Monthly Archives: February 2024

På vejen igen*

It has been all too long since Your West Coast Oenophile has appeared on these pages. I could plead medical reasons, which did seem to consume me throughout the latter part of 2023 (fortunately, everything has turned out unfounded or has been resolved with minimal intervention). More saliently, I have turned to a new wine venture, called BlueStream, which is a venue I have co-created, not as an alternative to Sostevinobile, but rather as a chance to hone my chops in the retail sector.

It was intended merely to be a consultancy on my part, but I found myself spending some 60-70 hours a week since last June building the website and ecommerce platform, writing and designing all our marketing deliverables, physically assembling the brick & mortar operations, sampling and ordering our entire wine stock, and putting in some 4,000+ miles visiting sundry wine regions from up & down the state.

In other words, scant time to write. But it’s time to get back in the saddle and revive these pages. Thus my report on my return to Solvang, some six years after opportunistic infection landed me in the ICU at Lompoc Valley Medical Center. Years before that, I had made my first sojourn to the February rendition of the Garagiste Festival, just after a couple of tourists at Fog Crest Vineyards insisted I looked just like Miles Raymond from Sideways.

Granted, there are numerous similarities between myself and Paul Giamatti: we’re both, quite obviously, Italian; we both have Ivy League degrees in English; I, too, am a writer longing for recognition of my sundry literary forays and tend to assuage my frustration with a copious amount of daily wine (I do, however, enjoy Merlot and and am alleged to have coined the term “Pinot fatigue”)

And then there is the alleged physical resemblance, which you can judge for yourself. Similar physique, similar coloration, even a somewhat similar hairline. But c’mon! That ridiculous scraggle of a sculpted beard cannot even begin to stand up to my lush, full hirsuite visage!

But the die had been cast, so when I made the obligatory pilgrimage to Hitching Post, I stood in the middle of the barroom floor and announced “If any calls me Miles, they’re getting punched out!”

It took over six hours to drive last week from San Francisco to Solvang. Being somewhat wary of returning to Lompoc—perhaps the future home of Trump et Fils—I headed straight to the Solvang Veterans’ Memorial Hall for the opening night’s “Rare & Reserve” Kick-off Party. But the delays to my drive meant I only had 30 minutes or so to enjoy these selections, and so I returned to Buellton, where it had all began, 15 or so years ago.

This time no one called me Miles.

*Danish for “On the Road Again”