Wine Daze

If you have ever looked at wine at a store in America, you have most likely noticed that a lot of the wines come from California. A healthy chunk of that wine gets made on the on central coast. That’s where we live. We live in wine country. There are grapes growing everywhere. We have learned a lot about wine and wine making since we have been out here. For one thing, there is a difference between vineyards (growers of grapes) and wineries (makers of wine). This may seem obvious, but we have kind of realized what that difference means since we’ve been living with it. The grapes growing everywhere are for the most part just vineyards. The grapes are grown and then sold off to wineries. The really big California labels that you might have heard of: Barefoot, Almaden, Gallo, Turning Leaf and the like are all a bit more north and central California, but they likely buy grapes from all over. What we have a lot of around here are “mom & pop” type wineries, a few of which have their own vineyards. They are small, usually a family business, specialize in a few kinds of wine, and they focus on quality over quantity. These are wine makers you most likely will never have heard of unless you have been to them before. It’s their small size that keeps them unknown to the world at large because they tend to make great wines! Wineries are thick on the ground in central California, but nowhere are they thicker than in Paso Robles.

The city of El Paso de Robles is forty miles north of us, but still in San Luis Obispo County. It is “The Pass of the Oaks.” When it isn’t called just Paso, it gets called “PAA-so RO-buls” or “PAH-so RO-blays” depending on the speaker. We use the later. We happened up on Paso Robles back in 2005 on our honeymoon. We have been excited about going back there to try some new wines.

We went to one new winery and one “old favorite.” The new winery was Wild Coyote. They are a vineyard, winery and bed & breakfast. Their approach to wine-making is that if you want to drink, say, a merlot wine it should be made from just merlot grapes. Apparently, many wines are blended from various kinds of grapes to maximize the flavors. Sometimes up to 15% of the wine is some other kind of grape. Not so at Wild Coyote. Their merlot was the best we have ever tasted. It was so good we bought a bottle of it even though we don’t typically like merlots. They also had a really good zinfandel port. In fact, all of their wines were really good.

The other winery we visited was Castoro Cellars. We first visited it on our honeymoon and at the time it was the best wine we had ever tried. Now that we have tried and enjoyed so many more wines we weren’t as impressed by Castoro. We tried their cabernet-sauvignon, which is usually our favorite varietal (a fancy wine term meaning “kind”), but we didn’t like it too much. We didn’t waste the visit however, we bought a bottle of an off-dry gewürztraminer that was quite good.

We got three bottles from Paso Robles. Those, plus the ones we already had from the local World Market (they always have a great selection!) means that we had a lot of good stuff to drink.

Of course, Paso Robles has other things to partake in. We ate at a Mexican restaurant, which turned out to be not that great. We did a little shoe shopping. We also went to an olive farm. There was an olive market in the town proper that we weren’t that impressed with. We were hoping for a lot of olive choices but they mostly had olive oil and products made from olive oil. Still, it was better than our stop at the actual olive farm. It was closed! That’s okay, we’ll be back again someday soon…

A quick P.S. from Matt: If a zombie outbreak occurs, one of the safer towns to be in will be Paso Robles. The main cemetery in town in isolated from the rest of the town by a big ditch. It looks like a little island in a valley off to the edge of town. Anything that helps to slow down the undead hordes is a good thing.

Solvang? What's a Solvang?

In mid-June we had a heat wave here on the central coast. Being on the ocean, there is usually a cool wind blowing in off the water. For about a week the wind was coming quite strongly from the inland deserts. Apparently, this is called a Santa Ana wind (possibly deriving from Sanatanas, as in devilishly hot and dry). Maya got to escape the worst of it by going to the hospital, which is air-conditioned, but Matt had no escape as the apartment has no AC. It’s apparently not needed often enough. The air in the house was so hot and stagnant he had to open the windows but then the hot winds would blow through the apartment and it wasn’t really any better. It was so hot the marble floors were warm to the touch! Matt was hot, Asher was hot, when Maya was home, she was hot. It was a fairly unpleasant week, but it’s the only one like that we’ve had.
When we were coming through Texas, we met a guy at a rest stop while walking Asher. He had rabbits of his own and told us that since his live outside all the time, he gives them blocks of ice when it gets hot and that lay on the ice to keep cool. Since it was so hot here we decided to try it with Asher. We have an ice pack that is like a sheet you can wrap around a bottle or something so we spread it out on the bottom of his cage. He laid down on it just like it was a cool blanket. It wasn’t much relief, but better than none for his fuzzy little body.

