Left Coast Cowboys

Whole Foods has taken a lot of heat recently — mostly due to CEO John MacKey’s Wall Street Journal Op-Ed piece on the Health Care debate. What sparked a lot of criticism was his somewhat clueless opinion that if people would only eat organic food, they wouldn’t need expensive health care. Aside from the fact that this doesn’t take into account accidents, hereditary diseases or the unluck of the draw that is most cancers that can strike even the healthiest, his comments, to anyone who’s ever priced groceries in Whole Foods, was laughably naive.

Even national chains like Aveda couldn't stay in business once our anchor store closed in a snit.

Even the Middle Class gasp when shopping at Whole Paycheck. And if you’ve ever read any of Michael Pollan’s books, you’ll know that American Farm Policy, which heavily subsidizes large agri-business, stacks the deck against the producers of good, nutritious food. Growing corn for high-fructose corn syrup, genetically modified soybeans or operating a huge warehoused beef or chicken factory? The playing field is specially leveled for you. Small farmer growing sustainable, responsibly grown produce? Good luck. The red tape alone might be enough to drive you out of business. One of the most heartbreaking scenes in the recent documentary, Food Inc., was of a Hispanic family that was barely covering their bills with three jobs between the two adults. They knew about good nutrition. They weren’t clueless. But they were shown trying to stretch their tiny food budget to cover healthy food. Couldn’t do it. Finally, they resorted to McDonald’s. The mother, with tears in her eyes, said she felt she was being a bad mother to succumb to Micky D’s, but some weeks it was the only way they could afford enough food for a meal for four.

Our new Whole Foods has a nice meat counter. But my local independent butcher will still get my roast orders. I bet Drewes Market can still do a better job sourcing local specialty meat, like game.

But, I’m here to tell you, that, at least in my neighborhood, I think Whole Foods has gotten it right. A little background: it’s probably naive to think that a purveyer of organic foods would have a stronger social conscience than another retailer, but call me naive. Call my whole neighborhood naive. That’s why it hurt so much when we were royally screwed over by The Real Foods store when the chain was taken over by the Utah corporation Neutraceutical International. When Neutracuetical took over, they promptly fired all the employees in a union busting move (I’m calling it a union-busting move because that’s what the courts deemed that it was. The former employees won the case.) In a snit, Neutracuetical boarded up the store, let it become a magnet for graffiti, and refused to talk to neighborhood leaders or our City Supervisor. They also refused offers to buy the building by some very interested parties. Our neighborhood is pretty small and it’s not on the way to anything famous in San Francisco, so we don’t get much outside traffic. Our little neighborhood is filled with small mom and pop shops that have relied on a large “anchor” store to bring in the outside traffic that keeps our retail strip viable. Many merchants reported their business dropped off as much as 40% once Real Foods closed. After five years, our high street was looking like a ghost town. Even the Aveda outlet and GNC, national chains, couldn’t stay in business.

Then Whole Foods negotiated to buy the sadly outdated Bell Market that had been across from Real Foods. Bell had just never kept step with the times. In a neighborhood of crunchy granola activists and increasing gentrification, it was still selling buckets of lard, the cheapest canned goods and wilted produce. From the start Whole Foods reached out to the neighborhood. They sent representatives to City Council meetings and community meetings. They always had time for our District Supervisor. As the neighborhood became more desperate and more and more stores on the street closed, they accelerated their opening plans.

The day before they opened, they had a little party with live music and free food in their parking lot. It was unadvertised and was clearly for the locals. Today at opening day, they had masses of smiling aproned workers walking through the store with clipboards ready to answer any questions customers had. (Contrast that with the parking attendants who were running their small lot like a Police State. That’s okay if it brings more foot and bike traffic down past the other local shops.)

Walking in today, I was stunned to see that most of the promises they’d made to the neighborhood about the store, which I’d read skeptically in our local rag, had been kept. My complaint about Whole Foods has been that they have a lot of organic produce that is shipped up from Chile and other places. At that carbon cost, it’s better to eat conventionally grown as long as it’s local. Whole Foods also, at least in their bigger stores, seem to pay only lip service to local sourcing. They show lovely pictures of local farmers, but if you read the small print on the bins, you see that most of the stuff doesn’t even come from California. And most is out of season.

Well, not in my store. As I strolled through, I noticed every bin and produce rack had large signs telling you the origins of the food: Petaluma, Marin, Monterrey. The most long travelled items were from Washington State and Bakersfield. Well, that’s still pretty local. Maybe the difference is that our store is about half the square footage of a normal Whole Foods. They don’t have the room for six large tables of oranges. There is just one table. And it’s showcasing California grown.

