Left Coast Cowboys

After weeks of unseasonably warm and fog-free weather, the day dawned for my Photography class’s field trip to Pacifica’s Mori Point. And wouldn’t you know it, the fog rolled in with a vengance. Since the purpose of the field trip was to learn to reduce glare with a polarizing filter, the point of the trip was somewhat negated. But we showed up anyway and tramped around in the fog and the wind looking for something reflective to neutralize with our polarizing filters.

No sun. Cold wind. Fog. But our fearless Prof, Nish, kept up a brave face and sent us out to combat non-existent glare.

We’re going to have to call the photo safari a wash-out, but I was pleased to discover this almost unknown little State Park, which is apparently the home of two endangered local species: the San Francisco Garter Snake and the California Red-Legged Frog. Overall Mori Point is an interesting hiking, running and biking spot with windswept bluffs, fresh-water ponds and odd art installations.

The endangered and colorful San Francisco garter snake. Photo by Todd Steiner.

The endangered California Red-Legged Frog. Photo by Kathleen Freel.

If you want the easy wilderness experience, Mori Point has lots of flat paved trails.

Or you can take the wilder paths up to the bluffs.

We were at the point to mitigate glare with polarizing filters. Ooops. Not much glare today.

But I gave it the old college try. This is a pic of my props without the polarizing filter.

And this is the same scene with the amazing mitigating factor of a polarizing filter.

So final score: Field Trip Success, D-. Interesting new wild area found: A-.

 From reading my posts in the last six weeks, you probably think it’s all Cincault, Grenache, crushpads and winemaking here at Two Terrier Vineyards. Actually the winemaking section of TTV — in fact the whole “inhabited by humans” part of the property — is relatively small. You can’t landscape 40 acres. And why would you want to? We’re trying to keep as much natural as possible. The fact that our property butts up on a State protected wilderness area makes it that much easier. The critters are already here. In fact, it’s pretty much their world. We just live in it.

Since the torrential rains of the past few days have cleared. Let’s take a walk through some of the wilder parts of the place.

Ready to go? Oscar and Lucy are.

The trail leads down to a seasonal creek. The trails were cut from existing deer trails. Deer make pretty good trails.

Existing fallen logs were used to mark the trail boundary. You must examine these carefully as small furry critters may be hiding in them.

Speaking of furry critters, this cave is where we think a Mountain Lion lives.

Time out here to explain: We had an incredibly talented guy in to cut our trails. The crews working on the barn called him John the Baptist because he always wore sandals and had waist length blond dreadlocks that were full of twigs and leaves. We called him Tom Bombadil after the forest guardian in The Hobbit. John is a master at rearranging nature in a sensitive way so that you have a trail that looks as if it had always been there. Actually it had, because John tries always to make trails on existing deer trails.

John is also fearless. After stumbling over a few steaming, fresh-killed deer carcasses and seeing tracks, he decided a Mountain Lion had taken up residency. And he went to look for it. He thought this cave in the cliff overhanging the trail might be a good place to look, so he climbed up here and found more bones and cat prints. Suspicions confirmed.

Since the Mountain Lion’s preferred way of killing is to leap on you from a great height, I’m not sure how we feel about is lair being over the trail. Luckily, Mountain Lions have a range of about 100 miles so they don’t live in one place all the time. So, just in case he’s in residency, I always send small children and terriers down the trail first. Call it an insurance policy.

Now back to the tour.

This seasonal creek was a trickle last week. Now it's well on its way to being the roaring river it will be in late Spring.

It's a great swimming hole for terriers.

Further on is an old Indian grinding stone. We've found arrowheads down here. It may have been a Miwok migration route.

Further down is a stand of 500 year old redwoods. Andy was obviously dressed for safari.

Manzanitas look even more sculptural in the rain. There are hundreds of them down here.

The Toyons are in berry, along with the Madrones.

After the long climb up Terrier Mountain, you can see out to the Mayacamas. Well, you could if it were clear.

At this point, you might want to dry off on the grass, because we're ready to head back to civilization.

We'll be walking over the Hobbit Bridge that spans the small waterfall that feeds Lake Charles.

