Brown Beverage with Bubbles

Did a shoot for a new beer coming to market soon.  Can't say what, who, when at this point but they have a interesting target market laid out.  When the cone of silence has been lifted I'll let you in on more details.

Stout bubbles.

My Friend Henry

Actually has very little to do with Henry.  One of the good things about becoming friends with Henry (and Laurine) is that he comes strapped with a large circle of his interesting friends.  To know Henry is to know and like his friends.

By the second or third meeting, I'm down with Leah and Frank.  Leah is a metal sculptor.  She makes big things, she makes small things.  She makes beautiful things.  With her hands.  The moment I saw one of her jewelry pieces I knew what I wanted to do with it from a photography thing.
Just holding this in your hands feels so good.  The weight of it is really comforting and the chain mail always fills up any hollow of your hand.  Almost like what water does when being contained by a vessel.

Called up an old friend that I first met while photographing her for a now defunct large format design magazine...Necie.  She supplied the beautiful skin and curves for this.

Yesterday, Sunday, we started taking some photos of the piece on Necie.  Unfortunately as the world turns, I only had a couple hours to work with it.  Plans are already in the works for round two but as for right now the jewelry piece is in a show....so round two will have to wait.

Necie has had breast cancer and wanted not to try and hide the scar but to feature it if we could.

Not quite done processing what I shot yesterday but put the ones I have done in here

Leah's website

My friend John

You don't meet too many people like John.  You think you have him pegged when you find out he's got a PhD in artificial intelligence and he has a job at NASA shooting rockets to the moon.  You're thinking if you've first met him at a convention mixer you'd end up talking about the minutia of the moon's gravity map (by the way, the moon's gravity map is still not well known according to John).

Nope.

You'd more likely to spend your time talking about Russian film directors or modern dance or the impact of bebop jazz influences on Jack Kerouac.  Maybe you two would talk about poetry or painting or another dozen topics that John throughly understands.

John has a bar nickname as well.  TequilaJohn is how I first came to know him.  It was rumored he had a PhD in tequila or he was a Demigod in tequila (both are available here by the way)  He does know his way around the blanco, the reposado, the añeho.  Anyhow, I really like John and have spent many an hour talking about everything under the sun as well as playing music together.  Lately sometimes we get together to do tiny tastings of a concentrated area or type.
I had emailed him about some special Fino Sherry that the Spanish Table was importing.  This is a Fino that Gonzalez Byass makes from a tiny amount of barrels that they keep separate from the rest of their production.
Instead of fortifying to 17% to kill off the flor, this Fino they let sit until sugars are consumed naturally.
There are only 120 bottles being imported in four age levels.
We decide to buy a bottle and split the cost and taste it while we snack on almonds and spanish olives, talk and listen to good music.  I'm thinking Manitas de Plata would right.  Maybe Astor Piazzola in a mixed metaphor type of way.

It's a beautiful label and the color within just sings when held to the sunlight.  Looks good in the dark too.

The Trajectory of Random

Know how knowing the less about something leads to experiencing it more?

Imagine never hearing about the Grand Canyon and one day you're driving down a random dirt road in the South West and you come upon it.  Or imagine studying the Grand Canyon, reading up on it, looking at pictures of it, watching movies, talking to people who have been there and then going to see it for the first time.

Which way would stagger you backwards?  Which way would lead to a sublime spiritual satori?

Friday morning found Annie and I in Calistoga.  After a hot tub, coffee and muffin, we get on the road to Headsburg. Picking up a car full of wine from a storage unit.  It's Jack and Michelle's wine, I don't know how many cases they made that year but we have 8 of them in the car at this point.

We're heading back now the way we came. Back through Anderson Valley, hitting and taking that 90 degree onto 128 and then through Knight's Valley before dropping down into Napa Valley.  Somewhere along the way we are going to stop to taste some wine.  We don't know where yet.  But it's going to be somewhere random and somewhere with no previous knowledge of it.  I want to taste something in one of the two valleys before Napa Valley.  I don't want to go to some winery I've worked for or tasted at before.  The big names are off the list too.  The Wisteria is in bloom, we've talked about it driving up...just how special Wisteria is, the smell, the hanging visuals, how it's real early this year.  Annie decides we stop at the first winery we see that has Wisteria somehow connected to it.  We pass a winery that was named something like Stuhlhiemer and I say "Ok, no winery with the word Stool associated it".  Annie spots a winery with another name that had body functions tied to it....no wineries with anything remotely body function like.

We're seeing nothing so far that fits the criteria....Wisteria, no stool and no other body functions. Thinking maybe we need to broaden the search words.   We're through Anderson Valley and just about to drop down out of Knight's Valley.  And I mean right before, there it is a winery sign with Wisteria in bloom around it.  Brake, a U turn and down the road, park and walk into a mobile bottling operation going on, music blaring, fork lifts, all hands on deck people.  We walked completely around the place looking for the tasting entrance until a worker directs us into the stainless tank area.

Instead of the de rigueur counter with pourers behind and tasters in front, there's a ten foot picnic table.  A big group of people are sitting and tasting.  There's room for us. $15 gets you 9 pretty healthy pours, a bit of pound cake with a wine sauce and a whole plate of salumi and pane.  This is way tasting should be done, something that many wineries have lost in their rush to "a wine experience".  We meet the others.  A couple from Florida with two of their grown children and their young kids.  There are two winery dogs that meander around us, waiting for just the right time to snatch that bit of pound cake off the table.  Forklifts are picking up pallets 15 feet away.  The wine on the whole is pretty good.  Right away Annie has decided she's getting some of the first wine of the taste.  It's a Rosé of all things!
The last little bit of surprise is the walk into the caves to taste one last wine.  All their barrels are stored in the tunnels they dug into the hillside behind the winery.  That's not that unusual but inside these caves were alcoves with a couple dozen at least marble busts of random people.  Ronald Reagan, a Pope, Gandhi, a lot of Italians, Einstein.

Annie buys her three bottles of Fiore Rosa D'Amore. It was such an enchanted little place made better by not knowing nothing.  Maybe not staggering backward nor sublimely satori Grand Canyon-ish but it was something.

We have to stop at one more winery, I have to pick something up from a past photo shoot.  This one requires an intercom to the winery to let you in the gates and a voice that tells you which "level" you've been assigned to and where to park your car.