DA’ Vine Words

If you are anything like most wine-heads I know, you are always traveling to undiscovered territory, varied by both varietal and producer, on the hunt for the next perfect glass of high. Wine-heads don’t seek to conquer our unquenchable thirst but rather to indulge it.

Community Building: Does Size Really Matter?

With so much focus on “building” and “adding” friends, karma, votes, points, followers, kudos et al, we may tend to lose sight of the quality of our online connections and friendships. Does size really matter when it comes to building your online community? In short, more could equal less.

Wine Tasting Etiquette: Stop, Drop & Roll

This three part series will explore wine tasting etiquette from the tasting room to the barrel room to the living room. Don’t be that guy who asks if they can drink the contents of the dump bucket or makes inappropriate jokes about the bung hole. Taste like a pro and be proud of it.

Socializing Your Brand

With peer-to-peer marketing and advertising now ubiquitous online, new platforms designed to create sociable widgets and embeddable media rich content are propagating across the web. Widgetbox, SpringWidgets, and Sprout are among countless new applications empowering users to create personalized widgets, social networking badges, RSS feed readers and living content.

Innovative Ways To Tell A Story

In the tale, in the telling, we are all one blood. Take the tale in your teeth, then, and bite till the blood runs, hoping it’s not poison; and we will all come to the end together, and even to the beginning: living, as we do, in the middle. - Ursula K. Le Guin

Storytelling has always been a collaborative work of art, thriving within the symbiotic relationship between reader and author, each experiencing the tale from beginning to end as an invention of the imagination. Now, with the myriad of social tools found online, a different kind of alliance is evolving.

Rabbit by Katrina Joy Plam

Jackrabbits are the soothsayers of wine country. The heavy hind-legged furry friends take to the valley floors with fast-footed abandoned, laying them selves upon the merciless vanguard of winemaking production. They run the highways, the vineyards, and the cemeteries freely, always on the go and with the intention of taking flight away from danger, or towards food, or in the directions of a mild bit of curiosity. They see all. They know all. They laugh with one another in hind-legged Morse code.

My best friend in wine country is a winemaker and I call him Rabbit. He is wise and whimsical like the jackrabbits and has lived in winecountry for a long time. He makes wine out of his garage. During crush season his hands are a constant shade of crimson red, stained by the blood of grapes that have given their lives over to his magic brew. When I drink his wine, I taste his explosive laughter and the strength of character with which he conducts himself in the world, mixed with his appetite for decadence.

In a dream, Rabbit and I engage with jackrabbits in a cemetery while looking for my great, great grandmother’s tombstone. We sit on tombstones, feet dangling and watch a still, blue sky. “So you look for a Josephine, do you?” he asks with disinterest. Rabbit looks towards to the horizon and rubs his lower back.

“I am,” I say. Three jackrabbits arrive at our feet and engage us in conversation with whiskered curiosity. “Look, see. Their whiskers are moving,” I point to the three jackrabbits sitting at our feet. “But I’m afraid I can’t find her.” I hand him a sandwich from a paper sack brought by one of the jackrabbits.

“Clever fucking rabbits,” he muses. He unwraps the wax paper wrapped goodie, a chicken salad sandwich. “Are you afraid there is no truth or that there is no great, great grandmother? ” He takes a generous bite.  “Thank you for the nosh. This is nice.” He smiles towards the sky.

In the dream, the three jackrabbits feed us and give us each a tickle on bare feet with their whiskers and then leave.

Rabbit is the antithesis of a small, furry animal. He is a big man with big hands and he never ceases to amaze the world with his ability to pick up heavy objects and move them anywhere he pleases as if they were giant chess pieces made out of cardboard. He wears his hair slicked back and pulled into a small ponytail at the nape of his neck befitting to his persona of the strong man at the circus. Rabbit is one of the rockstar winemakers in the valley and, like most winemakers, he is not a heavy consumer of wine; instead, he smokes hash from a large vaporizer that lives on a granite marble counter in his kitchen.

In a morning ritual, he dips the ends of clove cigarettes in hash oil and gently places them in a silver cigarette case. He carries these proctored cloves along with him on his daily visits to the various vineyards that he consults for.

“Water is so plain tasting,” Rabbit remarks as he pulls a Modelo from a cooler in the back seat of his car.

