Yang tucked the tray under one arm and grabbed the stand with her other hand. “I’ll be back to check on you in a bit.” Moving off, the blonde took a mental break while keeping her smile in place as she moved to her new booth. At a glance, she could tell the table would only be a little hassle. Two women- one right around her age and the other a little older- wearing expensive looking clothing that matched, white being the predominant color accented by either blue or black. They both had pure white hair and blue eyes, barely visible as they scanned their menus, and Yang guessed they were probably related somehow- sisters or cousins, probably. “Good afternoon, Ladies. May I suggest a glass of wine this afternoon?”

The older of the two- wearing a suit with glossy black boots, a tight almost military looking bun, and with sharper features than the other woman- looked up, blue eyes flicking over the server’s form before meeting her gaze. “And what suggestion would that be, I wonder?”

“Well, if you’re asking my honest opinion...” She glanced at the two of them, going with her gut as she always did. According to her customers, she had something of a knack for picking out the particular drink for the occasion. That’s why she suggested wine instead of the specialty beer they’d just imported from Atlas- not just because they certainly seemed like they hailed from or at least had strong family ties to the country across the sea of Vale but because, as a restaurant that specialized in Atlesian dishes, it was pretty much part of their gimmick. They seemed like the wine sort, and particular in that regard as well. “A bottle of Domaine Weinbache to split.” She thought on it. “We have their Riesling, which would pair rather nicely with our grilled citrus shrimp or the red snapper, now that I think on it.”

“Let me guess: that’s the most expensive sort you sell here, isn’t it?” The younger woman- an offset pony tail, thigh high boots, and a skirt showing off only a sliver of well toned thighs- scoffed, rolling her eyes. Only then did Yang notice the faded scare bisecting the left one.

“Actually, the Chevalier Montrachet we have is our most expensive, but that’s more for a special occasion or celebration.” The blonde set the stand down, leaning against the booth, and pulled out her pen and tab. “You two ladies seem more interested in a nice, pleasant lunch on this fine Vale day, and the Domaine Weinbache is a nice balance between your exceptional taste and the casual nature of the meal.”

Again, the younger of the two seemed unimpressed. “Are you always so quick to pour flattery over others.”

Yang’s mask slipped a little, the first thing that came to mind slipping out of her mouth before she could stop it. “Gee, with all your whining, I feel like I should just bring out the cheese.”

While one looked at her with absolute shock, the other laughed, lifting a hand to cover her mouth. 

“Why you-”

“Weiss.” The older woman recovered, though she still had a smile on her lips. “That was a rather rude comment. She’s only doing her job and I asked for her suggestion.”

Another roll of the eyes. “I suppose you’re right.”

“Of course I am,” she replied, turning towards Yang. “We’ll take a bottle of the Domaine Weinbache, please. And an order of breadsticks to start.”

Yang jotted the order down. “Alright, I’ll be back with that in a sec.” She tucked her pad and pen away, picking up the stand. “My name’s Yang, by the way. If you need anything, please let me know!”

Turning away, she went to input the order and replace the tray and stand, fingers hovering on the button for the shrimp she’d suggested. While it would be one of their best dishes to pair with the wine, she also got the distinct impression that the older woman would go for something with a bit more substance- perhaps one of their steaks- while her sister seemed more inclined towards a salad or perhaps chicken.

Sending the order off, Yang went over to the bar, gathering up two wine glasses, the chilled bottle from an ice box under the bar, and a corkscrew. Someone else had already brought them glasses of water, so she could deliver the wine and give them a few minutes to look over the menu while she attended to her problem table. She could already tell they were going to make some sort of snide comment about the fact that she hadn’t stopped by their table in a whopping five minutes- one would think they’d be more concerned about eating but she’d been wrong before- and braced herself, setting down the wine glasses and uncorking the bottle in practiced, smooth motions. Flipping the corkscrew around, she offered the newly revealed cork towards the women. 

The younger one appeared surprised, brows raising as she tilted her head slightly, while the other just smiled, accepting the corkscrew and smelling the aroma wafting off the cork.

“Sweet, but not enough to make me crave dessert yet. A little fruity, but there’s a subtle bite to it.” She nodded. “I do believe you’re correct in saying it would pair well with citrus.”

“Thank you, Ma’am.” Yang set about pouring the glasses, ignoring the louder snaps attempting to get her attention, instead leaving the bottle in a holder on the table while taking the corkscrew. “May I give you a few moments to look over the menu?”

“That sounds splendid, thank you.” 

The women turned their attention to their wine as the blonde turned around and went to the table, just a few feet away, and praying her smile seemed at least somewhat sincere. “So, how are we doing? Anyone need a refill?”

“What I need is a halfway decent beer,” one of the boys said- they were probably around her age, so they weren’t children exactly, but they sure as hell acted like it- with a sneer curling his lips. “This almost tastes like piss water.”

“Sir, you requested a light blonde-”

“Well, then, bring me a dark beer,” he replied with a grimace. “Don’t you know anything about appealing to a refined taste?”

Most days, Yang could handle types like this. But today, she had a bit of a vengeful streak going, and no real reason not to continue it. “Well, Sir, we do have a Rauchbier from Atlas.” She’d noticed the glances every man at the table threw towards her newest customers and silently relished being able to reach people so effectively. “I will warn you, though, it’s very dark, but it’s-”

“We’ll take a round.”

“Sir-”

“Are you deaf as well as dumb?” He glowered at her. “I said we’ll take a round! Now, chop chop!”

Through a tight smile, she offered a terse. “Yes, Sir.”

Oh she would love serving up this order.

As she made the rounds in her section, she made a mental note of what drinks would need refills and who would probably be asking for their check soon. She stopped by the pick up station to grab the few appetizers that were ready and delivering them to the appropriate tables, including the breadsticks for the two women in the booth. After she’d finished, she went back to the bar and grabbed four pint glasses with the brewery’s logo on the sides. The bartender, a monkey Faunus she considered a good friend, raised a brow as he saw what she was reaching for, a short chuckle leaving his lips.

“Uh... do they know what they ordered?” His bow tie sat around his neck, the top two buttons on his white shirt popped open and, while he was hands down one of the best bartenders she’d ever seen, he was eventually going to get written up and perhaps even fired for continuously disregarding the dress code. He even had the sleeves rolled up to his elbows.

Usually, filling the alcoholic orders would be his domain, but she wanted to do this one herself. “Nope.”

“Did you try warning them?”

“Yep.” She popped the ‘p’ and threw him a grin. “They’re super convinced they know more about beer than I do.”

Sun shook his head, his tail flicking behind him. “Alright. I’ll let Glynda know.”

“Good idea. These guys are going to cause a scene when they choke on this stuff.” Yang set the four beers on a serving tray and set out to deliver them to the table. As she walked, she passed Emerald, who did a double take at what she carried. Red eyes went wide but the other server started to smile even wider as she noted which table she was taking them to, doing her best to hide her amusement behind the customer service mask they all wore. When she arrived at the table, she passed out the beers. “Four Rauchbeir.”

The moment she’d handed the drinks out, the guy who’d spoken up before waved a dismissive hand her way. “That’ll be all for now.”

Digging deep into her reserves of patience for the moment, Yang nodded and went around to her other tables, correctly predicting that the one booth in the corner wanted their check and producing it from the apron tied around her waist. By the time she got back to the booth with the two women, both of them seemed to be eagerly awaiting something- and her arrival didn’t seem to be it.

“Tell me, did they order the Rauchbeir? Or was that your suggestion?” The older woman had more than a little amusement tugging at the corners of her lips.

“I suggested a porter, but they insisted they wanted the ‘darker taste’ of a lager.” The looks she received proved the women were miles ahead in their understanding of beers than anyone occupying the table. “They weren’t satisfied with it and asked for something that would appeal to a ‘refined taste’, so I brought up the Rauchbeir.”

The women immediately started laughing, hiding their mirth behind their hands and throwing glances towards the table.

“We grew up near the Schlenkerla; we know exactly what’s coming,” the younger said, obviously reveling in the impending reaction. “You’re certainly not wrong- Rauchbeir appeals to ‘refined’ tastes.”

“Speaking of refined tastes- this time, without the sarcasm- what can I get you lovely ladies to eat?” Yang flashed a bright smile just as she heard the first choked gag off to her side, coming from the table.

The older one hummed, then waved a hand at the menu. An eight ounce sirloin, medium rare, with a side of the citrus grilled shrimp, a baked potato, and... hmmm, sauerkraut in a bowl. However you need to ring that up.”

“And I’ll take a grilled chicken salad, hold the egg.” The younger one paused, then continued. “And a tomato soup, now that I think on it.”

The blonde lightly bit her lip as she scratched out the orders on her pad. Okay, she could generally read people pretty well, but she didn’t expect either of them to have appetites like that. To be honest... she kinda liked that.

Then she remembered she was at work with a very problematic table and now was no time to get distracted. “Did you want any onions or mushrooms on your steak?”

“No, thank you.”

A choke, a cough, and a muttered obscenity.

“And what kind of dressing on your salad?”

“Balsamic vinaigrette, thank you.”

Someone sounding genuinely perplexed- of the four, one of them looked like the sort to actually enjoy that sort of beer, so she bet it was him looking at the others like they were overreacting.

“Excellent! I’ll go put those in right now.” Yang turned, heading to input the order, but found herself stopped by a hand grabbing her arm, and it took everything in her not to break it then and there. She only refrained by the barest margins.

“What the hell is this stuff?” He shoved the beer towards her, a little bit sloshing out and forcing the woman to quickly shuffle to the side to avoid the dark liquid staining her shirt.

“It’s Rauchbeir,” she said, her tone level, which was just about the best she could hope for all things considered. “You know, smoked beer?”

“S- smoked beer?” The brat’s expression screwed up. “How was I supposed to know that?”

“Because it’s a literal translation,” the younger woman from the booth said, her brows drawn together and a frown on her lips. “Rauchbeir means ‘smokedbeer’ and it’s brewed in the Schlenkerla Smokemalt. It’s an Atlesian legend and one of the best of its kind.”

“The thick, smoked ham taste is certainly a unique flavor, almost like thick cut bacon sprinkled with brown sugar, and it’s renowned the world over for its distinctive taste.” The older woman swirled her wine a moment before setting the glass down. “Just seeing it again has made me a little homesick, to be frank. It’s a very nice way to start a morning, or even an afternoon.”

“Indeed. Perhaps a pint a piece?”

“An excellent suggestion, Sister.” Blue eyes sought hers out, no request voiced but understood all the same.

“Of course, Ladies. I’ll be back with those in a moment,” Yang said, her gaze sliding from what was quickly becoming her favorite table to the man still holding her arm. “If you’ll excuse me, Sir.”

For a moment, it looked like he was about to give her a bit more of his mind, but the subtle flexing of her arm discouraged him. He was built himself- a few inches taller with broad shoulders and a moderate amount of muscle mass, but the blonde’s uniform concealed her own figure pretty well. A lot of people saw her chest and assumed that’s where the majority of her bulk came from, but now that he took the time to look, it occurred to the customer that his grip didn’t completely encompass her bicep, fingers and thumb nowhere near touching despite the large size of his hand.

He let her go with notable reluctance and she quickly left the dining area, ducking back into the kitchens to silently scream, glaring at the tile wall fiercely while reciting every reason she had for not marching out there and decking that dude in the face.

“Rent is due next week and Ruby has that job interview on Thursday. She lands that gig, we’re good. Just... just gotta get through this.”

“Yang.” Trying not to sigh in defeat, the blonde turned to see the manager standing behind her, a sharp gaze made all the more pointed by the glasses sitting low on her nose. “Do I need to take over that table?”

“No, Ma’am.” Forcing a smile, she spread her hands. “I’m fine. I can handle them.”

Glynda narrowed her gaze. “I’m going to stop by and speak with them regardless. I trust you, Yang, but I’m not about to have you start a fight in the dining room again; we’ve already been lenient in that regard.”

She wanted to snap out that decking someone for grabbing her ass as she walked by shouldn’t be held against her but even she could admit chucking the guy through a window after the initial punch pushed her reaction from ‘understandable’ to ‘over the line’. “I’m sure, Ma’am.”

“Alright.” She nodded, then looked around. “After that table leaves, take your break and calm down. They’ve already ordered their food, right?”

“No.” She crossed her arms over her chest and groaned. “They haven’t even picked up the menus. I think they’re just day drinking.”

With a long suffering sigh, the manager nodded. “Make sure you’re ringing up their beers. If they manage to finish one, I’ll cut them off after the second.”

Nodding, Yang took another minute to compose herself and then returned to work, inputting the sisters’ orders, grabbing her other tables’ food, and returning to the dining area to pass them out with a forced smile. She got a few comments, low muttered reprimands that a customer would make a scene with such a nice server, but she couldn’t be quite honest with her appreciation for their support. Still, she managed to return to the pickup station with an empty tray and swing by the bar to grab two more Rauchbeirs without incident. When she dropped them off with the Atlesian sisters, who set about taking a deep pull each without so much as a wince.

Once again, the server found herself impressed. She herself preferred lagers and ales- blondes, usually, with crisp and refreshing tastes, though she’d been known to enjoy a wheat beer on occasion. The thick, almost cloying taste of liquid bacon sliding down her throat certainly qualified as a ‘special occasion’ sort of thing, and it wasn’t bad but she definitely wouldn’t be able to take the deep pulls the sisters did. Obviously, though, the younger sister didn’t care for the beer as much, a flash of something appearing in her expression as she set the mug down.

“Ah, right. That is why I don’t drink this.”

“It’s not that bad.” Her elder chuckled, taking another long pull. “And all the sweeter for the occasion.”

Blue eyes darted towards the table and while the blonde couldn’t look without drawing attention, she suspected the boys were glowering at how easily the two women were enjoying the beer while they had only managed a few sips since ordering it.

“You do have a point.”

With a soft laugh, Yang shook her head. “I’ll be back with your orders shortly.”

She settled a few checks, brought back change, did another round of refills and appetizers, and then the women’s orders were ready. Loading them up, hardly minding the hot temperatures on the bowl of tomato soup and consciously ignoring the slight rumble in her stomach as her own hunger started to grow. Maybe taking a break after the problem children left would be a good idea.