In the middle of this heat wave, we decided to go down the road to a touristy town called Solvang. It was maybe not the best day to go because it was at least 95 degrees outside and the main attraction of the town is to walk around to all the little shops. But there we were, heat or no, so walk around we did.

Although some people already lived in the area, Solvang was founded as a town in 1911 by a group of Danish settlers that were looking to set up a trade school for traditional Danish crafts. That endeavor eventually fell by the way side and Atterdag Collage is now a hotel. What’s left is this quaint little Danish village in the California hills. There is authentic detailing on the eaves and windows of just about every building in the downtown. Some buildings sport models of nesting storks, which is a European good luck symbol. There are a couple windmills too – well, not real windmills, but windmill-shaped shops. We saw clocks, books, Christmas decorations, vintage-style clothing, bread, marzipan, danishes, pies, figurines, steins and lots of jewelry. Unfortunately for Solvang’s merchants we are just not big on buying stuff from that sort of quaint little shop. We did a lot of looking, but all we got was a loaf of bread from the day-old rack of a bakery and some rabbit hay from a regular pet store we happened to see.

We did visit two non-store places that were a little bit more interesting. The first was the Mission Santa Inés. Founded in 1804, it was one of the later missions to be established. Most of the buildings are gone as the mission has gone through some major ups and downs over its life. It was damaged by an earthquake that hit the area in 1812 and it seriously declined after an Indian revolt in 1824. Its nadir was 1904, but in that year a new farther arrived and started to improve the remaining buildings and restore some lost ones. Despite ups and downs the church was never abandoned. It has been in use continuously as a Catholic church since its founding. In fact, it was still in continuous use as a Catholic church when we were there. There was a wedding going on. We got a discounted admission since we were not allowed to see the church itself. So that’s another mission we saw without getting to see the whole thing!

We saw the museum, some gardens out back, the cemetery and the remains of some historical buildings marked out on the ground. One of the no-longer-there buildings was a small school room for the natives. It was the first school building in the state. The floor is all that remains. It has remained because it was constructed using a native technique. It’s an asphalt floor! Since there is oil in California, sometimes it seeps up onto the surface. There the Chumash collected it, processed it and used it for all kinds of things. Apparently, they made some of their wooden-frame, thatched huts more permanent by packing tar into the ground – thus the asphalt floor of the old school has remained. It’s about a foot below modern ground level.

The other interesting thing we saw was the Hans Christian Anderson Museum. Since he is about the most famous Dane ever (next to Hamlet) a museum to commemorate him seems appropriate in a little Danish village. The owners of The Book Loft on the main street have set up informational displays on the second floor of their shop. These are nestled in between bookcases with an impressive collection of Anderson’s work in various editions and languages. Information on his life is presented, as well as a whole history of the illustration of his work. Information about his legacy and place in literature also appears. In addition to writing he was deft at paper-cutting and reproductions of his intricate cut-paper designs are on display. These are like those snowflakes you do in grade school, but they show circus figures, landscapes and animals of various kinds. It’s an interesting museum, if tiny. Of course, since it’s a bookstore you can also buy a lot of different collections of Anderson’s fairy tales.
So, what is solvang? Apparently it’s Danish for “sunny fields.” It certainly lived up to its name that day, with the hot wind blowing and the sun beating down from a cloudless sky. Og Tak for Besøget – Kom Igen!