Here's Lake Charles, named after our founding terrier. (Sadly, no longer with us.)

Now we're back overlooking the Estonian wagon and the "new" 50-year old olive tree.

Thanks for joining us. And, if you are a horse, you'll enter the barn here.

Postscript: To find the saga of the 50 year old olive tree, read this.

If you live in California or have ever visited here at the change of seasons, you know how the first heavy rain of the season suddenly makes everyone go completely INSANE. On a dry year, we can have no rain at all from March to late November. And I mean NO RAIN. Not even a sprinkle. Just maybe some foggy moisture in San Francisco. So when the first drencher of the season hits, people go nuts, especially when driving. People suddenly forget what lanes and sidewalks are for and which side of the road we drive on here. Well, apparently it happens to birds, too.

We’ve got dozens, maybe hundreds of little birds that dart in and out among the oak trees near the barn. They perch on the railings, they fly around the barn. But so far, they’ve always managed not to hit it. Which you would expect because, well, fer Pete’s sake, it’s as big as a barn!

However, as soon as the rain started: Thump, Thump, Thump. Three birds in succession smacked into the window. Luckily, each of them was only stunned. But something had to be done while they recovered. My dogs are complete failures at the expected Terrier Core Competencies, but I figured they could probably do damage to a stunned bird lying dazed on the flagstones.

I spent the next half hour, scooping up the first three birds, then the next two and putting them in the fenced-in raised bed where I’d just harvested the last of my corn. I figured that gave them a safe place while they recovered.

See, he really did recover!

That was my good deed for the day, although I won’t say I wasn’t motivated to get a few Bird Brownie Points. I mean, I’ve seen The Birds about a million times and I wanted to make sure that, if this was the start of an attack, I might be bypassed as A Friend to Birds.

Which is a long prelude to get to the fact that I’m going stir crazy again on the tail end of six weeks living alone in a barn and babysitting grapes. (Just read the last few weeks of posts to understand why.) The rain was making it even worse. Now instead of barricading myself in the barn when darkness falls and large animals start prowling, I was barricaded in the barn watching the rain fall.

This may not be Julian and John's great grandmother. But it could be. (Courtesy Google Images.)

Luckily, I got a call from Cousin John who said he was in the Sonoma area and could he stop by. Cousin John is not actually MY cousin, but the cousin of my extremely brilliant and eccentric friend Julian. Remember that name. Julian is going to be featured in these posts. And please believe me when I say that in my world eccentrics are not just people with a few quirks. I mean people with generations of behavior that, if it weren’t done so flamboyantly and with such style, would be labeled Bat Shit Crazy (to use the proper medical terminology). Julian’s mother ran AWAY from the circus and took her brother, John’s father, with her. Truly. She was from a very famous European circus family (her grandmother was painted by Toulouse-Lautrec in a tutu standing on horseback.) So that’s why Julian and John aren’t wearing harlequin outfits and juggling flaming torches. But they are no less wildly entertaining.

You’ll meet Julian later. Let’s focus on Cousin John, who is sort of the Indiana Jones of Northern California. He’s one of the guys called in when someone wants to stop developers from putting a shopping mall on top of an Indian burial ground. I get the best Facebook alerts from him: “Found an intact human skull today. Hooray!” and “Great morning’s work. Both recovered femurs show traces of old injuries.” When Cousin John isn’t digging up ancient bones, he also experiments with making some truly terrifying and horrible home-brewed wines. We’ve sampled his strawberry wine and lived to tell the tale, but just barely. His latest project is scavenging feral grapes and fermenting them with whatever yeast falls out of the air. So you can imagine he was interested in seeing how we were progressing with our ER style of winemaking that aims at keeping OUT all yeasts but those we introduce. (If you are unfamiliar with our obsessive cleanroom winemaking technique read this.)

When I casually mentioned to Cousin John that we've found an Indian grinding stone and several arrowheads down near our seasonal creek, he was all for marching through the forest in the rain to look at it. I convinced him to drink wine instead.

It was great to have company and slowed me from going completely around the bend before lunchtime.