Grabbing a stand and heading out, Yang carefully maneuvered her way through the dining area, leading with the stand as she approached the booth. However, a few steps from her destination, she felt the whoosh behind her a moment before the tray left her hand, the outside edge hit with enough force to sent the whole thing toppling towards her. For that most part, it just startled her, but the moment the tomato soup spilled from its bowl and hit her bare skin, she let out a pained cry, hand flying up to try and remove the hot liquid and sooth the injury as best she could. Thankfully, the high collar prevented it from hitting mostly flesh, but it seeped through her shirt easily, and the general chaos caused by plates, the tray, and the stand hitting the ground brought all eyes to her as she rounded on whoever caused the tray to fall. Unsurprisingly, she came face-to-face with the same man who’d grabbed her, a sick smile playing on his lips.

“You son of a-”

“Watch your tongue,” he said, the smugness in his tone enough to choke a bear. “Do you have any idea who you’re talking to?”

Logic and responsibility flew from her mind then, fury rising up in her and pulling her right fist back. In the next second, she would’ve knocked that holier-than-thou mentality clear from his head, along with a few other things, but someone grabbed her wrist and stopped her. A sharp rebuke lay on her tongue but it never left, someone else beating her to it.

“The better question, Mr. Winchester, is do you have any idea whose food you just ruined?”

Yang wasn’t surprised when she looked behind her and saw the older woman standing there, sharp features brought into even more definition thanks to the severe frown and furrow to her brows.

The Winchester guy scoffed, crossing his arms over his chest. “Please. Do you think you can intimidate me?”

“I’ll take that as a ‘no’ then.” Reaching into the best pocket of her suit, the woman produced a business card, offering it to the man while shifting her grip to the server’s bicep and gently pulling her back, out of punching distance. “Perhaps this will enlighten you.”

He snatched the card from her and glanced at it, then looked at it much harder, blinking several times. Then, he went pale. “Winter Schnee...”

Yang cringed. Sure, as a high end restaurant, they got their share of celebrities or those near enough the status, and anyone connected to the Schnee name automatically qualified as the former. They had some sort of genius relative in almost every field that existed and the family brand- the Schnee Development Company- made them easily known to just about every person in Remnant. Of course, she probably should’ve recognized the woman herself and her sister, considering Ruby was studying the corporation in preparation for that interview she had coming up, but she hadn’t exactly provided her older sister with any headshots of the current line of Schnees.

“Judging by your reaction, I’ll assume I’m known to you.” Winter scanned the three other men- all cowering in their seats- before focusing on the instigator. “Allow me to outline this in a very simple manner. You will pay off both of our tabs in full plus a fifty percent gratuity in cash and apologize to this young woman. Then you, and all your cronies, will leave this establishment quietly and not return until you’ve learned basic etiquette and, if you’re lucky, nothing more will come of this incident.” She paused. “And add twenty dollars to that amount; my sister and I were considering dessert. Is that amenable? Or would you prefer we handle this in court?”

“B-b-but I didn’t-”

“Oh, I’m aware you didn’t do anything to me, specifically, except delay the meal for my sister and I.” Her voice turned a bit harsher. “However, I will personally pay for her lawyers when she sues you for personal injury and loss of pay while she recovers. Which, you’ll probably not be able to defend yourself adequately after I call your father and personally inform him of the situation, and that recent liquidation of your trust fund might come in handy to cover you to some extent, but if Daddy Dearest tells your retained law firm to not handle the case as I have them represent her... things might truly not work out very well for you. Have I made myself clear?”

“Yes, Miss Schnee,” he replied, shoulders hunched as he ducked his head and looked away. “I’ll settle up the tabs now.”

“Good. I’m sure the manager will see to it that the amounts are accurate.” Winter made a motion with her unoccupied hand. “Now, shoo.”

As the man and his cohorts vacated the area at a quick walk bordering on a run, their metaphorical tails tucked between their legs, Yang took a deep breath and released it slowly. On the upside, she probably still had her job... but she really wished she could’ve punched him at least once. Still, she was grateful for the woman’s intervention and tried turning towards her.

Except, the hand on her bicep actually had a pretty good hold, the other woman looking at her in mild curiosity. Yang raised a brow, unsure what had brought the woman to a standstill but took a guess and flexed her bicep, unsurprised when the woman automatically squeezed and felt the firmness of her arm muscles.

Winter seemed to realize what she’d done the same moment the server smirked, releasing her and clearing her throat while producing a napkin. “My apologies for stepping in as I did but I truly detest when people are rude to their wait staff.”

“Hey, you probably just saved my job, so no worries, Miss Schnee,” she said, holding her hands up to try and ward off the woman’s attempt to clean her up. Honestly, the shirt was a loss at this point and she probably didn’t get burned by the soup, just suitably startled by the hot liquid. Plus, there were more than enough napkins in the back for her to clean the food off herself.

“Please, call me Winter.” The woman offered with a smile. “’Miss Schnee’ is only for those who need to beg my mercy.”

A flirtatious line popped into her head but, somehow, she managed to keep it there for once, instead laughing to cover the slight blush that was creeping into her cheeks. “Well, thanks, Winter. I guess I should’ve expected him to pull something like that, and I’ll get on restarting your order.”

“I’m sure someone else can do that-”

“I will see to it personally,” Glynda said, stepping in and putting a hand on Yang’s shoulder. “Go take a break, clean yourself up, and change your shirt. You’ve earned it, Yang.”

“Alright, boss.” She smiled and started towards the back, reaching up to slip out the knot out of her tie. She did have a spare shirt in the back, in a little break area. Along the way, she got sympathetic pats from Emerald and a few of the cooks, as well as a wide eyed look of fear from their newest server.

By the time she’d reached the break area, she’d already popped open the first two buttons and felt more than a little relieved she wore an undershirt today- nothing more than a thin tank top, but decent enough to get to the bathroom and tuck her shirt in properly- stripping off the ruined one and balling it up. The blonde truly doubted it could be saved, but she’d at least try, grimacing at the sticky combination of balsamic vinaigrette and tomato soup now soaked into the material. She quickly ducked over to wash her hands off before grabbing the clean shirt and heading towards the bathroom by the host stand.

She shouldered the door open and stopped short, surprised to find Winter washing her hands. It took a moment before she realized she was being a little silly- like, why was she surprised? Maybe nervous was the better word, since she was standing there in a tank top, but whatever- and Yang shook her head, stepping up to see herself in the mirror. The other woman turned and moved over slightly, to be courteous, but did a double take upon noticing who had just stepped up beside her.

For a moment, Yang fussed with her hair, setting the fresh shirt on the counter, but she was watching Winter’s reaction in the mirror. She seemed to be... staring. Maybe that was wishful thinking? After all, she’s just a server at a restaurant and Winter was... well, somehow connected to a business that probably spent her life earnings in a day on toilet paper.

But... it really looked like the woman was checking her out, or perhaps just very transfixed by the definition in her arms.

“I’m sorry that guy ruined your lunch,” she said, grabbing her shirt and beginning to pull it on.

“I’m not,” Winter replied, her voice calm and even, though a peek proved that she suspected her attention hadn’t gone unnoticed. “Weiss and I have been meaning to spend more time together. The extra time to bond is appreciated.”

With a chuckle, Yang started buttoning the shirt. “Well, if you ever come here again, you can ask for me to be your server. I’ll be sure to take my time.”

“I suspect you would.” She almost shivered at the way the woman’s voice sounded slightly deeper when she said that, biting her lip slightly. “I may take you up on that. Lunch here every Tuesday and Thursday would be a nice step in the right direction.”

“I look forward to seeing you here, Winter.” She tucked the shirt into her pants while the other woman dried her hands, just getting her buckle set before Winter turned. Yang quickly reached out and grabbed the door, opening it with a wide smile. “For you, M’lady.”

“You’re quite fortunate I find such cheekiness endearing.” The woman brushed past her, throwing a little smirk down at her. “Do enjoy the rest of your break, Yang. I was being serious about ordering dessert.”

After she’d walked away, the server allowed the door to close and passed a hand over her face, highly aware of the blush beginning to burn in her cheeks. Maybe it was just some friendly, amusing, flirty banter...

... or maybe it was entirely serious. 

Either way, she had to go out there and take the woman’s ‘dessert’ order with a straight face.

“Heh, yeah, straight.” She rolled her eyes, throwing her tie around her neck and tying the knot. “That is a good one. Gotta use it some time.”

Somewhere in the back of her mind, though, she started playing through a few different approaches to asking the woman out. Just to pass the time.

It’s not like anything would come of it, anyway.

Weiss watched as her sister returned to the table, raising a brow and remaining silent. She knew the woman rather well and asking would just make her defensive, while remaining silent and curious would eventually lead to-

“It probably should’ve occurred to me that she’d go to the bathroom to change her shirt.” Winter sighed, putting her elbows on the table for a moment and putting her face in her hands. “Did you know that she has the physique of a weight lifter? I’m quite certain she could bench press me over her head with little to no issue. It suddenly occurs to me that I’d rather like to know the answer to that.”

“Sister, I do truly love to put it this way.” She leaned forward, offering a soft smile to her elder sibling. “It’s quite obvious I got the useless lesbian gene from you.”

Blue eyes peeked out at her, an ineffectual glare leveled her way. “That’s not how genetics work.”

“Am I wrong?”

The silence she received functioned as all the confirmation she needed.

[naturecoaster]

The Insider's Guide to 2020 Kumquat Festival

Kumquats are fun to eat, and the word kumquat is fun to say, so it stands to reason that the Kumquat Festival January 25 in Dade City is going to be a fantastically fun event for all! Promoted as a family-friendly alternative to Tampa’s Gasparilla, the Annual Kumquat Festival has been a staple on the last Saturday of January in historic downtown Dade City for over 20 years. Today, NatureCoaster provides a behind the scenes guide to all things kumquat to help prepare you for the 23rd Annual Kumquat Festival.

What is a Kumquat?

First, one must know what a kumquat is. Kumquats are a small round or oblong-shaped citrus fruit that is sweet on the inside and has a tart skin. Kumquats are supposed to be eaten whole, so one might consider them the original SweetTart®.

Roger Swain, television horticulturist, explains kumquats at the 2016 Kumquat Grower's Open House. Image by Richard Riley. Kumquats are native to China and were given as a traditional gift on New Year’s Day. The name translates to “golden coins,” and the kumquat represents prosperity, according to information from TV horticulturist Roger Swain.

Why a Kumquat Festival?

More than twenty years ago, the Greater Dade City Chamber of Commerce began holding a festival to celebrate the golden kumquat and all it has contributed to the area. Today, this wholesome, fun, and delicious event features over 400 vendors and 30 sponsors coming together throughout the streets of an historic, charming Southern town to celebrate the little fruit that is both sweet and sour.

The Kumquat Growers are located in the Wells Fargo parking lot on Meridian. Image courtesy of Kumquat Growers. “Once again, Dade City and Eastern Pasco County are preparing to welcome thousands of residents and visitors to our area.  It is our pleasure to produce this quality event, and we invite everyone to enjoy the Festival and come back and visit us again,” says John Moors, Executive Director of the Greater Dade City Chamber of Commerce.

Music is held on the 1909 Classical Revival style historic courthouse steps throughout the day, where visitors are encouraged to stop and refresh themselves.

What Happens at the Kumquat Festival?

There is some amazing shopping, eating, drinking, fun activities and community spirit that envelope visitors to the Annual Kumquat Festival. With over 400 vendors situated in beautiful downtown Dade City, no-one gets bored. Music is held on the 1909 Classical Revival style historic courthouse steps throughout the day, where visitors are encouraged to stop and refresh themselves.  Local entertainment folk dancers, cloggers, local church choirs, and wholesome local acts.

Kumquat pie is so good. Creamy, slightly sweet citrus and a tart kickoff on a delectable graham cracker crust and worth a trip to the Annual Kumquat Festival for an indulgence. Image courtesy of the Greater Dade City Chamber of Commerce. The vendor choices are off the charts! There are arts and crafts, fine art, farmers market, food and beverages, and sponsor booths. Because the weather is usually beautiful and sunny, it is a good idea to rest periodically. When you get a little tired, take a few minutes to enjoy a snack and find a place to rest. Chairs can be found at the Historic Courthouse for those who want to take a break while enjoying some live local entertainment. Several picnic tables can be found at various locations. Pace yourself, take a few minutes to relax, and don’t forget to stay hydrated. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GoLr7BieIKQ Information booths are located at the intersection of 7th Street & Meridian Avenue and 3rd Street & Meridian Avenue. They can also be found on our Live Event Map at www.KumquatFestival.org, along with food and restroom locations. Here is where you can purchase your Official T-Shirt, Hat or Visor, or ask questions. 

Kumquat Festival Car Show

Pops 54 by Mike Groseclose at the Kumquat Festival Car Show a few years back. This year's Kumquat Festival Car Show is hosted by the Tampa Bay Classic Chevy Club, drawing great vehicles from around Florida and the southeast U.S. The Annual Kumquat Festival Car Show is hosted by the Tampa Bay Classic Chevy Club this year and features an amazing variety of classic cars and trucks in the large parking lot of the downtown Judicial Courthouse. Trophies, dash plaques and a well-organized show attracts some of the nicest vehicles to be seen in the Southeast U.S. Show runs from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Sponsors Make the Kumquat Festival Happen

The Annual Kumquat Festival is sponsored by many large, medium, and small organizations in the Dade City area. Sponsors often have large vendor spaces and offer freebies and information to Annual Kumquat Festival guests. Advent Health Dade City is the headlining sponsor for 2020, joining Florida’s Sports Coast, VisitFlorida, and dozens of business and government partners who come together to make the day memorable.  

Stop in one of the Friendly Local Shops and Restaurants

Local storefronts are decorated for the festival in kumquat themes and it can be nice to duck into a shop or restaurant and rest during the festivities. The Brass Tap, at the corner of 7th Street and Pasco Avenue offers Kumquat beer for the connoisseur.

If you get lucky, you might find Fairy Cake when you visit Lunch on Limoges in Dade City. Image courtesy of Robin Draper. Dade City is a great town to visit any day and the unique shops and restaurants that make up this vibrant downtown are another great way to spend part of your day. Antiques, toys, books, jewelry, quilting, and pet supplies are some of the types of shops you will find. Restaurants vary from an authentic tea house to sandwich shops, coffee shops, Mexican, Italian, craft beer and fine dining. Although Dade City is a pet-friendly city, please allow your pets to stay at home during the festival.

