Left Coast Cowboys

 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!

This little section of Sonoma is alive with wildlife, probably thanks to the State parkland trust just over the way. In addition, the small pond we put in on the edge of the woods has acted like a watering hole on the Serengheti. It’s drawing wildlife from everywhere.

After listening to the shrieks, caws, whooos and calls of unidentified animals everywhere, I decided I had to lock the terriers in the barn and get myself to town before I went stir crazy.

I’d barely gotten 20 yards from the barn on the way out the gate when I saw the huge buck that has been leading his harem down to the pond every morning. (Which sets up a huge amount of howling from the dogs. Howling that is roundly ignored.)

This time the buck was alone and just standing in the shadows next to the garage. Of course, it would be one occasion where I would  have no camera with me, but I stepped out of the car to see how close I could get to him.

I kept walking, walking, walking until I could, as they say, see the whites of his eyes. Still no movement. Since I’ve been up here long enough that I’m in early Dr. Doolittle stage of lunacy, I decided to talk to him.

Obviously, not my picture. But the guy I saw looked exactly like this.

“Hey, shouldn’t you be afraid of me?” No reaction.

I walked closer. “Hey, what are you doing.” Nothing.

Finally I started clapping my hands. If a deer can shrug, this one shrugged then ambled slowly off toward the pond.

It was only then that I took stock of how big he was and how many points he had on his antlers. He certainly had no reason to fear me. I also took his calm as a good sign that whatever animal noises we’ve been hearing at night aren’t from anything that would pose a threat to a deer, a terrier or me.

Later eating dinner at the bar at the Girl and the Fig, one of the barmen who recognized me as a semi-local was asking about the grapes.

“Where’s your place again?”

I told him roughly and heard the old familiar local reaction.

“You know that’s around the area where all the kids used to go drinking.”

“In fact,” he added, “there’s a really cool mountain where you can get up and see all of Sonoma Valley.”

Knowing this was the heart of our property, I played it cool.

“Can you still go up there?”

“No, it’s got a gate blocking the road now.”

“But I’ll tell you about one of the last times I went up there. I was in an open jeep and looked over to the side as I went up that road. There was a Mountain Lion loping along beside the jeep. I don’t think I ever went up there again.”

And that was a nice wildlifey image as a pondered how much distruction an angry Mountain Lion could do to a Prius and how fast I could run from the car to unlock the barn door before three inch talons ripped into my back.

Apparently our land has been a happy hunting ground for these guys for quite some time now.

Wine Report

The Mourvedre is 20 Brix which doesn’t seem right as it was 23 two days ago.

The Grenache is 21.25 Brix which is right about where it was.

So the panic that these grapes might need immediate harvesting is off, especially as it’s been cool.

The Cinsault is bubbling along nicely. As it reached 1070 Specific Gravity, I added in a little food since the yeasts are quickly converting all the sugars to alcohol.

Compared to our Rhone style varietals, our Cabernet vines are real stragglers. These bunches are half the size of the Grenache and Mourvedre.

The temperature, which I’m measuring several times a day seems to be uniformly about 7 to 10 degrees higher than ambient temperature, so it’s generating its own heat evenly and regularly.

Clouds swept in this afternoon and brought a shower. Not exactly what we want this close to harvest.

Oh, the drama of owning Smooth Fox Terriers! They’ve been called large dogs trapped in small bodies and they truly have no idea that they are just this side of being lapdog sized. But after last night’s drama, I think Oscar is going to be picking his battles very, very carefully.

We have a completely decked over back yard (which is about the size of a large postage stamp) which is surrounded mostly by the walls of other Victorians or our neighbors’ own back fences and decked back yards. We’ve sealed off most of the access to underneath, especially since the time Lucy wriggled under and had a close personal encounter with a skunk.

But Oscar is a lot skinnier and a lot more determined. Somehow he got under the deck and met up with a really evil looking raccoon. One that appeared to be nearly twice his size. How do we know the size? Because we spent more than two hours last night crawling as far as we could get under our deck, between fences and over neighbors’ fences with flashlights looking at the two of them. Seems Oscar is a brilliant tactician. Even when we sprayed a high pressure hose in there to try and break the deadlock, he managed to keep the raccoon wedged in one corner or another. Soon the growling and snarllng from the raccoon got very ugly and Oscar started to sound a lot less hesitant about the whole thing.