Then Cousin John left and I was plunged into a Cro-Magnon level of hunter-gatherer subsistence. Yes, I’d run out of firewood and since that’s the only source of heat here in the barn, it was a pressing matter. We are not going to mention any names, but someone was up here over the weekend and it was noted to that person that the available supply of logs that actually fit in our tiny woodstove was shockingly low. This person, rather than cutting the logs to size, dismissed me with a cavalier suggestion that I could buy some firewood in the grocery store. Note to that person: yes, you buy boxes of insanely expensive firewood at the grocery store in San Francisco, BUT NOT IN THE COUNTRY. People in the country cut their firewood or buy cords of it from someone who does. People who inquire at grocery stores in the country about where the firewood is are laughed at and given that smirky “City Slicker” look.

So I’ve been wandering around the wilder parts of our 40 acres looking for scraps of firewood and flammable branches. Luckily, the people who were trimming some dying trees cut them into logs and left them for me around the property. Unluckily, they are probably drenched by now. Let me also add that firewood wouldn’t be such a necessity if someone who shall not be named here had bothered to fix the broken hinge on one of the windows in the barn so it wasn’t in a permanently open position. That’s okay, I’ll just huddle by my rapidly diminishing store of pitiful gathered twigs and brush and feel the feeble heat it generates shoot up and out the window. Not a problem. I’ve read Jack London’s short story To Build a Fire. I know if things get desperate, you slit open a dog to warm your hands.

Lucy looking completely unconcerned about the possible need for Jack London Survival Techniques.

What did I tell you about the first drenching rain making people crazy?

POSTSCRIPT: Some readers have been griping that I seem not to know an election is going on. Hey, even living in a barn without radio, television and spotty cell reception, I do have WiFi. And the terriers and I are doing our best to keep our politics partisan.

Oscar with his George Bush chew toy. He says "THROW THE BUMS OUT". But only after he bites off his head and removes the squeaker.

And who would think that a mug bought as a gag gift would prove so prophetic?

Just a few short months ago, converting Red States would have been a pipe dream.

But just add your favorite hot beverage. . .

And, hey Presto, Obama Mojo Magic!

 Ever wondered what the typical day of a winemaker is like? No, not the romantic life of the beret-wearing winemaker you see in movies who spends his days in a picturesque villa sipping his fermenting wine and murmuring things like: “Eet is thee terroir.” I mean the grunts who do all the heavy lifting of the winemaking process. Not the glass lifting, but the bucket, sulfite and bin lifting work. These aren’t winemakers, they are “wine babysitters.” I are one.

Since one of us at Two Terrier Vineyards still has a day job, I’m the one who’s been living in a barn for six weeks babysitting the four varietals we’re trying to shepherd from harvest to crush through primary and secondary fermentation. With Mourvedre, Grenache and Cinsault now resting in oak barrels and only the Cabernet in primary fermentation, there’s more time to leisurely discuss the process. Or the process as it happens in my world.

First thing, you wake up a little before six AM because that’s when suddenly frantic terriers are pawing you and barking to go out.

It’s pretty dark out now at six, so I’m keeping the barn lit up, as my husband would say, “like Blackpool Illuminations.” I know it’s not very energy appropriate, but since we’re way out in the wilds, I need the light perimeter to keep the resident Mountain Lion at bay. So at six, we’re walking gingerly around the available pools of light where we (hopefully) can see large felines before they leap on us and sever our vertebra.

When it’s finally light enough that we feel we can defend ourselves against large predatory cats, we begin the 1/2 mile walk from barn to crush pad. But first we have to stop at Lake Charles and bark at the water.

As we stroll through the vineyards, we pass many beautiful flowers in the Insectary. This is a dense planting of natives featuring year-round color and bloom to keep the beneficial birds and insects working to maintain pest-free grapes.

Here's an example of one of the plants in the Insectary.

It's crucial at this point to check under EVERY BUSH for lizards.

Finally we round the corner to the Crush Pad. Lucy leads the way.

Here's our pitiful Cabernet harvest in these small grey containers. Behind are the white bins that hold one ton of grapes and where we fermented our other varietals. Our Cab harvest was so small, we'll be lucky to get a few case out of it.