Hundreds of Vendors provide Unique & Kumquat Items

Kumquat beer and wine are available through local shops, restaurants, and a retailer or two. Image courtesy of Tampa Bay Brewing and Kumquat Growers. Unique arts and crafts are fun to discover in many of the vendor booths lining the streets of this quaint city in eastern Pasco County. Many of these artisans return year after year to sell their wares. Delicious kumquat foods, as well as many ethnic offerings are available to festivalgoers. There is a myriad of opportunities to sample the tasty little fruit, whether it be as marmalade, cookies, salsa, ice cream, refrigerator pie, or a sip of kumquat beer.

There is a kids zone for playing and more at the Annual Kumquat Festival. Image courtesy of Pixabay.

Kumquat Kids Corral and Health Fair Onsite

A Kumquat Kids Corral offers families the opportunity to let off some steam with bounce houses, pony rides, games, face painting, rock climbing wall, a euro-bungee and more. The health fair gives visitors a chance to talk with providers and glean valuable information.

This family-friendly festival celebrates wonderful creations from the delicious kumquat citrus fruit. The whole town gets involved. Image by Gary Hatrick

Make it an Overnight Visit: Kumquat Growers Open House

The 2020 Kumquat Growers Open House will be held at the Kumquat Growers packing house in St. Joseph from 10:00 AM to 3:00 PM on the Thursday and Friday before the Annual Kumquat Festival (Jan. 23 and 24). Here you can immerse yourself in the agricultural side of kumquats. Learn about the origin and history of kumquats in the Dade City area during the 15-minute talks held several times each day. You will also learn about the different types of kumquats and how they are used.

Come a day or two before the Annual Kumquat Festival and enjoy learning about kumquats at the Kumquat Growers Open House. Image courtesy of Kumquat Growers. There are tours of the Kumquat Growers packing house where we learn how kumquats are picked, processed, packaged and shipped, and a visit to the Kumquat Gift Shop where you will find a little bit of “all things kumquat.” Lunch and live music, along with some historic demonstrations are provided. Half hour tram tours allow visitors to see an actual kumquat grove. This tour explains the planting, maintenance, and care of kumquat trees for commercial production.

Places to Stay

Travelers Rest Resort offers nice accommodations close to Dade Citys Annual Kumquat Festival. Image courtesy of Pixabay. There is a nice Hampton Inn just south of downtown Dade City, and several hotels in Wesley Chapel along the I-75 and SR 56-SR54 corridor. Camping and RV hookups can be had at the Travelers Rest Resort.

Free Admission and Shuttle Service

Bring your family to the Annual Kumquat Festival on January 25, 2020, and have a blast discovering Dade City's most renown event. Image courtesy of Pixabay. Free admission, family fun and free shuttle service from parking areas. Satellite parking lots are at the Pasco County Fairgrounds, 36733 State Road 53, Dade City, and along U.S. 301 across from Jarrett Ford. The Kumquat Festival has become an important part of Florida’s Nature Coast, and the 23rd Annual Kumquat Festival January 25 in downtown Dade City promises to be one not to miss.

Where Did the Kumquat Festival Come From?

Frank Gude, president of Kumquat Growers. Image courtesy of Robin Draper. Nearly 100 years ago, Casper Joseph “J. C.” Nathe came to what is now known as St. Joseph, and worked several jobs to make ends meet, including at a nursery near Jessamine owned by J. W. Ellsworth. There, he became acquainted with the kumquat, an ornamental plant that was given to wish prosperity to the recipient. Nathe planted an acre of kumquat trees in 1912, as well as 50 acres of citrus, and bananas, avocados, guavas, pineapples, and vegetables to feed his family and trade for other goods and services.

Kumquat Preserves, a real treat, homemade by Robin Draper. Image courtesy of Robin Draper. The Nathe family used the fruit for preserves and they became popular among area residents. Orders started coming in, so they began growing more kumquats. In less than 15 years, Florida Grower magazine crowned J.C. Nathe “the world’s kumquat king.” Several local St. Joseph families began converting their acreage to the profitable little sweet and sour fruit. From the 1930s to 1962, when a bad freeze destroyed the fruit on most of the trees, the number of kumquats grown in this rural area of eastern Pasco County grew and grew. Kumquat Growers, Inc. was started in 1971 by owners/growers Charles Barthle, Frank Gude, Joseph and Paul Neuhofer and Fred Heidgerken. The descendants of the original St. Joseph families have been growing, packing and selling kumquats for close to 100 years. For more information about the 23rd Annual Kumquat Festival, click here. Read the full article

[healthnotion]

Can Special Glasses Improve the Whiskey Drinking Experience?

Drinking whiskey from a glass tumbler — perhaps while sitting in a leather chair, reading a leather-bound book — has been a classic male pastime for hundreds of years.

In the modern age, companies have introduced what they claim are advancements in this age-old activity: glasses that supposedly enhance the drinking experience.

As a semi-regular whiskey drinker, these innovations in glassware have intrigued me. I wondered if they would noticeably change the flavor/experience, not only for a whiskey connoisseur, but for a more Average Joe drinker like myself. Sure, I can differentiate between high end and low end whiskies, but I’m never going to analyze flavor profiles or drop huge coin on a bottle. My usual commentary is more along the lines of “Oh man, that’s smooth and tasty” rather than “I detect faint notes of persimmon at the start and a real punch of toasted American oak in the finish.” Would a special glass make a real difference for a guy who can enjoy even the cheaper brands?

To find out, I tested 4 specialty whiskey glasses against my own classic rocks glass. Below I break them down. Did any of them really work? Could I notice a difference in flavor? Was all that “engineering” worth the associated price tag for the average guy? And ultimately, what ended up being my favorite drinking vessel?   

Aged & Ore Duo Glass

All photos of glasses are taken with 2oz of whiskey contained within.

Cost: $48 for a pair (includes ice ball molds)

Features & Verdict:

Double-walled insulation. Claims to keep your drink cool “for literally hours on end.” That’s fine, and appreciated, but why on earth do I need my drink to stay cool for that long? My own dram will be gone long before this feature takes effect!

Integrated measuring lines. This was a unique feature that I didn’t see on any other tested vessel. There are eight indented lines in the glass which each represent 1 oz of liquid. Indeed handy, but really only if you’re drinking your whiskey neat. If you prefer ice, the lines don’t do much good, since you aren’t going to pour the drink and then add ice.

Bell shape. The claim is that it’s designed for “better aromatics and ethanol aeration.” It’s supposed to make your drink taste smoother, but I didn’t notice any difference when compared to a normal glass. That bell shape does perfectly hold an ice ball, which they provide molds for when you buy this set. Kinda neat I guess, but doesn’t have much real benefit.

With ice.

Made with lightweight borosilicate glass. I did some homework here, and that borosilicate is indeed a nice feature. It’s just a special type of glass that’s “thermal shock resistant.” In layman’s terms: it won’t crack/break with extreme temperature changes. It’s the type of glass that nice restaurants and laboratories use. What I don’t like is the “lightweight” part. Feels like a feather when you’re holding it. Anecdotally, most whiskey drinkers I know much prefer a hefty glass. Something you can actually feel in your hand. With this one, I felt like I’d just drop it because I forgot it was there.

Overall: The measuring lines are nice, and it certainly looks unique, but there’s no noticeable difference in flavor and it’s too lightweight for folks who like some heft in their vessel.

Norlan Whiskey Glass

Cost: $48 for a pair

Features/Verdict:

Double-walled insulation. See my notes above about the Aged & Ore glass.

Indentations for better aeration. There are a few wave-like indentations at the bottom of the glass that are supposed to improve aeration and therefore reduce the ethanol burn that comes with drinking whiskey. I perhaps noticed a small difference when comparing to a normal glass, but not as much as with the NEAT glass (see below).

Made with lightweight borosilicate glass. See my notes above about the Aged & Ore glass.

Concave outer rim. With the double wall, the lip of the glass ends up sort of thick. It can make for drinking that’s a little less than optimal. The Norlan combats that by curving the lip out just a little bit so that it better conforms to your mouth as you drink. It’s somewhat noticeable, but honestly doesn’t make that much of a difference.

Overall: This is very similar to the Aged & Ore glass, and is even the exact same price. This glass doesn’t have the measurement markings, but it does have the aerating indents. I basically had the same feelings about this glass as the other one. It looks unique, but there’s not much difference in actual flavor, and it’s still a bit lightweight for my preferences.

The NEAT Whiskey Glass

Cost: $25 for a pair

Features/Verdict:

Especially unique shape. This is the primary selling point of this glass. The extra wide bottom, the tapered middle, and the extra wide mouth are supposedly highly engineered based on the science of how alcohol vapors hit the nose. 

Wine and beer glasses are almost always tapered toward the top, to better concentrate the aromas, which add a lot to the taste and overall enjoyment of those drinks. With distilled beverages though, those aromas can get too strong, to the point where you’re only getting the potent alcohol vapors rather than the scent of the whiskey itself. This is less of an issue with high-quality whiskies, as they’re purer products.

NEAT claims to give the drinker the best of both worlds, in that its wide bottom provides better aeration and concentrates aromas in the center, while the wide mouth — very unusual in tasting glasses — diffuses the harsh alcohol vapors that you often get when smelling (“nosing”) your whiskey. That combination of aeration and diffusion does actually work to create a smoother drinking experience. Huzzah! I was actually pretty surprised that there was a noticeable difference between the same whiskey served in this glass versus the standard rocks glass that I usually prefer.

This shape, however, was also somewhat of a detractor for me. Imagine serving a couple ounces of whiskey to your friends with this glass; it just comes off a bit douchey doesn’t it? Or if you’re by yourself on a weekend evening and taking in a nice big biography, is this the glass you’re going to reach for? (I tried it, and it felt weird.) Unless you’re having a tasting party or something, I can’t imagine these coming out much.

Comparatively thin glass. This is a feature that adds to the visual aspects of assessing a whiskey. With a double-walled glass or a heavy, thick-walled crystal, the view is muddled, so you can’t get a good look at the beverage’s true color and clarity. These visual features aren’t necessarily important for casual drinkers, but they are indeed nice for amateur connoisseurs who enjoy getting a clean look at what they’re drinking. On the flip side, this does make it lightweight, which as I’ve mentioned, I don’t particularly enjoy.

Overall: The NEAT indeed stands up to its claims, which is nice, and at a price point that’s half of what a couple of these other sets are. However, the fancy shape combined with its lightweight feel make for a glass that I just don’t realistically see using all that much unless I have a very nice whiskey that I want to drink neat. The NEAT also has a low capacity of just 2-3 oz; it’s truly only designed to drink whiskey sans ice, and I for one almost always prefer ice — even with nice whiskies. 

Glencairn Whiskey Glass

Cost: $17 for a pair

Features/Verdict:

This glass deserves some backstory, since it’s probably the most well-known on this list. First introduced in 2001, it’s been the standard go-to for whiskey tasting for the last couple decades. Designed in Scotland, it’s modeled after the tasting glasses that Scotch labs across the region use. The reason this particular glass became semi-famous in the whiskey world is that it was the first to be endorsed by the Scotch Whisky Association and is now in use all over the world.

On to the features:

Semi-wide bowl. The rounded, semi-wide bowl is designed for better aeration, which is supposed to make it smoother on the taste buds. I didn’t notice a difference, though.  

Comparatively thin glass. See note above on the NEAT.

Narrow, tapered mouth. As mentioned above, the problem of getting an excess dose of harsh alcohol vapors is minimized when you’re drinking a premium whiskey; you want to get a nice nose-full when you’re drinking the good stuff. It’s with that fact in mind (if you’re going to be using this glass, you’re probably going to be using it for nice whiskey) that the Glencairn glass tapers to a more narrow mouth, to really maximize the nosing experience. However, the small mouth of this glass concentrates the fumes a little too much, in my opinion. And it also makes for sort of awkward drinking; you have to almost pucker your lips to take any sips.

Overall: I have about the same feelings towards the Glencairn as the NEAT, except this one didn’t even enhance the flavor at all. It’s small, too lightweight, and honestly just feels kind of dainty. And I’m not alone in my poor opinion of the famed glass.

Classic, Hefty “Rocks” Glass

Cost: Varies, but nice sets can be had for $8-$10 per glass (I have no particular brand in mind here, though Waterford makes high-quality affordable sets)

Features/Verdict:

Even after all the testing I did, my favorite glass to use remains a heavy glass with a thick bottom, nice thick walls, and a wide mouth. The ones I use don’t have any special features in particular other than their heft. I like a glass I can get my whole hand around — not some dainty, lightweight thing that feels like my paws will crush if I squeeze too hard.

I also like a versatile vessel — outside of the Aged & Ore glass, none of those tested are suitable for cocktails, or really even drinking your whiskey with ice. The ones above will surely work well for professional tasters and armchair connoisseurs, as well as busting out for a tasting party with friends. But none work well as everyday use glasses except for the guy who exclusively drinks premium whiskies served neat.

While specially designed whiskey glasses look sort of fun, in reality they just aren’t terribly practical or, dare I say, manly. The NEAT can improve the flavor if drinking a high-end whiskey, but really, a quality product is going to taste good in any glass. What matters most is your own preferences, and I for one am sticking with my classic rocks glass.

The post Can Special Glasses Improve the Whiskey Drinking Experience? appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

Can Special Glasses Improve the Whiskey Drinking Experience? published first on https://mensproblem.tumblr.com

[iworeheelsforthis]

Tacos, Yoga, Chill

Much like Eat, Pray, Love, I just returned from a week in Tulum, where I ventured solo for a yoga retreat. Tulum feels like what would be if Shabby Chic and Anthropologie had a perfect baby on the Caribbean Sea. The sand is like walking on buttery flour, the ocean is warmer than any heated pool, and the clouds sometimes look superimposed and other times they look like Bob Ross had a complete heyday. This dreamy paradise is legit.

It was the safest I've ever felt in Mexico. Nary a bad hombre in sight.

My trip started off with a hitch - my mom picked me up before 6am to drive me to my airport shuttle and we barely made it in time.  The bus was about to pull away but I flagged it down.  I ran back to the car to gather my bags and my mom shouted "I locked the keys in the car!" and all my luggage was inside.   I ran around the car like a frantic lunatic banging on the windows as if they would somehow roll down on their own with the shuttle driver looking at me very unamused.  Fortunately, after I completely sweat through my clothes in sheer panic, she discovered she had not in fact locked the keys inside and I made my flight in time.  What a relaxing way to be sent off.

