AMERICAN WINE SOCIETY
A non-profit corporation

John Marshall Chapter


FEBRUARY MEETING: Red Wines Go Nuclear, presented by Donette Cappello

Red Wines Go Nuclear 2005 Although some of us were kidding about the Livermore nuke-und-grape connection, Donette was not. Reminding us that spent nukes also are packaged in glass, she passed pieces of silicon around for our inspection. And just as grape pickers wear protective masks as they pick grapes (to protect the grapes from them, we suspect), so do lab workers. And she forthwith donned two unsuspecting bystanders with nuclear gas mask and sheeting. Donette visits the Labs regularly, and she knows these things.

Donnete also knows a few things about the wines from that area, and shared them with us. The oldest family-owned winery in California, for instance, is Wente, just down the road from the labs, started in 1883. That factoid was delivered on her 16-page handout that covered all her wines plus recipes.

Wines reviewed that evening included three bubblies: Korbel Chardonnay Champagne ($10), Korbel Brut ($10), and Domaine Carneros Taittinger Brut ($20), which has been highly rated by Wine Spectator and other publications. Wouldn’t ya just know, the assembled multitude greatly preferred the Korbel Brut at half the price. But what do they know?

Other pair-offs presented thru the evening included a Merlot mano-a-mano, pitting the 2001 Wente product against Concannon. Wente walked away with that one, 9 to 3. (The wineries are across the street from each other.) Merlot is not doing well these days since Sideways swept the country, if not the Oscars.

Wrapping up the show were Petite Syrahs from Oak Grove and Concannon, and Cabernets from Concannon and Stony Ridge -- the latter a 1992 that, turned out, hadn’t aged so well. Jennifer Crafts provided edibles to die for (but no one did), and all were scanned with a Geiger before proceeding homeward.


MARCH MEETING:  California De-Napafied, Part 3: Gold Country, presented by Bruce and Rene Schaefer  (PLEASE RVSP if you plan to attend!)

This is for all the people who have journeyed to the mythical Valley of Napa, only to be gridlocked on Route 29 (and in the tasting rooms), baffled by all the little wineries they’ve never heard of, and busted by tasting fees that start at $5 per person. Yes, Virginia, there is a California, and it’s better than all that. Waaay better. Last year, we met the wines of the Santa Cruz mountains, including those of the great Satan, Bonnie Doon, of screwtop infamy, and, last month, we were introduced to the wines of the Livermore Valley, in all their radioactive glory.

Next Sunday, Bruce and Renee will present a travelogue through the Sierra foothills that takes in eight of the 100 or so wineries that dot the hillsides of El Dorado, Amador, and Calaveras counties today. They spent three days last summer, prospecting the gold country, and came back with a mother load of great wines. Wines will be mostly reds, huge, and worthy of a heartfelt “Eureka!” Join us next Sunday and strike it rich as we pan the river for more gold rush clichés.

Meet at the John Page Turner house at 6:30 p.m. as described below.  Question for attendees: Who was John Page Turner? And, why do we care today?

Directions:
Your RSVP can work wonders. Knowing who-all is coming makes for better planning and a better meeting all around. It’s just a Martha Stewart good thing. So do it. Mary Anne has automated the process. Simply click on this link and be whisked to where all you do is enter an email address with your member name(s) and guest name(s).


APRIL MEETING:  Aussome Aussies, presented by Nigel Ogilvie and Louisa Woodville   (PLEASE RVSP if you plan to attend!)

All of us appreciate Australian wines for their quality and friendly prices. Few of us actually go there to drink them. Nigel Ogilvie and Louisa Woodville did just that, crossing the continent by air, rail, and automobile to visit the Hunter, Barossa, Swan, and Margaret River wine valleys. They’ll be presenting not only wines but their travel experiences in the Land of Oz. Boxin’ with ’roos, rasslin’ with crocodiles, walkin’ about with the abos – they did it all, mite, and they’re gonna show and tell with pictures. This is one meeting not to be missed! Good on ya, folks.


WINO WISDOM: A Tale of Two Cities, a Hamlet, and a Coming of Age (being a long story having little to do with wine, but worth a telling nonetheless)

Orinda, California: An upper-middle class enclave 20 miles east of San Francisco, in 1961, a little island of bourgeois comfort separated from the larger world by orchards and open land to the east, and a mile-and-a-half of tunnel thru the Berkeley hills to the west. Oriented toward the acquisition of status and stuff, Orinda was a quiet backwater; the word “vacuous” came to mind. Local teenagers changed the freeway off-ramp sign to read “Borinda.”

Berkeley, California: A university town that crackled with brilliance, harbor to a goodly number of free-thinking folks inclined more toward the attainment of Nobel prizes and nirvana. Berkeley today is a different planet but in 1961, it was in the gathering stages of the storm that would come to be known as the People’s Republic of Berkeley.