Clan Castle Envy

If there was ever a clan castle (by which we meant a house big enough for our whole clan to line in) it is the mansion of William Randolph Hearst near San Simeon. This “weekend ranch house” is commonly called the Hearst Castle – and with good reason. Hearst made his massive fortune in newspapers. He was just about the original media mogul. There is this old movie you may have heard of called Citizen Kane. It’s partially inspired by Hearst and his big house. In 1919 he decided to build a weekend cabin on some ranch land that had been in the family for years. The Casa Grande on La Cuesta Enchantada was the result. Hearst hired famous architect Julia Morgan and kept having her expand and improve the main house and the guest cottages for the next 30 years. Money was literally no object. The house is furnished – almost literally stuffed to the seams – with a vast collection of antique carpets, ceilings, chairs, church alters, mosaics, paintings, statues, tables, tapestries and wall hangings from medieval, gothic and renaissance Europe. Hearst bought the art in loads from Europeans looking to eat during the lean inter-war years over there.

Not all of the art is imported. There is a lot of carving – like the animal cornice – and quite a lot of cast plaster work that was done just for the house. Often Morgan would have only one carved pillar to work with or a corbelled ceiling too small for a room so she would have it copied in plaster by this team of brothers that specialized in that sort of thing. They seem to have been good at what they did because you can’t tell – at least not by looking (and they don’t let you touch) – which is the original 300 year old statue and which is the 50 year old plaster copy. These guys did some original paintings too to match various frescos from Italy.

Most of the house is made from concrete and rebar and just gussied up on the surface. Morgan apparently didn’t believe in other building materials. At least not for buildings in California. She first came to fame, apparently, when her buildings in San Francisco were the only ones to survive both the 1906 quake and the subsequent fire. On the back side of the house (the part still not finished when Hearst died) the walls are just bare concrete – not even stuccoed. Also some time in the stairwells the rebar sticks out and has just been bent over against the walls. The tours tend to use the parts of the house that weren’t intended for guests so we saw the unfinished aspects to the house all the time.

On our honeymoon we took the main tour where you see the ground floor of the main house. You see parlors, sitting rooms, the dinning room, the billiard room and the movie theater. A few days after the zoon, we drove up and took the second tour where you see the second and third floors of the main house. This is where all the guest bedrooms are as well as Hearst’s personal apartments.

One of the really amazing rooms on this tour is called the Princess Bedroom. It’s in one of the towers just below the bells. The stone tracery windows use animal motifs (including rabbits!) and all the details in the molding are gold leafed. There are little balconies too from which one can see the ocean and mountains, or eavesdrop on other guests. Hearst’s office was also quite impressive. Bookshelf lined with a large table in the middle it would have been quite a place to jot off notes to his editors and underlings. There was a balcony attached and a big portrait of Hearst in his youthful prime. Matt didn’t get a shot of it, but the guest library was almost as nice.
So, take note those of you who want to be in on the clan castle: this is the level to which we would like to become accustomed! We’d take this place – if the state of California would sell it to us. It’s currently operated as Hearst San Simeon State Historic Monument. They charge $24 a ticket! On second thought, maybe it’s just too fancy for our tastes. The BIG is nice, the view is nice, the location leaves something to be desired, and the upkeep would probably be preventative. Some day we will have a Hearst Castle of our own. Except we won’t call it that, “Hearst Castle” is a registered trademark.

Across Highway 1 from the castle is Hearst Memorial State Beach. After seeing the Castle, we went down to fry our kites. Matt had much fun flying that one we took to Dog Island that we got all excited about kites and bought a small one called a 3-D micro kite. The larger one was easy enough to fly but the just wasn’t enough wind for the little one, despite some valiant efforts. We’ll have to try again some other day. There is a creek that meets that ocean right at the beach. The water doesn’t flow all the way out into the waves but reaches halfway across the beach and sinks into the sand. There ends up being a kind of back-up and the water at the creek’s mouth is essentially a stagnant pool. It was kinda gross (as are most stagnant pools) and the kite fun ended when the big one dove right into the creek water. It was wet, sandy, and kinda stinky. Plus it wouldn’t fly anymore. With both our kites out of commission we called it a day and headed home.