It was 4 days into the retreat that I discovered this was a hot yoga retreat. The style of yoga is Baptiste and that's Bikram. I've avoided Bikram all of my yoga years, which is about 1/2 my life. So when we were doing yoga for four hours straight in a hut with no fans or AC and an outside temp of 90 degrees with 89% humidity I started to wonder if I was missing something. And I definitely was. I was also missing all of my electrolytes. I've literally never sweated so much in my life. I've also never been so flexible in my life, with zero achy joints. I now get why the elder folks just LOVE Florida.

But you quickly get over the fact that you look like a perpetual hot mess, that you can't flush ANY toilet paper, that the mosquitoes will feed on you, that AC (at least in my hotel) was non-existent so you won't get much sleep, that your toenail might be falling off but you're too overheated to care, that attempting to put make up or shoes on would be a total waste of time and that putting yoga clothes and spandex on a humid body takes at least 6 full minutes. Then you walk outside into the hot sun and run freely into the ocean to swim right alongside the pelicans as if they were your pets. And everything melts away. Including my extreme fear of birds, so clearly this is a miraculous place.

It was a cast of characters. Truly a mix of all types. We had a newly single divorcee dad looking for some young tail peace.  And he got it with a reformed Mormon mother, newly separated from her husband of about 15 years, which put her wedding age around 16.  

She made up a third of the Kardashian trio, as we called them. They were three reformed Mormons with teenage kids and sugar daddies who had sent them on this trip. Did they do any yoga on this yoga retreat? Nope. Not even one shavasana. Did they Instagram the shit out of their every meal and over-posed selfies, drink all the tequila, have on full make up for breakfast whilst wearing crocheted thong bikinis and stilletos, and go on shopping sprees using their "daddies" credit cards? You bettah believe it.  And hey more power to them. Mormon suppression is a real thing so let loose. They just stuck out like a sore thumb.

One of them had a higher pitched voice than a baby chick and announced "I'm a freak in bed".  We wondered if that meant that she does something other than missionary or if she pegs her boyfriend.  We'll never know.

Another one of them looked like Khloe K's doppelgänger with overfilled everything - lips, brows, cheeks, boobs, and butt.  You could find her by listening to the sounds of her vomiting up tequila or freaking out about the cost of the shoes she bought (not with her money of course).  "I thought they cost 1500 pesos, not 1500 dollars!"

There was the photographer who came in an attempt to have her trip paid for by doing $200 amateur beach shoots. Oddly, she was only offering unedited  Facebook photos to recipients, not on a thumb drive or sent as a file. One subject had some racy nudes taken and the photographer wanted to publicly post them on FB. WTF.  She never came to any of the yoga classes or joined group activities, yet was depressed people weren't signing up for her work. I had a dream one night where I was talking about her behind her back saying that her brand is to make connections with all of us and that would drum up business. In my dream she attacked me so I took it as a sign to avoid her all week.

One night she told a few girls that the reason she came on the trip was to get away from the drama in her life - she's having an affair but doesn't want to divorce her rich husband because her lover has no money but is great in bed. "It's so hard you guyyyys."  Another night she barged into my new friend's cabana while we were chatting, ripped off her dress to fully expose her naked and pierced genitals, threw herself on the bed and started taking photos of my friend urging her to get naked. It was all very perverse.

Then we had the former southern belle who met her husband as a teenager and has since evolved into a yogi with a new green dyed buzz cut, and is attempting to change her first name. And she doesn't understand why he wants a divorce. He signed up for a sweet girl with a drawl and she's gunning for a part in the Mad Max sequel.

There was one couple on the trip who decided to have a Mayan wedding ceremony.  This was exciting since the last wedding I went to ended up with the bride and groom divorcing 6 months later.  

The shaman who performed the ceremony was clearly dehydrated like the rest of us, and as he chanted we watched as one white clump formed on the side of his mouth.  Soon another one formed on the other side of his mouth.  I wanted to bring him a kleenex and force water down his mouth but he was kind of in the thick of marrying people so I restrained.

Have you seen the movie Couples Retreat?  The manager of the resort was this guy's double.  

"No, I have not hooked up with anyone on these retreats. Do you think I will?"  - actual quote.

My friend and I checked out the shopping one day and came across a guy selling crystals.  What he didn't know was that my friend is a legitimate crystal connoisseur so when he showed us amber, it was actually plastic and his obsidian was petrified wood.  Classic mix up!

The mosquitoes were mean buggers.  Not only did they prefer the bottom of my feet and the backs of my knees but they started attacking faces.  One of the women full on slapped another across the face Dynasty-style to kill one of the suckers.

Speaking of Kardashians, my feet were so swollen from bites that they looked like Kim's feet when she was 8 months pregnant.  Really not hot.

Now for the travel guide portion of this post:  

Eat here and order the pasta.  Get the 2nd red wine down on the list. You might accidentally order 3 bottles and then chase the baby turtles running by.

Start with drinks on the roof at sunset overlooking the jungle here and then go downstairs and shove 4 fish tacos in your face faster than I did. I dare you.

Visit this cenote and if you want to face your fear of stalactites and stalagmites and in particular the cave horror movie, The Descent like I did, be sure to rent snorkel gear. You won't sleep well for a week but it's quite beautiful. Spoiler alert: if you don't like hundreds of bats swarming overhead, don't go here.  You'll freak.

Stay here if you like it eco-friendly and mostly vegetarian.  When Mauro asks for your room number even though you didn't order anything, make up a room number so that you can sleep that night and don't have a panic attack while you shower assuming he is looking into your windows without curtains on them.  Which he probably was.

Get a $35 massage on the beach here but also know that it's either going to be one of the best or one of the worst massages of your life. I had both.  I'm pretty sure no one was even massaging me for the bad one and it was just the sea breeze rubbing up against me. But hey, it's $35.

Do some shopping in Tulum Town and then find your way into here for some 2 for 1 priced drinks and yummy apps on the house.  Which you'll definitely need after you realize you overpaid for your "authentic" Mexican wares.  Ay ay ay.

Order the original margarita and some guac here overlooking the turquoise ocean and attractive couples dry humping on the lounge beds in front of you.

Wander into here and eat your Acai bowl in a hammock.  Doing this and trying not to spill it is a workout so you're basically consuming zero calories. Win-win!

To recap, Tulum is amazing. I highly recommend it.  The lack of wi-fi, the yoga culture, the endless delicious and healthy food, the epic scenery and the sexy people all make this place a true respite from whatever you need respite from.  Whether that be a needy sugar daddy, your damn kids, your rich but boring husband, moderate temperatures, or shitty tequila.  Dios mio, come get twisted in Tulum!

[corneroftheroomonetsy-blog]

Last year for a bridal shower I had to put together several prize baskets.  Mind you the maid of honor takes care of the prizes and favors, at my bridal shower the prizes were scented candles, and each basket probably cost as much as each gift card guests brought to my friend’s gift card shower…but I digress.  I did have fun making the baskets.

I didn’t have a ton of luck making them look like baskets, though.  I had never assembled a “prize basket” before…just an Easter basket…and some Easter grass certainly would have helped.  But Easter’s around the corner now, and I once again have the opportunity to put together a creative basket.  Let me tell you, it is a lot easier to assemble a basket when Easter grass is involved.

I’ll make an illustrated description of a coffee basket, and for other themed baskets I’ll just jot down some ideas below. Have fun with these!

Start with the very obvious basket and Easter grass. I like the look and sturdiness of a neutral basket, and this one’s pretty deep, but the Easter grass can be fluffed up enough to fill it.  Add a pound of a favorite ground coffee or coffee beans, and you’ve started a great gift for any adult! Almost everyone I know is a coffee drinker…but even if you know someone who isn’t, it makes a great re-gift (hey, we’re being truthful here!) Here are some more musts to add to your basket…

A springy mug

Coordinating coasters

Filters (they can be boring, but they’re a must have if you’re using a regular coffeemaker, and who wants to buy those at the grocery store?)

Individual creamers or the powdered non-dairy creamer

Sugar packets

And here are a few fun additives…

Flavoring syrup (this is for blueberry, which I’ve been craving because our local Dunkin’ Donuts stopped selling it)

cappuccino mix

Hot cocoa mix

Candy (what’s an Easter basket without it?  My strongest recommendation is to head to your local candy factory and buy some fudge or chocolates)

Biscotti (also recommended local)

If your lucky recipient has a coffee bar (all connoisseurs do!), grab some wall art to decorate the area!

I also tossed in these filler eggs from Target.  I’m not including those in the actual basket, but if your basket recipient will appreciate the extra Easter decorations hanging around, give it a go!

Or, head to your local craft store to assemble this craft basket:

A pack of 5*7 canvas panels

Bottles of acrylic craft paint

25 pack of value brushes

pad of watercolor paper

pan watercolors

box of crayons

Any other craft supplies you might think of!  Some stores even sell craft sets which you can rip out of the box and arrange all pretty. or check out Pinterest before going on your quest for basket goodies, find a fun project, and jot down the supplies you’ll need!

Fun  in the Sun Basket:

Sand toys

Water toys

Flip flops

Drink canteen

Bottle of sunscreen

Visor or hat

A few extras: This is a beach/pool basket but you can swap out sand toys for chalk or squirt guns and can add in one-serving lemonade packets.  You can also throw in a few wine coolets for the adult crowd B-)

Kiss the Cook Basket:

Recipe book

Apron

Dry/nonperishable ingredients for a favorite recipe (add home-canned goods for a personal touch)

Wooden spoons, a small cutting board or a spoon rest

Cloth napkins

Study Buddy Basket (this only works if you get REALLY fun supplies, because who likes studying?)

Notebooks

Highlighters

Pens

Paper or binder clips

thumbtacks

Post-it notes

Rubber bands (to make one of those balls on a study break)

Happy Easter!

CR home & holiday

In your Easter bonnet…er, basket Last year for a bridal shower I had to put together several prize baskets.  Mind you the maid of honor takes care of the prizes and favors, at my bridal shower the prizes were scented candles, and each basket probably cost as much as each gift card guests brought to my friend's gift card shower...but I digress.  

[wineanddinosaur]

EOD Drinks With Francis Ford Coppola

On today’s episode of “End of Day Drinks,” we’re talking with the iconic director Francis Ford Coppola. He’s known for his amazing movies, but he’s also just as well known for his amazing wine. While many know him for Francis Ford Coppola Winery, Francis owns many other wineries. We’re going to talk about all of them. We’re going to find out how Francis first fell in love with wine, thanks to his Italian heritage. We’ll also hear the story of how he decided to use his earnings from “The Godfather” to buy a winery.

Listen Online

Listen on Apple Podcasts

Listen on Spotify

Or Check out the Conversation Here

From VinePair’s New York City headquarters, this is “End of Day Drinks,” where we sit down with the movers and shakers in the beverage industry. So pour yourself a glass, and listen along with us. Let’s start the show.

K: Everyone, my name is Keith Beavers, and I am the tastings director of VinePair, as well as the host of VinePair’s “Wine 101” podcast. Welcome to “End of Day Drinks.” Today, we are joined by Francis Ford Coppola, film director, producer, writer, winery owner, vintner, I’m sure there’s more. Francis, thank you so much for joining us.

FFC: My pleasure.

K: And as always, today, we are joined by members of the VinePair editorial team. We have VinePair co-founder and CEO Adam Teeter.

A: Hi, Keith. Hi, Francis.

K: We have VinePair senior editor Cat Wolinski.

C: Hello, Francis. Thanks so much for joining us.

FFC: My pleasure, Cat. My pleasure to meet you.

K: We also have VinePair associate editor Katie Brown.

Katie: Hey, guys. Excited to be here today.

K: We also have staff writer Tim McKirdy.

Tim: Hi, guys, how’s it going?

FFC: Doing good.

FFC: And VinePair executive editor Joanna Sciarrino.

Joanna: Hi, everyone. Hi, Francis.

FFC: Hello, Joanna.

K: So, Francis, thank you again for joining us. You’re out on the West Coast? Are you doing some wine out there?

FFC: Well, I’m here in the Napa Valley in Rutherford, actually up in the mountain overlooking beautiful nature. I’m so fortunate and blessed to be able to be here during this difficult pandemic era.

K: You have a passion for wine as much as you have a passion for film. I was just curious: Did one come before the other, or how did that work out?

FFC: Well, you know, I think you can say I have a passion for everything. I have a passion for life. It’s such a privilege to even be alive. All of us can feel that way. But being an Italian American, I was raised in a household on the East Coast, in Long Island. And from the dawn of my consciousness, I never saw a dinner table that didn’t have wine on it. All my uncles, and my father, and my mother, as the children of immigrants, were all born in the United States, but they still spoke Italian. They didn’t teach it to the kids, so I didn’t learn. I was named after my grandfather, Francesco, but they wanted to call me Francis. So we were really new Americans, but the tradition remained. We drink wine at the table. As I said, even the kids, we didn’t drink glasses of wine shoulder to shoulder with our parents, but we were allowed a little wine and we would put 7Up or ginger ale or cream soda in it. Wine was part of that family ritual of dinner for me. As I grew older, I eventually traveled to Europe, and I collaborated on a script. I was a film person by then, and I collaborated on a script in Paris with the great Gore Vidal, and I had this opportunity to meet him. He was a very brilliant person. He knew Europe, and being with him, I had the chance to taste some great wine. I said, “My goodness, this is so delicious.” I mean, the wine we drank— the wine my father and my grandfather drank— that was good, honest wine made by some of the immigrant families, like Gallo. There were plenty of them. They made their own during Prohibition with grapes supplied by the Mondavi family. But this was a different story, having the wines of Bordeaux, Romanée Conti from Burgundy. I tasted wine from Rhône, and I thought, “My God, this is more delicious than Coca-Cola.” Coca-Cola was my standard as a kid. I had great luck and good fortune to taste some great wines. I remember when I had the opportunity to have a little bit of money — because most of my life I was really penniless, and I was a starving student with barely enough to eat — which is why I gained weight, incidentally, because every night I used to have the Kraft Macaroni & Cheese dinner, which cost 19 cents when I went to college. So when I made “The Godfather” film, and for the first time I had money, I said to my wife, “Let’s get a little summer house in the Napa Valley. It’s only an hour away, and the kids — I have two boys — we can all have fun at the summer house. But maybe we can have an acre of grapes, and then we can make wine ourselves, and for Christmas, we can give it to all the relatives.” So when I went there, the real estate agent said, “Oh, this isn’t for you, but they’re going to auction a great estate.” I said, “Well, what’s that?” They said it was part of the most beautiful estate of all, which was the Inglenook Estate, which has been all broken up by the corporations that owned it. But the family was auctioning the home. My wife and I went and saw it, and it was just an incomparable beauty — we couldn’t believe it. It was 1,700 acres. We made a bid on it. We didn’t get it. But then I said, “Gee, we should get a bigger place.” But the story is actually that the people who bought it did sell it to us, and we started to live here.