Another big difference, I’m hypothesizing, is the local Whole Foods team. Apparently, they were a pretty autonomous group that was responsible for getting this store up and running and integrating it into the neighborhood. I’m sure there are corporate perameters they must follow, but is it a coincidence that so many local suggestions for the store were realized? I think not. Which is a good reminder that a company isn’t just the CEO. It’s also dedicated field people and local branches. Judging from this case, when those people are given enough latitude and autonomy, they’ll do the right thing for the neighborhood they’re in.

Yes, there are several local merchants who are worried. There’s a wonderful cheesemonger, The Cheese Shop, down the road. They don’t need to worry. Whole Foods has the popular basics covered, but for those exotic cheeses and a greater variety, I’ll still stop there. The local butcher shop, Drewes Market, will still get my orders for sausage, holiday roasts and game — all of which they source from Marin and Sonoma. I was disappointed to see that Whole Foods was running a coffee stand in the store, something they had hinted they wouldn’t do out of respect for our local coffee shops. But I popped into Bernies and they said they’d been mobbed. With the increased traffic coming to the neighborhood, they felt there was enough business to go around.

Bernie's has better coffee than Whole Foods, plus Wi-Fi and places to sit. They aren't worried.

So kudos to the local team that put together this Whole Foods. It’s not the whole answer. If you are really concerned about supporting sustainable agriculture, you’ll still go to the farmer’s market and to places like Drewes Market. But, let’s be realistic, not everyone has the time every day to make that trip. And Farmer’s Markets don’t always run year round, even in California. So my Whole Foods will now be part of the mix when I’m not in Sonoma.

So this post was supposed to be about the lovely walk from the barn to the crush pad that I’ll be taking three times a day now that we’ve had a first harvest and I need to do thrice daily punch downs and readings. I was going to amaze you with beautiful photographs of woodlands, flowers and vistas. You would almost be able to smell the fragrance of Sonoma in Autumn. See what I mean in the photo above of the road past the vineyards? Gorgeous.

Then Oscar came along for the walk. And like most terriers, he can be a game changer.

But first let’s set the scene. One of the best parts of the walk is the Insectarium. This is an extensive planting, all along the upper vineyard, of native plants that attract beneficial birds and bees. As in those good guys who pollinate the grapes or eat all the nasty vine-eating bugs . The trick is to arrange for year-round color (or a year-round buffet if you are looking at it from the insect/bird point of view). Not as easy as you would think in a place where the fierce summer sun burns everything to a crisp by July. But our landscape expert has managed to find a great collection of natives that are indeed providing color all year.

Look at these pretty plants! I love the way some of them bend over like a flower waterfall.

How about this one that just burst into bloom?

I even know the name of this one. It's Echinacea.

The interesting thing about our native plants is that they don’t have sweet, flowery smells like those you’d associate with flowers growing in more temperate and rainy climates. Here in semi-arid Sonoma, our flowers and plants have sort of a peppery, spicy smell.

But wait, what’s that whiff I’m getting? It’s not peppery or spicy. It’s distinctly rotten and horrible. And it’s coming from the area of our harvested lavender.

It's Oscar holding some large, furry, decidedly dead thing.

It's the head and full backbone of a baby deer. And Oscar is not going to share with Lucy.

But he will share with me. At least he'll share the aroma of his "kill", as he waits patiently for me to open the gates.

Behold the Mighty Hunter. Or is it The Day of the Jackal?

Quick. Think nice thoughts. Don't think about Bambi. Hey, look at the view!

Take some readings. Think wine. Think nice thoughts.

Then walk back to the barn through the flowers. Behind a terrier. And the wafting smell of carrion.

The harvest has finally begun. And as it happened last year, the Cinsault was the first of our varietals to ripen. Which is a good thing since we’ve planted very little of it. It’s a gentle beginning before the tons of Mourvedre, Grenache and Cabernet get going. Further good news is that we kind of know what we’re doing by this point. Or, at the least, we have better equipment. So up at the crack of dawn Sunday for the harvest. Just us two. And some terriers for comic relief.

A bit of background: Cinsault (pronounced San-So) is a traditional Rhone blending grape. I have seen one or two single varietal Cinsaults around Sonoma, but mostly, since it’s pretty sweet, it’s used to give a little balance to a Rhone blend that is mostly Grenache, Mourvedre, Syrah and/or Merlot. The predominate nose is supposed to be strawberry. I can tell you that was NOT the dominant aroma of last year’s Cinsault. But hey, the vines weren’t mature yet and we didn’t really know what we were doing. We have higher hopes for this year’s harvest.

Unlike the tiny tanniny berries on Cabernet vines, Cinsault bunches are big, fat and sassy. With an almost sweet flavor right off the vine.

Andy cuts with the traditional mini-sythe grape cutter.