Charles Paddock Zoo

We like animals. We have been members of the Louisville Zoo for three years now and we love to go look at all the animals they have there. If you have not ever had a zoo membership we can recommend it. You start saving some time during your third visit. Surely in a year you can go to the zoo more than three times! When you have a membership you could just walk in, see your favorite two animals and go. There is no pressure to “get your money’s worth” be seeing all the animals so you can spend more time with the ones you like or just stop in for a little animal fun when you are in the area. The best thing about membership is since you are spending more time with each animal when you go and you are going more often you actually get to know the animals – as individuals. You pick up the animals’ names, you recognize their unique features and you see a lot more behaviors than just sitting around. Usually, one sees a lot of sitting (or standing) around at a zoo. That doesn’t change with a membership but when you go 15 times in a year, the one or two interesting encounters on each visit add up to a lot of interesting animal experiences. The reason you are reading a glowing endorsement of zoo membership on our travel blog is because now we get to enjoy another aspect of zoo membership: Reciprocal Membership. There are about ten zoos and aquariums within easy reach of us where we get free or reduced admission with our Louisville Zoo membership.

In mid-June we went to the Charles Paddock Zoo away north in Atascadero. It’s a small zoo, covering only three blocks at the most. Our AAA tour book said it had 150 animals and we were laughing about whether that meant 150 kinds or 150 total animals. Matt started counting to make sure we saw 150 animals: 6 goats, 1 tiger, 1 owl… He eventually lost count. Whatever the actual number in their collection, they have an impressive number of species. Several of their animals are species one doesn’t usually see in zoos at all, let alone in small ones. They even had animals that we had never even heard of. The diversity for such a small place was pretty impressive. Of course, nobody had a lot of room, which is a little bit sad. [Insert lengthy discussion of conservation pros and captivity cons of zoos here.]

We saw a sleeping Indo-Chinese tiger, the fluff of an alleged two-toed sloth that was sticking over the edge of a hammock, the striped shapes of at least two porcupines tucked away in an imitation cave and the ear tufts of a serval cat. We got a much better look at the goats in the petting zoo, the maras (a kind of cavie) named Pancho and Villa, the emu, the troop of wallabys, the spider monkeys and the prehensile-tailed porcupines. We spent a lot of time watching the flamingos groom themselves. They all chattered and then two would face off with puffed-up feathers and a great racket of calls. One would back down and then they all would go back to grooming and chattering. We guessed they were establishing and enforcing social standings. As far as social behaviors among birds go, the birds of Parrot Pond were the most interesting. They had four different types on display and two of each type. They two of each type were sitting together grooming each other, totally ignoring the other types. Most animals group together with other members of their species, but it’s all the more noticeable when such bright feathers are involved.
We saw a Channel Island fox. It’s a little-bitty thing. We saw some great big toad that we can’t recall the name of. Matt’s reaction when he saw it after a few moments staring into the tank was something like, “Oh look! There he is. He’s big!” After we walked away there was another couple looking at the snakes and frogs and the guy said something like, “Oh, there it is! I didn’t even see him! I thought that was a rock!” Apparently, reactions to big toads hiding in plain sight are universal. In the aviary, we decided we needed one of our own when we have a bunch of land someday. Mandarin ducks, Inca turns, and Sulawesi ground doves are all on our list of animals we would like to keep some day.