K: Wow, you started living there, and now you’re surrounded by wine.

FFC: Yeah, well, when you live in Napa Valley, all your neighbors and friends all make wine, and they make very good wine. You guys are much more connoisseurs, probably, than I am. I was never one. I went out of my way to not be someone who would sip wine on its own and discuss its various aromatics. I like to drink wine with food. I’m not a savant when it comes to that. I know what I enjoy, and I always like to learn more. Your panel of your associates, I’m sure that they’re much more sophisticated than I. But I will tell them from my perspective what I think about wine, and wine and food, and film, and life. I’m really interested in everything. I think of all the pleasures of life, the greatest one is learning. That’s what I like to do. That’s the key to how I got involved in the wine business — it was an accident.

K: That’s great.

C: Francis, this is Cat. It seems like the one thing that ties all of your passions together, whether it’s filmmaking or winemaking or otherwise, is your family. How important is family legacy to you in your businesses?

FFC: Well, I think I have to go one step further and tell you that in my personal philosophy, the highest level of something to have would be friends. Friendship, I think, is the most valued possible goal. It’s not money, it’s not billions of dollars, it’s not possessions. It’s friends. Family is a subset of friends. It should be, because these are the people who you are the most intimate with, and the most invested in their well-being, although I feel that way about all friends. In fact, all people — because, as you know, the human race, the Homo sapien race that we’re part of, is all one family. You and I are actually related by a grandmother if you go back far enough. We’re all family, and if you think of it that way, friendship is like family. All of us on the phone right now are all part of the same family.

T: Hey, Francis, this is Tim here. I’ve got a question for you. We’ve been talking about your early life and early days, and then moving on to your early life in wine. So you bought a property in Napa in the ’70s. What was that like then? Because we’re talking pre-Judgment of Paris. I imagine it was very different to how it looks now, or is that wrong? What was the landscape there?

FFC: I think Napa Valley, and the vineyards, and the wine business was in the middle of a turning point. There had been the glory days right after Prohibition. Inglenook Wines was under the supervision of their second generation — I never met him, but he was a wonderful man named John Daniel, who was the great-grandnephew of the founder Gustave Niebaum in 1870. At any rate, there was a transition, and people didn’t really know what was going to happen. In fact, the corporations started sniffing around the thing because families didn’t know quite what the next generation was looking at. It was a very damaging time because corporations bought both Heublein, which was in Connecticut, and bought both Inglenook and BV, which were two of the real reasons why Rutherford is such an important region. They dismembered them; they broke them apart and sold them. They made one into a supermarket wine, and made another into their luxury wine. They did a lot of damage. That’s why a kid from Great Neck, Long Island who had just made some money off of “The Godfather,” was even able to buy a property— the real knowledgeable people were very unsure of whether or not something like the property I bought was really a white elephant. It was sort of like what happened to the movie studios after the ’70s, when people bought MGM, or these great, wonderful studios (that in France would have been preserved by the cultural laws) and just broke them apart and sold the property. And Century City was built on the incredible back lot of 20th Century Fox — all the extraordinary props, the famous ruby slippers, everything was just sold and monetized in a way that I guess American industry does. As you know, we have a secretary of culture here. Nothing protected it. For that reason, my wife and I were really strangers to running wineries, and we were able to have that opportunity and the blessing of such a magnificent property. Interestingly, I began to feel very much as though I was the exploiter of this wonderful heritage — it was originally called Niebaum-Coppola, and we were starting to do very good business. People would come and look at my Oscars and the film memorabilia. We had a very popular product that was not really from the grapes here, called Claret. And to this day, Claret is tremendously successful, and a good bargain. It’s an $18 bottle of red wine that never lets you down. So I began to feel embarrassed. I announced at the time that I’m going to take everything out of Niebaum-Coppola — my awards, my name, the Claret, any wine that wasn’t made there because I wanted it to be pure, and I wanted it to be what it really was. I said we’ll find some other winery in Sonoma or somewhere, and we’ll call it Rosso & Bianco, and I’ll move my Oscars there because I really felt embarrassed. I didn’t want the property called Niebaum-Coppola to be a temple for myself. I didn’t even want the other winery to be called Francis Coppola. I wanted to be called Rosso & Bianco, in the name of one of our wines. But I was making a movie at the time, and when I came back, the Niebaum-Coppola Claret had become the Francis Coppola Claret, and the winery in Sonoma was called Francis Coppola Winery. In terms of making money, it might have been a good decision, but it embarrassed me tremendously. I’ve seen my name on so much stuff, and it only embarrasses me. Incidentally, the now Inglenook Winery is absolutely disconnected. They are two separate companies. There’s nothing that connects them other than the fact they’re owned by the same family. There’s nothing that connects them, which I feel is very necessary when you’re making a premium wine. Their business philosophy is different. If you tell me a couple of wineries that we’re making 5,000 cases of a certain wine, and if we add this other component to it, we can have 8,000 cases that’ll be almost as good, you’re likely to say, “OK, do it.” But if at Inglenook, you say, “OK, we have the same thing: 5,000 cases and if we add a little of this to the batch, it’ll be almost as good.” You say no. It’s a different ownership proposition, and that’s why the two companies have to be totally separate.

A: So, Francis, it’s Adam here. I have a question for you about the Claret. It’s actually one of the first wines I ever had. It’s one of the wines that helped me fall in love with wine. In all seriousness, when I was just graduating college (I’d actually been a film major). I knew your movies and then came in contact with your wine. I think it helped a lot of people discover wine. When you created the Claret, did you have the idea then that it would become such an ambassador for wine in general, and for everything else in wine that you would do? Or was it just a wine you were looking to create at the time because as you were saying it was something that the Valley really hadn’t experienced before.

FFC: Well, to tell you the truth, when I was your age, when I was a young guy— and I have become used to drinking wine, especially when I have the opportunity to have certain foods, like a steak, or something that seems to demand it. There was an Australian wine. I don’t remember the name of what it was called. It was a Shiraz. It’s a very famous one, and it was the only wine that you would really see — I made a movie called “The Rain People” driving across the country. We would get great steaks. You couldn’t get wine, but there was this one wine, and when I saw that wine, I knew it would never let you down.

A: Was it Lindemans?

FFC: No, it was ubiquitous. It was everywhere. It was very, very much available. And it was good. And you could trust that if you bought it you were OK. So with Claret, that was my image. I wanted to make a wine that would never let you down, that wasn’t too expensive, and gave you a really enjoyable wine-food experience that you could count on that you wouldn’t have to doubt. I’ll remember that name and I’ll tell you what — I’ll send an email with what it was called, but that was the inspiration. A wine that wouldn’t let you down.

A: Amazing.

KB: That’s awesome. And speaking of access and accessibility, you guys were the first winery, or at least in modern history, to put wine in a can. Can you tell us a little bit about what led to that decision? And then as a follow-up, I was curious, do you recommend drinking Sofia in the can, or pouring it into a glass first?

FFC: Well, the story there is this, when Sofia was a little girl, like 7 or 8, she was living here on the estate. In fact, she was a very feisty little girl. At one time, I was in the middle of a bankruptcy, and the process servers would come on the property just to try to serve at the property, which they’re not allowed to do because it’s a big estate. They’re not allowed to trespass. And of course, when one would come, my wife and I would hide, but little Sofia would stand on the porch and say, “Stop, you have no right to be here.”

K: That’s awesome!

FFC: “Leave immediately!” She was quite a kid. And I used to tell her when she was 7 that when she was married, we were going to serve a wine that was going to be like Champagne — of course, we can’t make Champagne, but we used to enjoy a blanc de blancs wine in Paris. And so we made this sparkling blanc de blancs wine called Sofia. It was an innovation, I know now there’s a big trend of people towards Prosecco and stuff like that. But back then, no. So Sofia was the early incarnation of a domestic sparkling blanc de blancs. Not Champagne, not at that level, of course, but at that time in the clubs, the kids were starting to drink with a straw, little bottles of Pommery Pop. So we said, “Well, why don’t we make a small container of four for Sofia?” Sofia, herself, and her brother said, “Well, why don’t we put it in those long, tall, Japanese cans?” One of the beauties of my family is that whenever I went anywhere for work, if I was going to be gone for more than two weeks, I took the kids out of school and brought them with me. So as little kids, they got to live in Japan, they got to live in the Philippines, they got to hang out with movie crews. I thought their schooling was more important than the experiences they were having, and I put Sofia in a Chinese school. Their academic thing was a mess, but it was very stimulating, and they knew about Japan and stuff like that. Sofia said, “Call it a mini,” and we put this type of Champagne, not Champagne but blanc de blancs in these little minis and had a straw attached to it.

And the idea was it would be something for kids that were going to clubs. We were copying, remember the Pommery Pop?

A: I do, yeah.

FFC: So we put them in little cans. I wouldn’t drink it out of the straw. I like to drink wine out of a glass, and I like to drink everything out of a glass. I love beverages, and I love the enjoyment of drinking a beverage in a pretty glass, a nice glass — simple but pretty.

K: Speaking of pretty glasses and wine, that reminds me of Pinot Noir, because Pinot Noir smells so good in a nice glass. You have a new venture, and you’re in the Dundee Hills in Willamette. It’s where it all began, so you decided to start something there. That’s really exciting. Do you want to let us know about that?

FFC: I love the Willamette Pinot Noir, I’m an admirer, and I heard there was an opportunity to buy a property right next to the wonderful — and I hope I can pronounce it right — it’s the Domaine Drouhin.

K: Yes.

FFC: They’re the family who really started that style of Pinot Noir in a Burgundy fashion in that area. Then it was copied by a few other people. But it’s like Napa Valley, where all your neighbors make wonderful things. But I love the Domain Drouhin, and the wonderful French family. We were able to buy this property. I think forget what it was called now, but I wanted to give it — I’m very interested, I’m passionate about sciences and businesses, and I always loved this young nobleman de Broglie who won the Nobel Prize and was part of the group that were really essential in quantum physics — and the idea that he was a prince. Now you think of a prince as a guy who has a life and he’s got good clothes and girls like him ’cause he’s a prince? And yet here was one who was devoted to science and was passionate, and was a very shy prince. I wanted to honor him as I have honored the great scientist Archimedes, so I called it Domaine de Broglie and it’s in his honor. I also have certain connections. I took some of the props from the movie “Is Paris Burning?” that I put up there. And I made it with things that I’m passionate about, in this case science and quantum physics. It’s a beautiful place, and the wine is wonderful and fragrant. I’m very proud of the Domaine de Broglie, I really am.

K: Yeah, it looks really great. I love the sparkling wine and Pinot Gris, which is very exciting in Oregon. When I was looking at the website , I really can’t wait to taste the wines. Does your family still call you Science. Is that still your nickname?

FFC: No, Science was not said in a nice way. When the kids at Jamaica High School called me Science, they went “SCIENCE, SCIENCE.” It was an insult.

C: Oh my God, no! That’s awful. Jokes on them.

FFC: It was to put me down. And in New York Military Academy, I was very skinny in those days, they used to call me Ichabod.

K: Ichabod Science.

FFC: Those were different schools. I was always taken out of school or put in another school for reasons I don’t even understand. My father was always moving. I went to about 22 schools before college, so I had what I realized was a benefit. No school ever got a hold of me and brainwashed me because I was in and out of school. Once I went to three junior high schools in one year.

K: In one year!?

FFC: Yeah, I went to six high schools. I went to Jamaica High School, University High School, Bayside High School, Great Neck High School, and New York Military Academy.

C: You had a very well-rounded education growing up.

FFC: Well, there is a theory. There’s a great philosopher, educator — for those of you interested he’s named Ivan Illich — who came up with in the ’70s this idea that school was actually a danger to children because it tended to brainwash them into thinking that the kind of society we’re in where you get a better job and you make more money, and you get all the accreditation, and the grading, and the grades — was to brainwash good, obedient little cog in the wheel of our society, and that the best thing would be to abolish school and to institute learning in a totally different way. I’m reading this book and said, my God, I got away with de-schooling because they never had me for more than two months! A school in New York in those days, which was the early ’50s, a school in New York was totally different than a school in L.A. They were very different styles, and one of the most embarrassing moments of my life was when I came into a class late in L.A. and the teacher said, “You’re tardy.” And I said, “I’m not tardy, I’m Coppola!” Because  in New York, they never said you’re tardy, they said you’re late. I didn’t know what tardy meant. But the happy thing is, I really think that the fact that I had not gone through regular schooling was that I was, in the words of this philosopher, getting de-schooled, it probably was an advantage to me. And I know my children, Sophia and Roman, my eldest son Gio — they didn’t do well academically, but in life they learned all about a lot of things, about exotic countries and different kinds of people and movies. And they’ve all benefited in a funny way. I think putting your kid in a regimented school with kids of their age going for accreditation and their prescribed curriculum is ultimately damaging. I would recommend a different system of learning. I don’t even want to call it education. We have a secretary of education, and I wish, of course, in addition, that we had a secretary of youth, because education is just about ideology and budgets. It’s not about young people. But our young people are the most valuable people in our whole country, and we never listen to them, we never ask what their aspirations are. I would split the secretary of education, and a second one, the secretary of youth that really brings young people into having a say about the society that’s going to be theirs.

K: Yeah, life experience is everything.

J: This is Joanna, one last question for you: What is next, in terms of expansion. Are there more properties in Oregon or any other regions that you’re interested in?

FFC: Well, a region that I absolutely love and that I think has wonderful wines and is very affordable would be Argentina. Certain countries have a region which is considered the wine region, like Napa Valley. Argentina has a region in Mendoza, which people think is the wine region, but really, that’s just the region where a lot of people settle down. In fact, most of Argentina is a wonderful wine region and all along the mountains there, if you have water, Argentina is a natural vineyard — the whole country, practically. Argentina has made great wine, but they’re not as well known as Chilean wines, which, of course, is on the other side of the mountains. Because the Chileans are basically descended from Germans and they’re very good at business and selling and stuff whereas the Argentine people are more so descendants of the Italians, and so they make the wine, but they drink it. I know when I go to a wine list and I don’t want to go broke, I always look at the Argentine selection because, again, you get wonderful wines for very fair prices. I think the Chilean wine is OK. But to me, the great wine from south of the border is in Argentina. And if I were a younger man or if the opportunity fell on my lap, I would love to have a place there or maybe even with a hotel, a place you can go visit. Who’s the gentleman who has a beautiful place in northern Argentina, what’s his name? He also has a winery here.