Still, the grapes are really foaming and bubbling as I punch them down. Fermentation is GO!

Then we do all the science stuff like checking temperature and specific gravity.

Everything is noted down in an extremely scientific manner.

Now we go into the wine cave to check on the other varietals that are aging in oak. Quick, check for lizards!

Then the half mile walk back to the barn through the vineyards. That's the Insectary on the right.

We notice that the Toyon and Madrone trees are putting out berries.

That brings out the foxes. Lots of them judging by the amount of poo. Some of us taste this just to be sure it is fox poo.

So you know that old term “Lather. Rinse. Repeat.” We basically do this whole routine two more times. Then it’s dark and the critters and scary things are coming out. So we barricade ourselves in the barn.

We're so tired at this point, we collapse and listen to country music. This is Oscar enjoying the Bakersfield Sound of Buck Owens.

That’s the drill. No romance. Lots of walking. Some scientific stuff. And lots of fox poo. Sante!

I’m getting myself geared up for NaBloPoMo or National Blog Posting Month, where you commit to posting once a day, every day for a month. And no cheating and writing 5 advanced posts on Sunday!

This is my flight check week.

As I head into my sixth week of babysitting fermenting wine alone in Sonoma, it’s getting easier and easier to slip into “Dr. Doolittle” Level of Stir-Craziness. If you didn’t read this post, let me explain that the Doctor Doolittle Stage is that point where you progress beyond talking to the animals and truly believe you are having intelligent conversation with them. Living alone in the country in the loft of a barn with two terriers will do that to you.

Andy just left early this morning and now at 9PM, I’m already needing meds.

Okay, I’m sane enough to know that I can’t REALLY have a conversation with the stag I’ve taken to calling Chuck the Buck. But we do have a relationship.

Let me explain about Chuck the Buck (pictured above). While there are dozens of deer that traverse our property on their way to and from the state preserve that bounds our land, Chuck the Buck is by far the biggest. He also may be Mormon. At least he seems to have about seven wives. Most mornings I see him walking calmly up our road toward Lake Charles, our little man-made pond, with a gaggle of cute does.

Lately though, his marital status is seeming not so blissful. I haven’t actually talked to Chuck about this (see I’m not THAT crazy yet.) But he’s acting like he needs some time alone. If he had opposable thumbs, he’d probably be down on Sonoma Square at Steiner’s knocking back Jack Daniels shots.

Like clockwork every night for the past two weekends, he’s taken up a stance under a Coastal Live Oak at the end of the driveway to our barn and stood there for hours. Alone. We drive in late from dinner or grocery shopping and he’s standing there. And he’s not going to move for anything. Well, I wouldn’t expect

him to move for a Prius. From his size and the size of his antlers, I’m guessing my Prius would come out the worse in an altercation with him. But now, he’s starting to disrespect Andy’s Range Rover. We’ve gotten so we can drive in about ten yards from him, with the windows down and talking to him all the way and he doesn’t bat an eyelash. Only if we blink the lights off and on does he decide that he will move, slowly and disdainfully off a little bit to the side of the pasture.

Chuck's view of the barn from his special spot.

Tonight, knowing that he’d be there, I thought I’d walk out with my camera and catch a close-up picture of him. You can see how close I got to him in the ATV with the photo I caught of him above. However, armed with my camera and my new hotshoe light, I didn’t reckon on the one thing that apparently strikes terror into the hearts of wildlife. I opened the door to the barn letting out a blast of bluegrass fiddle music. (Yes, it’s all classic country all the time here at Two Terrier Vineyards. The terriers demand it.)

Chuck was on the alert and not ready to take anything for granted. He only let me get about 50 feet from him. And he certainly didn’t appreciate the blinding glare of my camera light.

Then Bill Monroe tuned up his fiddle and Chuck was off.

Obviously, Chuck is a Cold Play fan.

Note to Self: Even your fancy new hot-shoe camera light will NOT illuminate all of Sonoma. This was supposed to be a picture of Chuck at night under his tree.