I had finished my college sophomore year and was living at home in Orinda, working a clerk job in San Francisco days and learning to play guitar nites. The Kingston Trio was upon the land, and I had acquired a nylon-string guitar and was strumming chords from the fingering charts in folk music books of their songs. “Michael roll the boat ashore, allay-looooo... yuh.” One evening after dinner, for reasons since forgotten, I went with some friends out to a house seven miles away in Canyon.

Canyon, California: If Orinda was a Falls Church in the boondocks, Canyon was the hollers of Appalachia. That’s where our po’ folk lived. The town consisted of a post office and a two-room school. The area was owned, I believe, by the water company; the small houses on the dirt road running to the top of the hill were rentals. The place was beautiful, secluded in redwood and pine forest, a major reservoir on the other side of the one-lane road that passed the town. But it was our low-rent district. Years later, the police would uncover a safe house in Canyon used by the Symbionese Liberation Army; Patty Hearst would sleep there one latter day.

I don’t remember why we had gone there, but it appeared shortly that the several other guys already at this house were awaiting the arrival of one Tom Talbot. Who is he, I asked. He’s the best white blues singer in Berkeley, came the answer, which meant nothing to me then. The house was rented by one of these guys; furniture was elderly and rough; lighting was low, part of it coming from a kerosene lantern, the rest from 60-watt bulbs. Smoke was everywhere; we all smoked in those days. Everyone else was in their 20s; I was 19.

Before long there was commotion at the front door and in walked Tom Talbot carrying a guitar case. Long hair, scruffy beard, wearing a tan canvas jacket that looked like Army surplus; flannel shirt and jeans when he took the jacket off. Hiking boots laced with leather thongs. In his mid-20s, he appeared a lot older than the rest of us. Realize that this was many years before the Beatles would appear, even in their mod phase; people just didn’t dress like this in 1961. He was definitely from the underbelly of Berkeley, I decided. With two year of college-level liberal arts, and trained in the art of suspending judgment, I immediately wrote him off as a jerk.

He opened the guitar case and pulled out an equally ramshackle guitar. The faceboard was all scuffed below the strings, and up at the head at the tuning pegs, the leftover strings were wild and bushy, sticking out unkempt in every direction. He hadn’t bothered to trim them to the one-inch length recommended by my guitar book. Obviously this guy knew nothing about guitars. Maybe I’ll teach him a few chords later, I thought, charitably. The brand name written across the head – Martin – might have tipped me off, but I remained clueless. My own guitar was a Harmony, bigger than his and obviously more serious.

As he was getting ready, he chatted away with the other guys. His name was Tom, it came out, but friends call him Steve after his favorite cartoon strip, Steve Canyon. He was also known as Ransom T; to whom or why we never learned. He spoke in a croaky voice but with self-assurance; he apparently had been to Canyon before, knew several of these other people who were all strangers to me.

Um, Humble Scribe, this is a wine newsletter…
I know, I know. But there is a connection. Patience, grasshopper.

Then he put these little metal clips on the thumb and two fingers of his right hand. Hello, what’s this? Finger picks, he told me, you can buy them at Lundberg’s guitar shop in Berkeley. He tuned the guitar, pressing each string at the 5th fret to tune the next string, the method I knew. But then he went on to tune it by harmonics, he called it, lightly touching each string—which, by the way, were steel, not nylon like my own—up at the 12th fret to make a ringing gong sound that he said was more precise. What really caught my attention, tho, was when he took the cigarette out of his mouth and squeezed the butt between two of the strings up by the pegs so it stuck straight out as he held the guitar in playing position. That was definitely dukey, I would do that myself when I got home.

Then he began to play. He attacked the strings with the pick-tipped fingers, his thumb setting rhythms on the three bass strings, his fingers plucking individual treble strings to make melodies and harmonies, together and in syncopation with the bass strings. I’d never seen anything like this. The steel strings were louder and clearer than my nylons, and he would bend them with his left hand to slur notes upwards, or hammer them to raise, then drop a note. His finger-picking right hand was almost too fast to follow.

And the music: He sang songs completely unbeknownst to me. Or the Kingston Trio, that’s for sure. They reminded me of the rhythm and blues I’d heard on black radio stations in the 50s, but these songs sounded more rural, backed by acoustic guitar. His raspy voice and delivery style were utterly primal, not at all polished like my folkies, and the intricacies of his finger moves on the strings had me riveted. The whole effect was absolutely electrifying. I’m sure my eyes were big as sewer lids. As he finished each song, I thot to myself, Holy brown word, Batman, this guy is FANTASTIC!