K: Well, Tim McKirdy who is on right now, he is our staff writer, but he also was a chef in Argentina for a couple of years.

TM: Yeah, I was out in Buenos Aires for a while in San Telmo. I believe you may be familiar with the neighborhood.

FFC: I love San Telmo. So when you say horse, you say gabacho?

TM: I say gabacho. I like to think of Italians, speaking Spanish.

FFC: Well, that’s exactly what it is! On the list of the top hotels in Argentina, the first one. What’s that great big, beautiful hotel?

T: The Faena? I think it’s the Faena, maybe. I’m not sure.

FFC: Well that’s a more hip hotel. But there’s a classic hotel there that’s wonderful. But our hotel, which is called Jardin Escondido, is No. 5, and it only has about eight rooms. It’s really, really lovely.

K: That’s beautiful. Well, Francis, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us. This was an awesome conversation. It was so great, and I’m so glad we got everything to work. Thank you again!

FFC: It was my pleasure. One thing: You know, I’m 81 years old, about to be 82. But, you know, the truth of the matter is— it’s not just “I have a passion for film.” I have a passion for everything. I think a human being is a wonderful entity with kindness. We’re a much kinder and more friendly people than we think. It’s just that we’re all addicted to news now, which scours the world looking for something bad to say. All of you, I know, are younger than me, and I want you to have some of my enthusiasm for living, learning, friendship, and the future, because the future will be beautiful. We’ll share meals with our friends, with wine, and we’ll see beautiful works of art. And your children — it’s important to have that to look forward to. That’s my sincere belief, and of course, my hope, for a blessing for all of us.

C: That was beautiful.

ALL: Thank you so much.

FFC: Bye bye. Nice to meet you.

Thanks for listening to this week’s episode of “EOD Drinks.” If you’ve enjoyed this program, please leave us a rating or a review wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps other people discover the show. And tell your friends. We want as many people as possible listening to this amazing program.

And now for the credits. “End of Day Drinks” is recorded live in New York City at VinePair’s headquarters. And it is produced, edited, and engineered by VinePair tastings director, yes, he wears a lot of hats, Keith Beavers. I also want to give a special thanks to VinePair’s co-founder, Josh Malin, to the executive editor Joanna Sciarrino, to our senior editor, Cat Wolinski, senior staff writer Tim McKirdy, and our associate editor Katie Brown. And a special shout-out to Danielle Grinberg, VinePair’s art director who designed the sick logo for this program. The music for “End of Day Drinks” was produced, written, and recorded by Darby Cici. I’m VinePair co-founder Adam Teeter, and we’ll see you next week. Thanks a lot.

Ed. note: This episode has been edited for length and clarity.

The article EOD Drinks With Francis Ford Coppola appeared first on VinePair.

source https://vinepair.com/articles/eod-drinks-francis-ford-coppola/

[naturecoaster]

The Insider's Guide to 2020 Kumquat Festival

Kumquats are fun to eat, and the word kumquat is fun to say, so it stands to reason that the Kumquat Festival January 25 in Dade City is going to be a fantastically fun event for all! Promoted as a family-friendly alternative to Tampa’s Gasparilla, the Annual Kumquat Festival has been a staple on the last Saturday of January in historic downtown Dade City for over 20 years. Today, NatureCoaster provides a behind the scenes guide to all things kumquat to help prepare you for the 23rd Annual Kumquat Festival.

What is a Kumquat?

First, one must know what a kumquat is. Kumquats are a small round or oblong-shaped citrus fruit that is sweet on the inside and has a tart skin. Kumquats are supposed to be eaten whole, so one might consider them the original SweetTart®.

Roger Swain, television horticulturist, explains kumquats at the 2016 Kumquat Grower's Open House. Image by Richard Riley. Kumquats are native to China and were given as a traditional gift on New Year’s Day. The name translates to “golden coins,” and the kumquat represents prosperity, according to information from TV horticulturist Roger Swain.

Why a Kumquat Festival?

More than twenty years ago, the Greater Dade City Chamber of Commerce began holding a festival to celebrate the golden kumquat and all it has contributed to the area. Today, this wholesome, fun, and delicious event features over 400 vendors and 30 sponsors coming together throughout the streets of an historic, charming Southern town to celebrate the little fruit that is both sweet and sour.

The Kumquat Growers are located in the Wells Fargo parking lot on Meridian. Image courtesy of Kumquat Growers. “Once again, Dade City and Eastern Pasco County are preparing to welcome thousands of residents and visitors to our area.  It is our pleasure to produce this quality event, and we invite everyone to enjoy the Festival and come back and visit us again,” says John Moors, Executive Director of the Greater Dade City Chamber of Commerce.

Music is held on the 1909 Classical Revival style historic courthouse steps throughout the day, where visitors are encouraged to stop and refresh themselves.

What Happens at the Kumquat Festival?

There is some amazing shopping, eating, drinking, fun activities and community spirit that envelope visitors to the Annual Kumquat Festival. With over 400 vendors situated in beautiful downtown Dade City, no-one gets bored. Music is held on the 1909 Classical Revival style historic courthouse steps throughout the day, where visitors are encouraged to stop and refresh themselves.  Local entertainment folk dancers, cloggers, local church choirs, and wholesome local acts.

Kumquat pie is so good. Creamy, slightly sweet citrus and a tart kickoff on a delectable graham cracker crust and worth a trip to the Annual Kumquat Festival for an indulgence. Image courtesy of the Greater Dade City Chamber of Commerce. The vendor choices are off the charts! There are arts and crafts, fine art, farmers market, food and beverages, and sponsor booths. Because the weather is usually beautiful and sunny, it is a good idea to rest periodically. When you get a little tired, take a few minutes to enjoy a snack and find a place to rest. Chairs can be found at the Historic Courthouse for those who want to take a break while enjoying some live local entertainment. Several picnic tables can be found at various locations. Pace yourself, take a few minutes to relax, and don’t forget to stay hydrated. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GoLr7BieIKQ Information booths are located at the intersection of 7th Street & Meridian Avenue and 3rd Street & Meridian Avenue. They can also be found on our Live Event Map at www.KumquatFestival.org, along with food and restroom locations. Here is where you can purchase your Official T-Shirt, Hat or Visor, or ask questions. 

Kumquat Festival Car Show

Pops 54 by Mike Groseclose at the Kumquat Festival Car Show a few years back. This year's Kumquat Festival Car Show is hosted by the Tampa Bay Classic Chevy Club, drawing great vehicles from around Florida and the southeast U.S. The Annual Kumquat Festival Car Show is hosted by the Tampa Bay Classic Chevy Club this year and features an amazing variety of classic cars and trucks in the large parking lot of the downtown Judicial Courthouse. Trophies, dash plaques and a well-organized show attracts some of the nicest vehicles to be seen in the Southeast U.S. Show runs from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Sponsors Make the Kumquat Festival Happen

The Annual Kumquat Festival is sponsored by many large, medium, and small organizations in the Dade City area. Sponsors often have large vendor spaces and offer freebies and information to Annual Kumquat Festival guests. Advent Health Dade City is the headlining sponsor for 2020, joining Florida’s Sports Coast, VisitFlorida, and dozens of business and government partners who come together to make the day memorable.  

Stop in one of the Friendly Local Shops and Restaurants

Local storefronts are decorated for the festival in kumquat themes and it can be nice to duck into a shop or restaurant and rest during the festivities. The Brass Tap, at the corner of 7th Street and Pasco Avenue offers Kumquat beer for the connoisseur.

If you get lucky, you might find Fairy Cake when you visit Lunch on Limoges in Dade City. Image courtesy of Robin Draper. Dade City is a great town to visit any day and the unique shops and restaurants that make up this vibrant downtown are another great way to spend part of your day. Antiques, toys, books, jewelry, quilting, and pet supplies are some of the types of shops you will find. Restaurants vary from an authentic tea house to sandwich shops, coffee shops, Mexican, Italian, craft beer and fine dining. Although Dade City is a pet-friendly city, please allow your pets to stay at home during the festival.

Hundreds of Vendors provide Unique & Kumquat Items

Kumquat beer and wine are available through local shops, restaurants, and a retailer or two. Image courtesy of Tampa Bay Brewing and Kumquat Growers. Unique arts and crafts are fun to discover in many of the vendor booths lining the streets of this quaint city in eastern Pasco County. Many of these artisans return year after year to sell their wares. Delicious kumquat foods, as well as many ethnic offerings are available to festivalgoers. There is a myriad of opportunities to sample the tasty little fruit, whether it be as marmalade, cookies, salsa, ice cream, refrigerator pie, or a sip of kumquat beer.

There is a kids zone for playing and more at the Annual Kumquat Festival.

Kumquat Kids Corral and Health Fair Onsite

A Kumquat Kids Corral offers families the opportunity to let off some steam with bounce houses, pony rides, games, face painting, rock climbing wall, a euro-bungee and more. The health fair gives visitors a chance to talk with providers and glean valuable information.

This family-friendly festival celebrates wonderful creations from the delicious kumquat citrus fruit. The whole town gets involved. Image by Gary Hatrick

Make it an Overnight Visit: Kumquat Growers Open House

The 2020 Kumquat Growers Open House will be held at the Kumquat Growers packing house in St. Joseph from 10:00 AM to 3:00 PM on the two days before the Kumquat Festival (Jan. 23 and 24). Here you can immerse yourself in the agricultural side of kumquats. Learn about the origin and history of kumquats in the Dade City area during the 15-minute talks held several times each day. You will also learn about the different types of kumquats and how they are used.

Come a day or two before the Annual Kumquat Festival and enjoy learning about kumquats at the Kumquat Growers Open House. Image courtesy of Kumquat Growers. There are tours of the Kumquat Growers packing house where we learn how kumquats are picked, processed, packaged and shipped, and a visit to the Kumquat Gift Shop where you will find a little bit of “all things kumquat.” Lunch and live music, along with some historic demonstrations are provided. Half hour tram tours allow visitors to see an actual kumquat grove. This tour explains the planting, maintenance, and care of kumquat trees for commercial production.

Travelers Rest Resort offers nice accommodations close to Dade Citys Annual Kumquat Festival. Image courtesy of Pixabay.

Places to Stay

There is a nice Hampton Inn just south of downtown Dade City, and several hotels in Wesley Chapel along the I-75 and SR 56-SR54 corridor. Camping and RV hookups can be had at the Travelers Rest Resort.

Bring your family to the Annual Kumquat Festival on January 25, 2020, and have a blast discovering Dade City's most renown event. Image courtesy of Pixabay.

Free Admission and Shuttle Service

Free admission, family fun and free shuttle service from parking areas. Satellite parking lots are at the Pasco County Fairgrounds, 36733 State Road 53, Dade City, and along U.S. 301 across from Jarrett Ford. The Kumquat Festival has become an important part of Florida’s Nature Coast, and the 23rd Annual Kumquat Festival January 25 in downtown Dade City promises to be one not to miss.

Frank Gude, president of Kumquat Growers. Image courtesy of Robin Draper.

Where Did the Kumquat Festival Come From?

Nearly 100 years ago, Casper Joseph “J. C.” Nathe came to what is now known as St. Joseph, and worked several jobs to make ends meet, including at a nursery near Jessamine owned by J. W. Ellsworth. There, he became acquainted with the kumquat, an ornamental plant that was given to wish prosperity to the recipient. Nathe planted an acre of kumquat trees in 1912, as well as 50 acres of citrus, and bananas, avocados, guavas, pineapples and vegetables to feed his family and trade for other goods and services.

Kumquat Preserves, a real treat, homemade by Robin Draper. Image courtesy of Robin Draper. The Nathe family used the fruit for preserves and they became popular among area residents. Orders started coming in, so they began growing more kumquats. In less than 15 years, Florida Grower magazine crowned J.C. Nathe “the world’s kumquat king.” Several local St. Joseph families began converting their acreage to the profitable little sweet and sour fruit. From the 1930s to 1962, when a bad freeze destroyed the fruit on most of the trees, the quantity of kumquats grown in this rural area of eastern Pasco County grew and grew. Kumquat Growers, Inc. was started in 1971 by owners/growers Charles Barthle, Frank Gude, Joseph and Paul Neuhofer and Fred Heidgerken. Today, Frank and Rosemarie Gude and Joseph and Margie Neuhofer own the nation's largest producer and shipper of kumquats and kumquat products. They are descendants of the original St. Joseph families that have been growing, packing and selling kumquats for close to 100 years. For more information about the 23rd Annual Kumquat Festival, click here. Read the full article

[naturecoaster]

The Insider's Guide to 2020 Kumquat Festival

Kumquats are fun to eat, and the word kumquat is fun to say, so it stands to reason that the Kumquat Festival January 25 in Dade City is going to be a fantastically fun event for all! Promoted as a family-friendly alternative to Tampa’s Gasparilla, the Annual Kumquat Festival has been a staple on the last Saturday of January in historic downtown Dade City for over 20 years. Today, NatureCoaster provides a behind the scenes guide to all things kumquat to help prepare you for the 23rd Annual Kumquat Festival.

What is a Kumquat?

First, one must know what a kumquat is. Kumquats are a small round or oblong-shaped citrus fruit that is sweet on the inside and has a tart skin. Kumquats are supposed to be eaten whole, so one might consider them the original SweetTart®.

Roger Swain, television horticulturist, explains kumquats at the 2016 Kumquat Grower's Open House. Image by Richard Riley. Kumquats are native to China and were given as a traditional gift on New Year’s Day. The name translates to “golden coins,” and the kumquat represents prosperity, according to information from TV horticulturist Roger Swain.

Why a Kumquat Festival?

More than twenty years ago, the Greater Dade City Chamber of Commerce began holding a festival to celebrate the golden kumquat and all it has contributed to the area. Today, this wholesome, fun, and delicious event features over 400 vendors and 30 sponsors coming together throughout the streets of an historic, charming Southern town to celebrate the little fruit that is both sweet and sour.