However, we were working against 400 years of breeding resulting in a dog that has been engineered to follow varmints into dark places and never give up until one of them is dead. Those are the terrier rules of engagement. There was no way Oscar was going to end this. Someone had to end it for him.

By 45 minutes into this madness, Andy started dismantling our deck to try to get to Oscar and the raccoon, who immediately moved beneath the hot tub which wasn’t going to be moved by anything smaller than a crane.

Another 45 minutes into it, another section of the deck destroyed, water sprayed everywhere and we called in Animal Control. Luckily they had one of those long noose thingys. When Oscar poked his head up with a look on his face that said, “Get me out of this mess”, the officer hooked him and dragged him up. No word on what happened to the raccoon.

Luckily, he hadn’t been bitten, so the officer didn’t quarantine him. Unluckily, you can’t have that much adrenaline pumping through a fifteen pound body without bad effect. He immediately threw up, got rid of some other stuff and then crawled into my arms whimpering.

So now you know what they mean when they say, “Tenacious as a Terrier”.

  It’s probably dangerous to post in this condition. We’ve been traveling since noon Shanghai time with a plane change and delay in Vancouver. The clock says we arrived six hours after we left, but we’re not even sure what day it is. And that’s not just jetlag. Posting from China poses its own Twilight Zone weirdness. I thought I’d keep everything coordinated by changing the time zone on my camera, my laptop and my iPhone to Beijing time. But then when I posted to Flickr or WordPress there was a warp in the space time continuum. Flickr and my blog kept thinking I was posting the next day or pre-posting. I guess, the servers for Flickr and my blog are on American time no matter what my laptop says. So the servers kept thinking I was posting for a day that hadn’t happened yet. I started trying to backdate or postdate things but that only made it more confusing. Believe me, Project365, I posted every day. It’s just going to take time to sort it all out.

Adding to our confusion, as we entered back into airspace where we started getting Western stories on the Olympics, we realized that we’ve been in a complete Olympic bubble. We really only had information about the events we were at, since there were few English sources of information. We had 8 sports channels available to us in the hotel, all of them on Central China Television and all in Chinese. If you think American coverage is too concentrated on the home team, you should see CCTV. For instance, in the coverage of the swimming, you might not even know Michael Phelps was in the pool as the camera and commentator kept a tight focus on the Chinese swimmers. I’m not saying the Chinse teams aren’t important for coverage, but let’s just say, they weren’t always the big story. In the race we saw, Michael Phelps was already out of the pool and had blow-dried his hair before the Chinese swimmers even touched the wall. And of course, we missed all the heated commentary that we are now just becoming aware of. Like Bela Karolyi threatening to bust a heart valve over the age of Chinese gymnasts. We were also surprised to see a Canadian paper discussing how Alicia Sacramone had “blown the Gold” for the Women’s Team Gymnastics. We were at that event and every one of the US team got a red flag or committed an error. Alicia was no more or less the problem than any of them. They were just all slightly off their game.

Yes, they do the WAVE in China. It went around the Bird's Nest five times until the Jumbotron told us "Quiet Please!"

Most Undercovered Big Story. I don’t think anyone is covering the true magnificence of the Jamaicans — men and women. They were fast, they were stylish,  they had the best bling and dreads and I swear they ran to a reggae beat. They never looked like they were even breaking a sweat. You can’t imagine what incredible athletes that tiny island fielded until you’d seen them lined up with other athletes for their events. When an athlete stands among a group of other Olympic quality athletes, and stands out like Shaq would among the middle aged players on the San Francisco Bay Club Hoops Club, you know you are seeing an extraordinary level of physical perfection. (Besides, what are the odds that the world’s fastest man would be named “Bolt”?)

Rats! All my photos of the Jamaicans were destroyed in a security scan that wiped my card. I had tons of shots of Usain Bolt.

Most hyped story that was worth all the hype. Michael Phelps. He really was that good. And from the reaction of his teammates and even his competitors, he seems to be the kind of nice guy who deserves all his success. At the heat we saw, his competitors were swarming around him to shake his hand and pat him on the back when he smoked them in the pool. And the first thing he did after winning was get out and wave to his Mom in the stands. Gotta love a guy like that.