“You’re totally right. Water sucks.” I’m sipping sparkling wine from a paper cup. We’re driving into the city for dim sum and to take a walk on the beach.

I’m wearing a pink summer dress and a blue, tight denim jacket, and red flip-flops, clearly the wrong attire for the windy San Francisco and maybe the wrong impression for Rabbit. He said I looked beautiful when he picked me up. It’s unclear if we’re on a date or just hanging out as friends.

We find a parking spot near Good Luck Dim Sum, just off Clement Street in the Richmond district.  We sit, we order drinks, and the parade of food in bamboo containers begins. Rabbit’s ample hands scoop up his favorites of the passing dishes. He introduces me to what’s what. These are steamed buns stuffed with barbecued pork and these delicious deep-fried dumplings have a wrapper made from mashed taro root. We chew and sip and awkwardly smile and he asks, “So, is this a date?”

If Rabbit were a soothsayer, like the jackrabbits in Napa, he would tell me things that I would not want to know like this relationship ends badly. This unclear beginning only ends in a complete dismantling of self and soul. But such soothsaying is not the idle conversation of those enjoying dim sum in the city.

“I am not sure,” I offer him the last piece of shrimp toast.

He smiles and pops it into his mouth. Rabbit consumes the toast, my words, and my life in general with the pleasure of an appetite never quite satisfied.

After lunch, we take Rabbit’s dog Greta for a walk on the beach. My feet are turning red from the leather straps of my flip-flops. Rabbit throws pieces of driftwood towards the coastline and Greta chases after them, alternately nipping at saltwater and sand. There is a strong headwind and we lean in, pushing our weight against the pressure, forging ahead to no particular place. Rabbit stops and grabs my hand. I look into his dark brown eyes always smiling but always with a single tear ready to drop. He bends down to kiss me. Our lips clumsily find a place to perch and he pulls me in closer. I appreciate being held close, he makes me feel safe, but the kiss makes me giggle and feel strange like holding hands with your mom as an adult. It’s not exactly a bad kiss but it’s not the kind of kiss you want to be seen having. I suggest we go back to the car where it’s warm. We sit in a parked car and overlook the ocean with the heat on blast. I brush sand off my red stained feet and he opens the cooler and finds another beer and refills my paper cup with sparkling wine. “I think you will like this Schramsberg,” he says.

I take a sip. “It’s got that yummy guava and pomegranate taste that I love.”

On the drive back to Napa, he lights up one of his cloves dipped in hash oil and I smoke a regular one. I think about the kiss and how much I love Rabbit. He’s my best friend and I have never felt as safe and comfortable with anyone in all my life even when he is drinking and driving high on hash. It’s a friendship where all the non-verbal cues are understood and your timing is always in synch and you want the same things at the same time – let’s listen to M. Wards new album, let’s take magic mushrooms and watch Happy Feet, let’s have a picnic in a vineyard with tequila and PBnJ sandwiches, let’s fly to Tahiti and bury each other in the sand and get high on fruity cocktails and endless beaches – and something about the kiss feels like a third party coming in and throwing off all of our blissful, perfect timing. I have no words for the new visitor; I want to politely ask the kiss to leave but I don’t want to upset Rabbit. I want to keep him laughing gigantic belly laughs and enjoying decadent food and moving French oak barrels around like they are made of cardboard because he needs these things to make his magic brew and I need these things because he is my best friend and he makes me feel safe in the world.

“Do you want to come over for dinner tonight? I can make you my famous seared duck salad.”

“Sure,” I tell him, “I’d love to….” And I know the kiss is joining us for dinner even without asking and I say nothing.

Fishnets and Vodka by Katrina Joy Plam

“Clean-up on aisle nine.” A nasally voice interrupted the low drone of soft rock tunes that I was humming along with. “Can we get a clean-up on aisle nine, immediately please.” The second time around, the voice on the intercom spoke louder, enunciating each and every syllable.

Simmer down, I thought to myself. What’s the urgency at eleven o’clock in the evening on a weeknight?I wandered down the chip aisle, running my hands along the cool plastic bags filled with cheese and salt dusted delights. I could hear a commotion on the next aisle over and considered checking it out. Then I looked at my list. Mintz was specific about the list: -black fishnets, size large, -half-gallon of cheap vodka, and he added a gold star sticker next to the words, “Hurry home, Chicken.”