The Kumquat Growers are located in the Wells Fargo parking lot on Meridian. Image courtesy of Kumquat Growers. “Once again, Dade City and Eastern Pasco County are preparing to welcome thousands of residents and visitors to our area.  It is our pleasure to produce this quality event, and we invite everyone to enjoy the Festival and come back and visit us again,” says John Moors, Executive Director of the Greater Dade City Chamber of Commerce.

Music is held on the 1909 Classical Revival style historic courthouse steps throughout the day, where visitors are encouraged to stop and refresh themselves.

What Happens at the Kumquat Festival?

There is some amazing shopping, eating, drinking, fun activities and community spirit that envelope visitors to the Annual Kumquat Festival. With over 400 vendors situated in beautiful downtown Dade City, no-one gets bored. Music is held on the 1909 Classical Revival style historic courthouse steps throughout the day, where visitors are encouraged to stop and refresh themselves.  Local entertainment folk dancers, cloggers, local church choirs, and wholesome local acts.

Kumquat pie is so good. Creamy, slightly sweet citrus and a tart kickoff on a delectable graham cracker crust and worth a trip to the Annual Kumquat Festival for an indulgence. Image courtesy of the Greater Dade City Chamber of Commerce. The vendor choices are off the charts! There are arts and crafts, fine art, farmers market, food and beverages, and sponsor booths. Because the weather is usually beautiful and sunny, it is a good idea to rest periodically. When you get a little tired, take a few minutes to enjoy a snack and find a place to rest. Chairs can be found at the Historic Courthouse for those who want to take a break while enjoying some live local entertainment. Several picnic tables can be found at various locations. Pace yourself, take a few minutes to relax, and don’t forget to stay hydrated. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GoLr7BieIKQ Information booths are located at the intersection of 7th Street & Meridian Avenue and 3rd Street & Meridian Avenue. They can also be found on our Live Event Map at www.KumquatFestival.org, along with food and restroom locations. Here is where you can purchase your Official T-Shirt, Hat or Visor, or ask questions. 

Kumquat Festival Car Show

Pops 54 by Mike Groseclose at the Kumquat Festival Car Show a few years back. This year's Kumquat Festival Car Show is hosted by the Tampa Bay Classic Chevy Club, drawing great vehicles from around Florida and the southeast U.S. The Annual Kumquat Festival Car Show is hosted by the Tampa Bay Classic Chevy Club this year and features an amazing variety of classic cars and trucks in the large parking lot of the downtown Judicial Courthouse. Trophies, dash plaques and a well-organized show attracts some of the nicest vehicles to be seen in the Southeast U.S. Show runs from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Sponsor Make the Kumquat Festival Happen

The Annual Kumquat Festival is sponsored by many large, medium, and small organizations in the Dade City area. Sponsors often have large vendor spaces and offer freebies and information to Annual Kumquat Festival guests. Advent Health Dade City is the headlining sponsor for 2020, joining Florida’s Sports Coast, VisitFlorida, and dozens of business and government partners who come together to make the day memorable.  

Stop in one of the Friendly Local Shops and Restaurants

Local storefronts are decorated for the festival in kumquat themes and it can be nice to duck into a shop or restaurant and rest during the festivities. The Brass Tap, at the corner of 7th Street and Pasco Avenue offers Kumquat beer for the connoisseur.

If you get lucky, you might find Fairy Cake when you visit Lunch on Limoges in Dade City. Image courtesy of Robin Draper. Dade City is a great town to visit any day and the unique shops and restaurants that make up this vibrant downtown are another great way to spend part of your day. Antiques, toys, books, jewelry, quilting, and pet supplies are some of the types of shops you will find. Restaurants vary from an authentic tea house to sandwich shops, coffee shops, Mexican, Italian, craft beer and fine dining. Although Dade City is a pet-friendly city, please allow your pets to stay at home during the festival.

Hundreds of Vendors provide Unique & Kumquat Items

Kumquat beer and wine are available through local shops, restaurants, and a retailer or two. Image courtesy of Tampa Bay Brewing and Kumquat Growers. Unique arts and crafts are fun to discover in many of the vendor booths lining the streets of this quaint city in eastern Pasco County. Many of these artisans return year after year to sell their wares. Delicious kumquat foods, as well as many ethnic offerings are available to festivalgoers. There is a myriad of opportunities to sample the tasty little fruit, whether it be as marmalade, cookies, salsa, ice cream, refrigerator pie, or a sip of kumquat beer.

There is a kids zone for playing and more at the Annual Kumquat Festival.

Kumquat Kids Corral and Health Fair Onsite

A Kumquat Kids Corral offers families the opportunity to let off some steam with bounce houses, pony rides, games, face painting, rock climbing wall, a euro-bungee and more. The health fair gives visitors a chance to talk with providers and glean valuable information.

This family-friendly festival celebrates wonderful creations from the delicious kumquat citrus fruit. The whole town gets involved. Image by Gary Hatrick

Make it an Overnight Visit: Kumquat Growers Open House

The 2020 Kumquat Growers Open House will be held at the Kumquat Growers packing house in St. Joseph from 10:00 AM to 3:00 PM on the two days before the Kumquat Festival (Jan. 23 and 24). Here you can immerse yourself in the agricultural side of kumquats. Learn about the origin and history of kumquats in the Dade City area during the 15-minute talks held several times each day. You will also learn about the different types of kumquats and how they are used.

Come a day or two before the Annual Kumquat Festival and enjoy learning about kumquats at the Kumquat Growers Open House. Image courtesy of Kumquat Growers. There are tours of the Kumquat Growers packing house where we learn how kumquats are picked, processed, packaged and shipped, and a visit to the Kumquat Gift Shop where you will find a little bit of “all things kumquat.” Lunch and live music, along with some historic demonstrations are provided. Half hour tram tours allow visitors to see an actual kumquat grove. This tour explains the planting, maintenance, and care of kumquat trees for commercial production.

Travelers Rest Resort offers nice accommodations close to Dade Citys Annual Kumquat Festival. Image courtesy of Pixabay.

Places to Stay

There is a nice Hampton Inn just south of downtown Dade City, and several hotels in Wesley Chapel along the I-75 and SR 56-SR54 corridor. Camping and RV hookups can be had at the Travelers Rest Resort.

Bring your family to the Annual Kumquat Festival on January 25, 2020, and have a blast discovering Dade City's most renown event. Image courtesy of Pixabay.

Free Admission and Shuttle Service

Free admission, family fun and free shuttle service from parking areas. Satellite parking lots are at the Pasco County Fairgrounds, 36733 State Road 53, Dade City, and along U.S. 301 across from Jarrett Ford. The Kumquat Festival has become an important part of Florida’s Nature Coast, and the 23rd Annual Kumquat Festival January 25 in downtown Dade City promises to be one not to miss.

Frank Gude, president of Kumquat Growers. Image courtesy of Robin Draper.

Where Did the Kumquat Festival Come From?

Nearly 100 years ago, Casper Joseph “J. C.” Nathe came to what is now known as St. Joseph, and worked several jobs to make ends meet, including at a nursery near Jessamine owned by J. W. Ellsworth. There, he became acquainted with the kumquat, an ornamental plant that was given to wish prosperity to the recipient. Nathe planted an acre of kumquat trees in 1912, as well as 50 acres of citrus, and bananas, avocados, guavas, pineapples and vegetables to feed his family and trade for other goods and services.

Kumquat Preserves, a real treat, homemade by Robin Draper. Image courtesy of Robin Draper. The Nathe family used the fruit for preserves and they became popular among area residents. Orders started coming in, so they began growing more kumquats. In less than 15 years, Florida Grower magazine crowned J.C. Nathe “the world’s kumquat king.” Several local St. Joseph families began converting their acreage to the profitable little sweet and sour fruit. From the 1930s to 1962, when a bad freeze destroyed the fruit on most of the trees, the quantity of kumquats grown in this rural area of eastern Pasco County grew and grew. Kumquat Growers, Inc. was started in 1971 by owners/growers Charles Barthle, Frank Gude, Joseph and Paul Neuhofer and Fred Heidgerken. Today, Frank and Rosemarie Gude and Joseph and Margie Neuhofer own the nation's largest producer and shipper of kumquats and kumquat products. They are descendants of the original St. Joseph families that have been growing, packing and selling kumquats for close to 100 years. For more information about the 23rd Annual Kumquat Festival, click here. Read the full article

[naturecoaster]

The Insider's Guide to 2020 Kumquat Festival

Kumquats are fun to eat, and the word kumquat is fun to say, so it stands to reason that the Kumquat Festival January 25 in Dade City is going to be a fantastically fun event for all! Promoted as a family-friendly alternative to Tampa’s Gasparilla, the Annual Kumquat Festival has been a staple on the last Saturday of January in historic downtown Dade City for over 20 years. Today, NatureCoaster provides a behind the scenes guide to all things kumquat to help prepare you for the 23rd Annual Kumquat Festival.

What is a Kumquat?

First, one must know what a kumquat is. Kumquats are a small round or oblong-shaped citrus fruit that is sweet on the inside and has a tart skin. Kumquats are supposed to be eaten whole, so one might consider them the original SweetTart®.

Roger Swain, television horticulturist, explains kumquats at the 2016 Kumquat Grower's Open House. Image by Richard Riley. Kumquats are native to China and were given as a traditional gift on New Year’s Day. The name translates to “golden coins,” and the kumquat represents prosperity, according to information from TV horticulturist Roger Swain.

Why a Kumquat Festival?

More than twenty years ago, the Greater Dade City Chamber of Commerce began holding a festival to celebrate the golden kumquat and all it has contributed to the area. Today, this wholesome, fun, and delicious event features over 400 vendors and 30 sponsors coming together throughout the streets of an historic, charming Southern town to celebrate the little fruit that is both sweet and sour.

The Kumquat Growers are located in the Wells Fargo parking lot on Meridian. Image courtesy of Kumquat Growers. “Once again, Dade City and Eastern Pasco County are preparing to welcome thousands of residents and visitors to our area.  It is our pleasure to produce this quality event, and we invite everyone to enjoy the Festival and come back and visit us again,” says John Moors, Executive Director of the Greater Dade City Chamber of Commerce.

Music is held on the 1909 Classical Revival style historic courthouse steps throughout the day, where visitors are encouraged to stop and refresh themselves.

What Happens at the Kumquat Festival?

There is some amazing shopping, eating, drinking, fun activities and community spirit that envelope visitors to the Annual Kumquat Festival. With over 400 vendors situated in beautiful downtown Dade City, no-one gets bored. Music is held on the 1909 Classical Revival style historic courthouse steps throughout the day, where visitors are encouraged to stop and refresh themselves.  Local entertainment folk dancers, cloggers, local church choirs, and wholesome local acts.

Kumquat pie is so good. Creamy, slightly sweet citrus and a tart kickoff on a delectable graham cracker crust and worth a trip to the Annual Kumquat Festival for an indulgence. Image courtesy of the Greater Dade City Chamber of Commerce. The vendor choices are off the charts! There are arts and crafts, fine art, farmers market, food and beverages, and sponsor booths. Because the weather is usually beautiful and sunny, it is a good idea to rest periodically. When you get a little tired, take a few minutes to enjoy a snack and find a place to rest. Chairs can be found at the Historic Courthouse for those who want to take a break while enjoying some live local entertainment. Several picnic tables can be found at various locations. Pace yourself, take a few minutes to relax, and don’t forget to stay hydrated. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GoLr7BieIKQ Information booths are located at the intersection of 7th Street & Meridian Avenue and 3rd Street & Meridian Avenue. They can also be found on our Live Event Map at www.KumquatFestival.org, along with food and restroom locations. Here is where you can purchase your Official T-Shirt, Hat or Visor, or ask questions. 

Kumquat Festival Car Show

Pops 54 by Mike Groseclose at the Kumquat Festival Car Show a few years back. This year's Kumquat Festival Car Show is hosted by the Tampa Bay Classic Chevy Club, drawing great vehicles from around Florida and the southeast U.S. The Annual Kumquat Festival Car Show is hosted by the Tampa Bay Classic Chevy Club this year and features an amazing variety of classic cars and trucks in the large parking lot of the downtown Judicial Courthouse. Trophies, dash plaques and a well-organized show attracts some of the nicest vehicles to be seen in the Southeast U.S. Show runs from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.

The Annual Kumquat Festival is sponsored by many large, medium, and small organizations in the Dade City area. Sponsors often have large vendor spaces and offer freebies and information to Annual Kumquat Festival guests.

Sponsor Make the Kumquat Festival Happen

Advent Health Dade City is the headlining sponsor for 2020, joining Florida’s Sports Coast, VisitFlorida, and dozens of business and government partners who come together to make the day memorable.  

If you get lucky, you might find Fairy Cake when you visit Dade City.

Stop in one of the Friendly Local Shops and Restaurants

Local storefronts are decorated for the festival in kumquat themes and it can be nice to duck into a shop or restaurant and rest during the festivities. The Brass Tap, at the corner of 7th Street and Pasco Avenue offers Kumquat beer for the connoisseur. Dade City is a great town to visit any day and the unique shops and restaurants that make up this vibrant downtown are another great way to spend part of your day. Antiques, toys, books, jewelry, quilting, and pet supplies are some of the types of shops you will find. Restaurants vary from an authentic tea house to sandwich shops, coffee shops, Mexican, Italian, craft beer and fine dining. Although Dade City is a pet-friendly city, please allow your pets to stay at home during the festival.

Hundreds of Vendors provide Unique & Kumquat Items

Kumquat beer and wine are available through local shops, restaurants, and a retailer or two. Image courtesy of Tampa Bay Brewing and Kumquat Growers. Unique arts and crafts are fun to discover in many of the vendor booths lining the streets of this quaint city in eastern Pasco County. Many of these artisans return year after year to sell their wares. Delicious kumquat foods, as well as many ethnic offerings are available to festivalgoers. There is a myriad of opportunities to sample the tasty little fruit, whether it be as marmalade, cookies, salsa, ice cream, refrigerator pie, or a sip of kumquat beer.

There is a kids zone for playing and more at the Annual Kumquat Festival.

Kumquat Kids Corral and Health Fair Onsite

A Kumquat Kids Corral offers families the opportunity to let off some steam with bounce houses, pony rides, games, face painting, rock climbing wall, a euro-bungee and more. The health fair gives visitors a chance to talk with providers and glean valuable information.