One Area Where the Chinese Fell Down in an Otherwise Beautifully Run Games. Souvenirs, tat, Olympic crap. You should be able to buy everything from a water bottle to key chains to shirts, hats and doo-rags with Olympic logos. There should have been vendors everywhere. Particularly the bootleg vendors selling the tacky “Olympics Beer Drinking Team” T-shirts. Nothing. Nada. I don’t know if it was part of the Chinese Government’s promise to the Olympic Committee and luxury manufacturers to crack down on counterfeits, but you couldn’t find a single vendor with anything Olympic. Not even a post card. About the only thing you could buy on the street was a Chinese flag.

Most Amazing Military Effort. The armies of fresh-faced, uniformed University students who lined the routes to the venues, organized lines into the security checkpoints or just walked the streets of Beijing smiling and waving to foreigners. It was an impressive mobilization. Especially since some of them seemed to have no role other than to smile and call out “Welcome to Beijing.” Could you mobilize that many teenagers here? Could you get so many who were so unflaggingly enthusiastic about their jobs even when that job was just standing in the hot sun and being friendly?

Most Annoying Thing About the Chinese that Was Still Strangely Endearing. For some reason, the Chinese believe both wine and coffee must be served a thimblefull at a time — no matter how big the cup or glass. The hotel had fairly regular, if a bit small, coffee cups and wine glasses, but it was impossible to make anyone understand that it was possible to fill it up to a normal pour. So we resorted to just constantly signaling for refills, and the Chinese were completely Okay with that system. Did you know it takes 15 thimblefulls to get a normal glass of wine? Coffee was more problematic, especially when trying to make an early morning call while still jetlagged. Until we discovered the hidden cappucchino maker and the one barman who knew how to use it!

Armies of students, working for sponsors and for the Olympic committee, guided us around the city with smiles and waves.

And a special word about our sponsors, UPS. They had this whole event organized like an upscale summer camp for adults. There were meals and food available around the clock in the hotel, dozens of volunteers from the local University guided us around, hydrated us on the buses and enthusiastically explained things to us, often to hilarious effect, like the little girl who told us all about the “Net Burst” where we would see Athletics.

Jason, our camp counselor, was getting choked up to see our group of Campers get on the bus for the airport.

Two of our kids flex their Olympic muscles as they haul out drinks to the bus.

If you ever get a chance to go on a corporate sponsored sporting event, that’s the way to go. If UPS is handling it, even better. After all, their business is moving things safely and quickly from one place to another and that’s certainly what they did with us. Special mention: they even kept me on-line and blogging on the frequent occasions when, as we were informed by the staff, the government had “Closed the Internet”. (As we were leaving, we were told that the Government had shut down Wi-Fi in all the airports. Guess they didn’t like my blog.)

Another Sad End of An Era. The Chinese government has also cracked down on “Chinglish”, sending language experts out to correct the mangled English that is always such a fun aspect of Asian signs. I think it was a mistake. No more “Racist Park”, which was the former sign on a park dedicated to showcasing the culture of ethnic minorities. No more signs on fresh sowed lawns that urged pedestrians to “Be kind to the slender blades of grass”. I guess we’ll have to look to Malaysia to uphold this grand tradition.

If in doubt, read the rules!

So Was It Real or Was it Faked? Granted we were shielded and most certainly we were coddled, but as I said in an earlier post, I don’t think that level of friendliness and warmth can be faked that consistently and for that long. No matter what was mandated, I have to think we were seeing the Chinese people. Would we go back to China again? In a New York minute. In fact Andy decided he wants to do even more business in China and ordered me to look for Mandarin classes he can take.

So thanks, Beijingers! Thanks UPS! We had a fabulous time.

P.S. Oscar and Lucy say that people who take off to the Olympics and leave their dogs behind probably don’t deserve to have dogs.

And Oscar’s hoppin’ mad about the Nastia Liukin score. He’s not blaming the Chinese, they were great. But that Australian judge is going to get his ankles bitten if he ever comes to San Francisco.

Oscar sez "Nastia Liukin wuz robbed!" Just one terrier's opinion.