{"id":1131,"date":"2019-05-29T15:51:16","date_gmt":"2019-05-29T22:51:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.sostevinobile.com\/?p=1131"},"modified":"2019-05-31T18:08:22","modified_gmt":"2019-06-01T01:08:22","slug":"the-lost-art-of-serendipity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.sostevinobile.com\/?p=1131","title":{"rendered":"The lost art of serendipity"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"It has been an unusual month or so for Your West Coast Oenophile<\/strong>. My dedication to focusing the wine program at Sostevinobile<\/span><\/strong> exclusively on sustainably-produced wines from the West Coast has not altered, but I continue to be exposed to wines from the other 47, most recently Colorado and Hawai\u02bbi. Spending over 24 hours on various flights over a 10-day period left me plenty of time for idle thoughts, and so I enumerated all the states whose wines I have sampled over the years. Apart from California, Oregon, and Washington, as well as the other two aforementioned states, there have been vintages from Arizona, New Mexico, Idaho, Texas, Missouri, Michigan, Vermont, New York, Delaware, Virginia, and North Carolina. I vaguely recall trying a blueberry wine from Maine, but won\u2019t include that in my tally, and I did polish off a bottle 17\u00b0 Zinfandel my former fianc\u00e9e\u2019s Uncle Carlo produced in his Rhode Island basement, which would bring me up to 17 states. Just because. <\/span><\/p>\n

From there, I reckoned that I had tried wines from each of the six inhabited continents, which encompassed 26 different countries. Besides the US, there have been North American wines from both Canada and Mexico. South America has Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and Brazil. Of course, Australia and New Zealand. South Africa was another given, while Morocco was a unique experience shared with Francis Ford Coppola\u2019s brother Augustus. From Asia, there has been Georgia, Lebanon, India, and China, while Europe included Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, England, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Hungary, Croatia,\u00a0 and Slovenia. I may have tried wines from Moldova and Bulgaria, as well, but the memory is a bit fuzzy on these two counts. <\/span><\/p>\n

The embarrassing part of all this is how few of these places I\u2019ve actually visited. But while I await a whirlwind world tour once Sostevinobile<\/span><\/strong>\u2019s doors are opened, I managed to slip away for a few days last week and finally make the trek to Maui, courtesy of a complimentary ticket I won from Southwest Airlines. With barely a couple days to plan my excursion, I left my fortunes in the hands of the resort\u2019s concierge. It would be an unfair comparison to equate her choices, like the L\u016b\u2018au Te Au Moana<\/a><\/span> at the Wailea Beach Resort, to experiencing Italian food at Olive Garden, but it wasn\u2019t far from the mark. And it did get me lei\u2019d! The Zipline tour seemed a bit perfunctory, as well, but standing above the Haleakal\u0101 Crater did feel like I was on top of the world and could just make out Japan on the horizon. <\/span><\/p>\n

Following this sojourn, I rolled down the volcano and wound through the most circuitous route I could map out to the island\u2019s northeast shores, bypassing the chance to tour Ulupalakua Vineyards<\/span><\/a>, Maui\u2019s viticultural foothold, while glimpsing the vast span of haole<\/em> intrusions, from cattle farms to polo fields, before finally traversing intimations of the lush rainforests of the Wai’anapanapa State Park<\/span> that lay further along the Hana Highway. Emerging near the town of Pe\u2019ahi, I meandered west until coming upon the storied \u201chippie enclave\u201d of Pa\u2019ia<\/span><\/a>. <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

This rustic town seems quite akin to Bolinas<\/span> in West Marin, though the locals here do keep the road signs posted. As such, downtown Pa\u2019ia offers a greater variety of shopping, drinking, and dining options, along with plentiful strains of the local bud,\u2014should one choose to partake. I opted instead for glass of the sugar cane-based Ocean Organic Vodka<\/span> <\/a>at Charley\u2019s Restaurant and Saloon<\/span><\/a>, then surveyed my dining options before choosing my pentultimate Hawai\u2018ian meal at the understated Pa\u2019ia Fishmarket<\/span>. <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"My slection could not have been more fortuitous. The popularity of this quaint shack, with its multiple communal dining benches, bespoke the quality of its exceptionally well-prepared fare. I opted for one of the Specials of the Day, the fresh Opah, grilled to perfection, along with a bountiful helping of rice and potatoes. The obligatory glass of wine, Tuck Beckstoffer\u2019s 2018 Hogwash Ros\u00e9<\/strong> (sorry, Ulupalakua)<\/em>, proved a worthy accompaniment to this ample repast, while the anything-but-touristy tab could easily be afforded two or three times a week. <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

In a word, serendipitous. Which brings me to the point of this post. I currently have 4,363 West Coast wine producers logged into the Sostevinobile<\/strong><\/span> database, with another 500-600 on my to-do list. I had thought I could expedite my goal of cataloguing every sustainably-focused winery in California, Washington, and Oregon through the 2019 Wines and Vines Buyer\u2019s Guide<\/span><\/a>, but, to my surprise, this industry staple only lists 5,996 wineries throughout this region, a mere fraction of the 12,000+ labels I estimate are currently in production. Without a centralized source for all this data, my methodology ultimately compels me to stumble upon the unlisted and yet-to-be listed, like Stagiaire<\/span><\/a>. There are, of course, trade tastings, wine bars and wine shops, forums like Seven% Solution<\/span><\/a> and B\u00e2tonnage<\/span>, regional trade associations, varietal advocacies, etc., but I have been most successful in discovering new wines and wineries simply by getting lost on my visits to different wine regions and invariably coming across a label that has received little-to-no fanfare in wine circles at-large.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Which is why my latest excursion to Napa proved such a dud. Not that the wineries I visited weren\u2019t routinely excellent. The problem was that every place I came across was sealed off with an electric gate and a large, ominous sign limiting visits to \u201cBy Appointment Only.\u201d Up until this year, it was relatively easy to flaunt this requirement, but TTB has started vigorously enforcing license restrictions and is clamping down hard.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Domaggio!<\/strong><\/em>This may be fine for keeping tourism at a manageable level and curtailing the general public, but for my purposes, the loss of serendipity, of being able to discover the hitherto unknown winery, meet with its principals , and sample through their wines, is truly a monumental shame.
\n<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It has been an unusual month or so for Your West Coast Oenophile. My dedication to focusing the wine program at Sostevinobile exclusively on sustainably-produced wines from the West Coast has not altered, but I continue to be exposed to wines from the other 47, most recently Colorado and Hawai\u02bbi. Spending over 24 hours on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[82,1],"tags":[595,596],"class_list":["post-1131","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rose","category-uncategorized","tag-hogwash","tag-stagiaire"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.sostevinobile.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1131","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.sostevinobile.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.sostevinobile.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.sostevinobile.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.sostevinobile.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1131"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/blog.sostevinobile.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1131\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1158,"href":"https:\/\/blog.sostevinobile.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1131\/revisions\/1158"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.sostevinobile.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.sostevinobile.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.sostevinobile.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}