This family-friendly festival celebrates wonderful creations from the delicious kumquat citrus fruit. The whole town gets involved. Image by Gary Hatrick

Make it an Overnight Visit: Kumquat Growers Open House

The 2020 Kumquat Growers Open House will be held at the Kumquat Growers packing house in St. Joseph from 10:00 AM to 3:00 PM on the two days before the Kumquat Festival (Jan. 23 and 24). Here you can immerse yourself in the agricultural side of kumquats. Learn about the origin and history of kumquats in the Dade City area during the 15-minute talks held several times each day. You will also learn about the different types of kumquats and how they are used.

Come a day or two before the Annual Kumquat Festival and enjoy learning about kumquats at the Kumquat Growers Open House. Image courtesy of Kumquat Growers. There are tours of the Kumquat Growers packing house where we learn how kumquats are picked, processed, packaged and shipped, and a visit to the Kumquat Gift Shop where you will find a little bit of “all things kumquat.” Lunch and live music, along with some historic demonstrations are provided. Half hour tram tours allow visitors to see an actual kumquat grove. This tour explains the planting, maintenance, and care of kumquat trees for commercial production.

Travelers Rest Resort offers nice accommodations close to Dade Citys Annual Kumquat Festival. Image courtesy of Pixabay.

Places to Stay

There is a nice Hampton Inn just south of downtown Dade City, and several hotels in Wesley Chapel along the I-75 and SR 56-SR54 corridor. Camping and RV hookups can be had at the Travelers Rest Resort.

Bring your family to the Annual Kumquat Festival on January 25, 2020, and have a blast discovering Dade City's most renown event. Image courtesy of Pixabay.

Free Admission and Shuttle Service

Free admission, family fun and free shuttle service from parking areas. Satellite parking lots are at the Pasco County Fairgrounds, 36733 State Road 53, Dade City, and along U.S. 301 across from Jarrett Ford. The Kumquat Festival has become an important part of Florida’s Nature Coast, and the 23rd Annual Kumquat Festival January 25 in downtown Dade City promises to be one not to miss.

Frank Gude, president of Kumquat Growers. Image courtesy of Robin Draper.

Where Did the Kumquat Festival Come From?

Nearly 100 years ago, Casper Joseph “J. C.” Nathe came to what is now known as St. Joseph, and worked several jobs to make ends meet, including at a nursery near Jessamine owned by J. W. Ellsworth. There, he became acquainted with the kumquat, an ornamental plant that was given to wish prosperity to the recipient. Nathe planted an acre of kumquat trees in 1912, as well as 50 acres of citrus, and bananas, avocados, guavas, pineapples and vegetables to feed his family and trade for other goods and services.

Kumquat Preserves, a real treat, homemade by Robin Draper. Image courtesy of Robin Draper. The Nathe family used the fruit for preserves and they became popular among area residents. Orders started coming in, so they began growing more kumquats. In less than 15 years, Florida Grower magazine crowned J.C. Nathe “the world’s kumquat king.” Several local St. Joseph families began converting their acreage to the profitable little sweet and sour fruit. From the 1930s to 1962, when a bad freeze destroyed the fruit on most of the trees, the quantity of kumquats grown in this rural area of eastern Pasco County grew and grew. Kumquat Growers, Inc. was started in 1971 by owners/growers Charles Barthle, Frank Gude, Joseph and Paul Neuhofer and Fred Heidgerken. Today, Frank and Rosemarie Gude and Joseph and Margie Neuhofer own the nation's largest producer and shipper of kumquats and kumquat products. They are descendants of the original St. Joseph families that have been growing, packing and selling kumquats for close to 100 years. For more information about the 23rd Annual Kumquat Festival, click here. Read the full article

[wineanddinosaur]

The Winery Wedding Industrial Complex Doesn’t Care if You Have Objections

The greatest bartending move of all time is reported in the New Testament. In the Gospel of John (2:1-11), Jesus is at a party in Cana, chilling with his disciples, when his mother tells him they’ve run out of wine. Lo and behold, he turns their water into wine.

What most people don’t realize, however, is this miracle occurred while the Messiah was at a wedding. That detail precipitates one of the most pervasive trends in present-day America: the winery wedding.

Over the last 20 years, as American beverage and wedding cultures have evolved, winery weddings have transformed from rarity to ubiquity, powered in part by those seeking Instagrammable backdrops for their big day. How did this whole cottage industry start? And if you’re hosting or attending a winery wedding, is it fair to expect the juice will be good?

“I suspect there have always been weddings at wineries as wineries have always had event spaces, hospitality houses,” says Charles Olken, author of the Connoisseurs’ Guide to California Wine, first published in 1980. “And that goes back as long as I’ve been in the business.”

His insight is useful because researching the history of winery weddings on the Internet is extremely difficult. Any combination of search terms results in hundreds of pages of results for wineries advertising their gorgeous grounds.

On Brooklyn Winery’s slick website, for example, the fourth menu heading, after “Shop,” “Tours & Tastings,” and “Winemaking,” is “Weddings.” The lovely onsite wine bar and tasting room is not open to the public on most weekends because it’s too busy hosting wedding receptions that can pull in $50,000 per event. This urban facility in Williamsburg, Brooklyn purports to be, “a uniquely chic space featuring our fully functioning winery as the understated backdrop to your wedding day.” Rather than touting its Chardonnay or Cabernet Franc, the site has a blog with tips on wedding color palettes (not, er, palates), recommended photographers, and “Wedding Shoe Styles We Love.”

The earliest mention of a winery wedding in The New York Times’ “Vows” section I can find is from 1999, when so-called master of the universe J. Todd Morley (“He doesn’t smoke cigars. He’s polite to waiters. He takes calls from old friends with low-paying jobs”) married fashion market director Dorrit Thomas (“She reads a lot, cries easily and always wears a gold bangle between her elbow and shoulder”). Their July wedding took place on a Southampton, NY beach, but the reception for 340 was held “under a tent with a Balinese theme” at Channing Daughters Winery in Bridgehampton, NY.

One year later, the New York Times reported a wedding at Viansa Winery, a small, family-run place at the summit of the Sonoma Valley. From there, winery weddings became more and more commonplace. (Today, Viansa is a massive wedding factory, with meticulously-landscaped, Tuscan-style grounds and an ivy-covered courtyard.)

“It became an accelerating trend really, because if you look at the demographics of the world, things really changed in the ’60s and ’70s. We became a much more middle class nation. Which brought about the wine revolution, soccer, all kinds of progressive things post-World War II,” Olken says. “Meanwhile, weddings were becoming increasingly more expensive generally, people were becoming increasingly more secular, and they started wanting to hold their weddings in places other than churches.”

Enter wineries, one of the few picturesque, indoor-outdoor spaces with a large amount of manicured grounds. By early 2001, Wine Enthusiast was extolling how “the natural beauty of a vineyard is as romantic and elegant a setting as you can get.” Titled “Vows in the Vineyard,” the article included a list of top wedding wineries the country over as well as tips for securing your reservation (“get married on a weekday or on a date between November and March”).

By 2009, wedding publication The Knot started formally tracking winery weddings. The amount doubled nearly every year. As for the Times, it published 30 wedding announcements that specifically cited a winery as their location in 2018; it’s already published 14 more through the first half of 2019.

Credit: Instagram.com/MarvinYeah

Interestingly, these weddings will probably not be held at a winery in America’s most famous wine region.

In Beverly Clark’s 1989 book “Planning a Wedding to Remember,” Napa wineries in particular are touted as a great location for your special day. “Many are old, steeped in tradition and make a beautiful setting for a unique wedding. Some wineries in California’s Napa Valley are known for the hot-air balloons which land at the winery in time for a champagne brunch,” Clark writes.

That same year, however, the Board of Supervisors of the County of Napa issued an ordinance that local agriculture must be protected from events that could deplete it. Though never specifically stated, that meant weddings. And so, aside from a few places that were grandfathered in (Charles Krug Winery, to name one), winery weddings in the county were strictly verboten forevermore.

“Why bring in Las Vegas to Napa?” wrote resident Beta Hyde in support of the ordinance in her letter to the editor of the Napa Valley Register. “When you examine other quality-oriented wine regions of the world, you’ll see that the greatest wine estates are closed to the public and yet they manage to sell their wines at high prices. I’d like to say it’s the quality and not a wedding party that is responsible for their success.”

If Napa has done a somewhat good job staving off weddings for the last two decades—admittedly, quite a few sneak by the ordinance—that just means couples have redirected their attentions to other wine-producing regions, like next-door neighbor Sonoma. According to legal firm IJ Action, Sonoma County hosted 3,000 winery weddings in 2013, injecting $101 million into the local economy. Other regions such as Texas Hill Country, the Charlottesville area of Virginia, the North Fork of Long Island, and New York’s Finger Lakes have also jumped on the trend.

“People like wineries because of the romance,” says Tambi Schweizer, the former tasting hall and wine club manager at Heron Hill Winery, which started holding weddings in 2000 and now does about 25 annually. “The couples want to get their picture in the barrel room. In front of the vineyard it always looks very romantic.”

Ah, yes, pictures. You can’t ignore the importance of Instagrammability in general, but especially at weddings.

“Whether you love wine or not, couples want that wow factor for their wedding more than anything else these days,” explains Ivy Jacobson, who served as digital editor of The Knot.

“They want their guests to say, ‘Wow, I’ve never seen that wedding before!’ They want beautiful pictures to be taken. That’s why unconventional venues like wineries are having a moment. It’s organized with social media in mind more than anything.”

The first time I attended a wedding at a winery was in the Finger Lakes, NY, circa 2005. “How’s the wine here?” I naively asked my buddy, the groom. “Awful,” he responded. We both drank Brooklyn Lagers all night.

A couple of years later, at a wedding at a pastoral winery on the North Fork of Long Island, NY, the bartender insisted I have a Dewar’s instead of the house Chardonnay. At many winery weddings, the bubbles for the toast is carted in from another producer.

Did wineries with bad wine pivot to become wedding venues? Or did the scourge of wedding receptions every weekend lead winery owners to not particularly care if their wine is great, so long as the event deposits keep rolling in?

There do seem to be some wineries that don’t even need to make wine, and exist merely to hold weddings —“Potemkin wineries,” Olken derisively calls them — but Olken doesn’t think good wine and a beautiful setting are mutually exclusive. “I think that’s a fallacy, that if you hold weddings, you have bad wine,” he says. “If you do it right, you can do both very well.”

The question is: Does anyone care?

Olken recalls attending a wedding a few years back at the well-regarded Thomas Fogarty Winery in the hills of the San Francisco Peninsula. It had lovely views of the vineyards, and the wine was delicious.

The kicker, however, was that the bride and groom didn’t just not drink that particular vineyard’s wine… They didn’t drink at all.

“It’s a very attractive place, which is why these wealthy kids chose it,” Olken says. “They didn’t choose it because of the wine; they couldn’t care less. So it doesn’t matter that that winery was a decent winery. All they care about is the optics.”

So do other couples, and that’s why this wedding winery industrial complex has sprung up in areas not exactly known for producing world-class wine, like, say, Brooklyn—where, admittedly, the grapes are trucked in from Long Island. Thus, maybe it’s not the wineries that are cynical. Maybe it’s the bride and groom. And maybe it’s always been that way.

Even in that initial Wine Enthusiast article from 2001, the magazine noted, “You might think that the people who get married at wineries must all be crazy about wine…most brides and grooms interviewed for this article said that an attractive outdoor location was their top criterion for a wedding or reception site.”

So if I’ve mostly had bad wine at winery weddies, maybe it was simply my bad luck that the couples getting married cared more about the setting, the romance, the potential for killer photos, than what their guests would be drinking all night. Hell, maybe I should be paying more attention to my friends’ weddings than focusing on how good or bad their wine is.

Credit: BKWinery.com

Now, certain wineries are finally starting to realize that having non-wine fans in for a raucous Saturday night might not actually benefit their business in the long term. Jim Nocek, owner of Anyela Vineyard in New York’s Finger Lakes, toys with putting an end to having wedding receptions on his estate. He had offered them since 2009, holding about 20 per year.

Initially, he thought it was nothing more than a smart business decision. Opening a winery is “capital intensive,” he tells me; his vineyard was planted in 2001 and he wasn’t even able to start earning a single dollar from it for another five years. Using his facilities for the most effective economic capacities was a good insurance measure.

“When you look at, certainly, the booking of an event for a certain amount of money, it’s a sure thing,” he says, “as opposed to ‘Is this going to be a good Saturday or a bad one?’”

As the years moved on, his wine became better regarded, and his winery and the Finger Lakes in general became more of a wine tourism destination, he began to question the need for weddings. He hated always having part of his winery blocked off on weekends for receptions.

“We were cannibalizing some of our regular Saturday business,” he explained. “And that concerned me a great deal. We were first a winery before anything else. That’s our core business.”

He had also learned that weddings aren’t always the massive cash cow that they seem to be to outsiders. There are all kinds of hidden costs and challenges, like setting up temporary seating, coordinating with caterers (few wineries have kitchens), and not annoying countryside neighbors with loud music. There’s countless headaches to deal with as well, including portable bathrooms getting flooded, and young, drunken guests mistreating the facilities.

With so few weekends during the summer, Nocek started thinking it would be better to focus on the true wine fans—those who might actually return to the vineyard every year—as opposed to uninterested, one-time reception guests. As of summer 2019, Anyela Vineyard is no longer hosting wedding receptions.

“Certainly part of the challenge is you have to identify what you’re about. You’re about selling wine,” Nocek explains. “So hopefully [the bride and groom] would like wine and their invitees would like wine and you’d sell more wine. But that’s not usually true and I think there was definitely a diversion from what we had initially wanted to do.”

Olken doesn’t own a winery, but he agrees with Nocek’s way of thinking.

“The argument has become that the wineries need the weddings to survive economically. “But do they?” Olken asks. The U.S. has gone from around 6,000 wineries in 2009 to more than 10,000 today and only continues to grow, generating some $200 billion in revenue. “The failure rate of wineries is infinitesimal to the failure rate of pretty much all other businesses. They just don’t fail. You have to be an absolute idiot at winemaking and wine-selling to fail at it.

“We just don’t lose a lot of wineries. Weddings or not.”

The article The Winery Wedding Industrial Complex Doesn’t Care if You Have Objections appeared first on VinePair.

source https://vinepair.com/articles/winery-wedding-trend/