Between songs, I couldn’t get enough out of him. Where’d you learn to play like this? Where do you find music like this? What artists do you follow? Do they have records out? He was pleasant with me, answered all my wide-eyed questions. Some of his heroes were Blind Lemon Jefferson, Lightnin Hopkins, Big Bill Broonzy – nobody I’d ever heard of. When I asked how he liked the Kingston Trio, his response was reflexive. If he’d been drinking milk, it would have shot out of his nose. He laughed hard, but, not to hurt my feelings, I guess, he simply said they were a bit too commercial for his tastes.

During a break, he asked someone to put on “that Mose album.” The music that ensued featured a bone-dry black male voice backed by light bluesy piano, bass and drums. “Everybody’s talkin ‘bout the seventh son, in the whole round world there is only one…” Good stuff, I thot, Who is this guy? Mose Allison, came the answer, and he’s white. Sure enough, the guy on the album jacket was a white guy. Where do these people come from, I wondered? And where in the hell have I been?

Conversation turned to politics. Communism was big in Berkeley then, but Talbot allowed that he himself was an anarchist. I glanced at his guitar case looking for the round black bomb, but anarchy, he said, was not nihilism. Rather it was the notion that humans could conduct their lives in such harmony that no state-arbiter was needed. Put this way, anarchy appeared more idealistic than communism; one could see its appeal to youth here.

He picked up the guitar again and began tuning it, this time to an open chord. Then he pulled out what looked like the neck of a bottle and slid it over the baby finger of his left hand. He began plucking strings again but changing tones by sliding the bottleneck up and down the frets, the metal strings against glass giving off a scratchy shimmery sound to accompany what he called a delta blues song. For his next song, he placed the guitar flat across his lap and simply slid the bottleneck up and down the neck without fretting the strings. This was just bitching, I thought: even I could learn to do that! When he finished, I asked him where I could get a bottleneck, and he proceeded to tell me how he made his, and how you, dear reader can make yours.

Watch closely now, here’s the wine connection: Take an empty wine bottle, preferably of a red wine so the glass will be green or brown, and tie a string lightly around the neck near the shoulder. Light a candle and trickle wax over the string. Now set the string on fire, making sure it burns all the way around, scoring the glass. Knock the tip of the bottle against the edge of the table and – voila – the bottleneck falls off into your hand. Sand the jagged edge so you don’t cut the web between your fingers; you are now in the delta blues business.

It took me four bottles before I had a usable neck, partly because I failed to take his first instruction. Being only 19, I had to resort to soda pop bottles; when I finally had my bottleneck, it was clear-colored – not dukey at all. But it did make a scratchy shimmery sound, and I certainly impressed my Orinda friends with my delta act, especially when I lodged my cigarette between the strings up at the pegs, to burn while I flailed away with my new fingerpicks.

I never saw Tom Steve Ransom T Talbot again. God knows I adopted Berkeley, haunting the Cabal, the Jabberwock, the Blind Lemon – bars and cafes that offered live blues – but I never quite caught up with him. I took guitar lessons from another Berkeley guitarist, Ken, who taught me how to finger pick. He certainly knew about Ransom T, confirming that Talbot was indeed considered the best white blues singer in Berkeley. I looked for him at Lundberg’s stringed instrument shop, which turned out to be a major hangout for musicians from all over the Bay Area. I once got into a conversation there with a black guy who turned out to be blues legend Brownie McGhee. And I completely wore out my Mose Allison LP.

And next year, back in school, I wrote a 25-page term paper on Pierre Prudhomme, a French anarchist of the 1800s. In fact, looking back, I have never gotten so much out of one evening since the nite they ran Deepak Chopra and Suze Orman back to back on public telly. (Kidding, of course. I can’t stand Suze Orman.)

Last year, reminiscing on Talbot, I did a Google to see whatever happened to him and turned up this story on the Jefferson Airplane website:
Jorma [Kaukonen, one of the founding members of the Jefferson Airplane] named the band. "I had this friend up in Berkeley, Steve Talbot, and he came up with funny names for people," explains Jorma. "His name for me was Blind Thomas Jefferson Airplane (for blues pioneer Blind Lemon Jefferson). When the guys were looking for band names and nobody could come up with something, I remember saying, 'You want a silly band name? I got a silly band name for you!' "
Jorma’s wife Vanessa wrote me that Steve Talbot died many years ago, she knew not when or whereof. The life of an avowed anarchist may be nasty, brutish and short, especially if he ventures outside of Berkeley. But in his time, Ransom T certainly left a footnote in the history of rock music, and he inspired at least two young men along the way. And speaking for one of them – the callow young jerk from the ‘burbs –  at least one of us is still grateful to him 40 years later.
 
And that, dear friends, is all the news that’s print to fit.  Do your RSVP now while you’re at the computer. And, have a super week.

Your humble scribe,

~ Bruce ~

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