We’d been working on a music video for friends of ours for the past forty-eight hours. Mintz was directing, which really amounted to him supplying the cast and crew with a steady stream of ketamine and booze while he sent me off on errands at the grocery store. Less than two hours ago, I was here picking up eggs and sponges.

Mintz had set-up the cameras and lighting a week ago and invited the cast and crew over for a get-to-know-you, pre-production party. Mintz wanted to capture all the footage “al fresco” as he called it. What he really wanted was to capture the band in various states of being wholly outside of themselves. It was working. We had a house full of wacky with a guitarist groping egg yolks, a lead-singer gluing sponges to his ass, and a naked tambourine player walking around in a tiara with a stuffed unicorn on a leather leash in tow. Mintz was getting great footage.

I knew where the booze was. This was my local store, dimly lit with cluttered aisles, a small market within walking distance from the house, and I already had the fishnets, size large, in my basket. It was just a matter of grabbing the vodka, paying for my things, and making the ten minutes walk back to the film shoot. As I was rounded the alcohol section, the voice on the intercom said, “Chicken, we need you on aisle nine.”

On the one hand, I was mildly annoyed that the voice on the intercom kept interrupting my only chance at listening to soft rock without a diatribe from Mintz about its destruction on the human kind.  “Four-part harmony is the root of all evil,” Mintz would say. On the other hand, I was curious about aisle nine and how the voice on intercom knew my name.

Aisle nine, I knew, was full of soup cans and boxed meals. Worse case, it’d be a spaghetti and meatball spill with slip and stain causing potential. At the very least, I could offer my condolences to the lost dinner and give the grocery store clerk a high-five for his quick and efficient damage control. Neither one of my good intentions had the opportunity to transpire; instead, when I arrived at aisle nine, I forgot how to blink.

Luckily, I was in my finest, a floor length purple gown with a plunging back and neckline. Mintz rented all these thirties era costumes for the shoot and we fought over this dress, guys included, but Mintz stood up for me. “Chicken gets the gown,” he told the crew. And what Mintz said was never questioned.

A string quartet, instruments down, was spooning up Campbell’s chunky soup from the can, tossing their empty tins on a pile accumulating at the foot of a man wearing a tuxedo, watching television on a flat-screen television that took up the top shelf of where one would normally find a wide variety of boxed rice and noodles.

Once the string quartet saw me, they chucked their half-eaten cans of soup on the pile as chunks of processed meat and sauce spilled out in all directions, and raised their violas, violin and cello. They began Luigi Boccherini’s Minuetto from String Quartet in E Major. The tuxedoed man rose from the overstuffed armchair, turned the television off, and held out his hand to me.

I took his assured hand and he swiftly and without hesitation moved me as if we’d been dancing together for years. I could here tiny macaroni noodles and bits of rice cheering us on, tossing themselves up against one another to make noise inside their usually quiet boxes. It was not soon after he took my hand that our bodies began to rise up. I waved goodbye to the basket with the fishnets and half-gallon jug of vodka. Transformed by an unexpected song and dance, my familiar neighborhood market with the dimly lit crowded aisles appeared all together different. From above, it was a pastiche of color or shapes, something not unlike a Cezanne landscape.

The man in the very smart tuxedo wrapped his arms around my waist and twirled me around as I waved, like a parade float princess to the produce and vegetables. Bananas stood up in erect salute, peaches, apples, and oranges rolled around on one another in celebration, and the lettuce moved their leaves back in forth in a slow, romantic gesture.

I thought briefly about Mintz and the cast and crew back at the house, but I was only mildly sad that he was missing my al-fresco moment. This clean up on aisle nine was mine and mine alone. “Chicken gets the dance,” I thought to myself, and there was no grocery list to tell me otherwise.

Turn Old Content Into Fresh News

In the era of new media publishing, it’s not uncommon to go back to older blog posts to update them with new information and fresh news; adding linkbait, such as a groovy how-to article or running a contest, will also help boost your page rank. While old world thinking would have us believe that what’s published is the final world, the fluid nature of the web and the confluence of ever-evolving information flips the script on that logic and insists that we keep things fresh to stay in the news.  There are a few simple ways to give a face-lift to aging blog posts:  More at Portland Internet Design….