I have a different weapon of choice: kitchen shears. Yes, in the field, I can cut a bunch of grapes or bone a chicken. Julia Child would be proud.

Meanwhile, once at the crush pad:

Here's our entire Cinsault harvest. About 400 pounds. Which is chicken shit in grape harvesting terms.

So the bins are dropped off at the top of the crush pad. I sit on the concrete ledge here and drop the grapes, bunch by bunch, into the crusher/destemmer that you can just glimpse below. Andy then pours the crushed grapes into the big white primary fermentation vats, in the right of the picture.

So this whole dropping grapes thing. Well, it's like picking 400 lbs of grapes all over again.

400 lbs. of grapes is a lot. Especially twice in a morning.

Terriers are no help at all.

Once you have the crushed/destemmed grapes in a primary fermentation vat, it's called a "must". And you stir it. You'll keep stirring it up three times a day for about a week.

After this point, Dr. Frankenwine retreated to his lab to do very complex things like testing acidity and calculating how much yeast and tartaric acid to add to the whole mix. It’s all a little beyond me, so that bit will have to wait until I can get the Mad Scientist to sit down and explain everything. Meanwhile, I discovered something alarming: a mouse invasion (the crush pad is outdoors after all.) Recently the mice had built a nest on the engine of the crusher/destemmer and one poor guy had crawled into an empty vat and died. Yes, all of these things were cleaned and disinfected before the crush! Although I’m told the French would just shrug and say “Eet ees thee terroir.” But this is America. So Andy devised an elaborate plastic and duct tape mouse barrier to go underneath the vat cover.

Take that Trixie and Dixie, Stuart Little and Tom and Jerry. No meeses in our wine.

Time for clean up. This is where terriers come into their own. HOSE PATROL!

Oh, and all those stems that were separated from the grapes? Those go over the side of the hill for the deer. They love them!

Deer don't want no Cinsault. Just give them the stems!

More pictures of the Cinsault 2009 Harvest and Crush here.

It was 104 degrees yesterday. We’d done all the prep work for the harvest that we could and we had to escape the sun. Hmmm. What’s a nice cool activity? How about something that requires hours in front of boiling pots in a barn loft with no air conditioning? Yeah! Let’s make jam. Okay, I knew at the time it was a bad idea, but I’ve got batches of tomatoes ripening by the hour, we’re eating them with every meal, I’ve canned 12 pounds of them, I’ve got friends on a quota system and I still can’t keep ahead of the harvest.

So canning time it was. And the tomato product of choice was tomato marmalade from The Big Book of Preserving the Harvest by Carol W. Costenbader. That required 5 lbs. of tomatoes. Not a problem. That many are ripening in a morning these days. It also required one orange, one lemon, 3 cups of sugar, a bit of cider vinegar and allspice, cinnamon and cloves, all ground.

Now for the first vat of boiling liquid, the water to loosen the skins of the tomatoes. Not a problem. After my canned tomato adventure, I’m an expert at this: dunk ‘em in boiling water for 30 seconds, drop them in ice water, then the skin peels right off.

One flick of my special tomato knife and off come the skins and out comes the core. I powered through those 5 pounds in no time.

Now here’s where it gets tricky: that orange and that lemon. Turns out you have to carefully peel off the zest which is the thinnest uppermost part of the peel and DON’T WHATEVER YOU DO GET A SPECK OF THE PITH, THAT NASTY WHITE STUFF, WITH IT. Okay, my cookbook author didn’t exactly write those instructions that way or in capital letters but I sensed the urgency. She didn’t explain exactly what would happen if I inadvertently allowed pith to contaminate my zest. Bitterness? A dangerous chemical reaction? A meth lab like explosion? Note to cookbook writers: We laypeople like to know these things.

If that ShamWow/SlapChop guy would invent a reliable gizmo to separate the zest from the pith, he'd have my money. This can take hours.

There is clearly some dangerous pith on my zest here, but by the time I got to the lemon, I was ready to brave the consequences.

So once I’d separated the zest from the pith and peeled the fruit, AGGGHHH! I’ve got pithy covered peeled fruit.

So you scrape off this pithy white stuff with your fingernail. Unless that ShamWow/SlapChop guy really does have a gizmo for this task.

Did I mention you also cut the zest into delicate little confetti-like strips?

What wasn’t mentioned by the cookbook author at this point is what you do with these strips. She had me adding the tomatoes, sugar, vinegar, citrus fruit and spices into the pot. But what about that zest? No mention. Do I throw it in the air and yell “Happy New Year”? Sure, I figured out it was supposed to go in there with everything else. But specifics, people. Some of us have never done this before.

I really wanted to use my Mother of All Pressure Canners again. It’s faster and at least the heat stays in. But no, no one will give you a recipe for pressure canning jams. It’s water bath all the way. And no one gives you a reason why. Specifics, people, specifics.

So you start with a soupy tomatoey citrusy soup.

A mere few hours later, you've got a jammy sticky mess.

Did I say a few hours? Well, that’s after the hours and hours and hours it takes to get all that water for the water bath up to boiling. Not to mention that the cookbook didn’t really specify how high to simmer the marmalade concoction. But it did warn: BE CAREFUL NOT TO BURN THE MIXTURE. So I probably simmered it at close to room temperature which no doubt took three times the required cooking. I started this whole process at about five and by eleven thirty, I was just taking the canned, sealed marmalade out of the water bath — which required only 10 minutes processing. Only ten minutes. Imagine that.

Did I mention my yield? Here it is, from all those pounds of fruit.

These are four half-pints. From over 5 pounds of fruit. This better be worth it.

Close to midnight and I had a few spoonfuls of leftover jam that didn’t fit in the cans. So I woke Andy up to taste it. Because I wasn’t going to wait for confirmation of those hours of work.

Wow! Explosion in the mouth. Huge burst of the savoriest most tomatoey goodness in the world. The Platonic Ideal of Rich Sweet Tomatoey Ambrosia.

High fives all around. The hours of slaving over boiling vats on the hottest day of the year. Completely worth it for this stuff, which I will serve with a cheese plate and small slices of brown bread. You couldn’t have more than a teaspoon of this tomato marmalade at a time or your head would probably explode from the intense tomatoey goodness.

Just two more thoughts. To my friend Susi who is insisting that I put “Win a Blue Ribbon at the Sonoma County Fair” on my Bucket List: I’ve got the winner, Household Arts Division.

To the lovely and talented Ree Drummond who just missed being my BlogHer BFF, hey who’s The Pioneer Woman NOW!

First the good news: the deer are back at Two Terrier Vineyards. Which most people in Sonoma would think we were crazy to celebrate. Drive around here and you’ll see most places completely fenced in from the deer. The local hardware store does a brisk business in deer repellant, especially the faux coyote wee that’s marketed under the name “Not Tonight, Deer”. We gave in and fenced the vineyards, since it would only take three hungry deer to strip all our vines. But otherwise, we’re actively trying to attract them. We built a little pond and waterfall to give them water during the dry months and I’m thinking of giving them a salt lick. They faded away into the adjacent State Park recently since John the Baptist has been here with a chainsaw cutting brush. But recently, we’ve seen Chuck the Buck (that’s him at the top of the post) as well as his harem of does hanging around the wine cave and crush pad. That’s no coincidence. Every year after we’ve crushed and pressed, I’ve taken the pressed skins (which, after they’re removed from the press, resemble a very rich Christmas fruitcake) and thrown them over the side of the hill for the deer. They love it! And they’re sensing that the crush is just around the corner, so they’re already lining up.

Not my pic! This is from Corbis Images and looks disturbingly like a stuffed coyote. Mine are just this fat, but considerably more lively.

Which brings me to the next class of critter — or varmint, depending on your point of view. Also back in force are our coyotes. I’ve never managed to get a picture of one — not that they seem all that scared of me. When we were still spending weekends up at the tent cabin, we’d wake up in the morning to find coyote poo on the deck. Which is certainly a coyote way of disrespecting you and your little dogs, too. One morning, one of them strolled by down the path in front of the cabin. The dogs were going crazy but were too scared to leave the cabin. The coyote just looked at us disdainfully, sniffed the air and walked on. He certainly had no reason to fear terriers as he was the size of a young German Shepherd with a full and glossy coat. Clearly the Master of His Domain.

Just the other day, John the Baptist and Louis showed up to cut brush and saw two adults and two or three youngsters skulking in the bushes outside the barn. The coyotes retreated into the brush, but didn’t run away when they saw John and Louis, who reported that these were also coyotes of the fat and sassy persuasion. I know I might feel differently when we have horses, but right now, we’re being overrun by gophers and moles since the rattlesnakes moved on. So coyotes are welcome here. The buffet is laid out.

And speaking of the least welcome little varmints, at the top of the list put whatever is eating up my poor haricot verts before they can even sprout. Judging from the location and quality of the fox poo around here, I’d say the foxes have moved on to the vineyard — which is fine because they aren’t tall enough to grab many grapes. But some little critters are stalking my garden.

Here are my poor little sprouts chewed to the nubbins. This is my second planting. The first was completely chewed, uprooted and destroyed.

Here's what I hope is critter-proof netting that I'm praying will protect the third planting.

The next tactic is to post a sign that says: “All You Can Eat Buffet, Coyotes Eat FREE!”

Meanwhile in other vineyard news, we may be picking and crushing the Cinsault as early as tomorrow!