The zoo also had three red ruffed lemurs out while we were there. We like to watch lemurs bounding around. Matt saw one come right up to the edge of the cage and reach out to grab the leaves of some nearby bamboo. Like so many primates we’ve seen in captivity we are fascinated by lemurs. They seem so familiar because they are primates. They have forward-looking eyes and hands. Real hands! We’ve seen them sitting around looking not unlike tired children. We’ve also seem then giving us considered looks. They really seem to be thinking when they look at you. That’s a look we are not used to getting from animals. On the other hand, since their lineage separated from other primates early on they are also very alien. They look even more animal-like to human eyes than do apes or monkeys. They do things that remind us of ourselves and they do other things that remind us of the animal we know best – Asher. We find many animals end up looking like rabbits to us. We recently saw an episode of Dirty Jobs where they were sheering yaks and the yaks were so shaggy, snorty, and kicky that all we saw were big rabbits.

At the zoo we also discovered a new favorite animal. Prevost’s squirrels are really neat. They are also called tricolored squirrels because they are black on top, reddish brown underneath and have white stripes on their sides. They just look so neat. Also, they have cute little rodent faces!

If you want to see all the animals that the zoo has to offer, they have a great section of their website with information and photos of all their species. It’s one of the better zoo websites we have seen.

A SLO Day

Sorry for such long delays between posts. It’s not that nothing has happened since we’ve been here in California. We’ve done a fair amount of things, actually. It’s just that Matt has gotten behind in getting things all written out and posted. He’s really going to try to get caught up. 3, 2, 1… GO!

The town of San Luis Obispo, where Maya is working, is about 10 miles up the highway from our apartment. It turns out that the locals don’t call San Luis Obispo by its name but instead us the mono-syllabic acronym SLO. We have not yet totally adopted this use between ourselves, but it’s really hard to resist the trend to verbal laziness.

Soon after getting moved in we drove up to San Luis (another shortened form) to find the hospital and investigate what kind of fun we could have there. SLO is the largest city for 30 or 40 miles around so it has almost all of the stores we might want. A Blockbuster, a World Market, a Borders, a Best Buy… There is also a Ralphs – which is really a Kroger with a different sign out front. This makes us very happy because all the items we are used to getting are available again, for the most part. Also the prices of most things here is closer to what we were used to in Louisville, expect for gas. Fuel here is typically $4.35-$4.75 a gallon. Don’t know how that compares to your neck of the woods, but we don’t like it. On the other hand, we do fill up when we need it, so that's inelastic demand for you.

We make a stop at the World Market just about every time we go up there. Early on we found a wooden figure of a bird that we liked. It didn’t have a price on it and it was the only one on the shelf so we debated about how much it would be and if we really needed it or not and whether or not we wanted to deal with them having to look up of the price on the item. In the end we decided that we liked it enough and took it up along with our other items. We’ve been buying a lot of wine here since just about every store has a very good selection of reasonably priced wines. The bird did have to be looked up and we waited while the manager people searched for a SKU. At first the cashier called back to the office and was trying to describe it. That’s about the time they opened another lane because we were holding up the one we were in. The over-the-phone description was not getting anywhere so a manager came out to actually see the item. They had been imagining some kind of wall hinging. So a manger came out and took the bird off to find out what it was called and how much to charge us for it. While he was gone, we expended all the small talk we could think of with the cashier and still he did not return so we just stood around in the line not talking and waiting. Eventually, the manager re-appeared bringing the bird and the news that it was called “bird blk w/ tail” which is surprisingly accurate descriptive of the figurine. It cost a mere $9.99! We bought it and now it is in the bathroom making the counter more interesting.

Speaking of interesting, California is full of missions. Back when “California” meant the whole western coast of New Spain the mission system set about bringing civilization to the hinterlands. From the southern tip of the Baja Peninsula to what is now the US-Mexico border there are about 30 missions. In 1767 the government of New Spain decided to expand the missions into Alta California (“Upper California,” what is today part of the US). This was an attempt to secure the Pacific coast against potential incursions from the British, the Russians and any others who might be interesting in settling the area. There is some room to argue about how the missions are counted, but the majority opinion is that 21 missions were founded in Alta California between 1770 and 1823. Lacking the population to send colonists from New Spain, the idea was to convert the local native population into Christians, agriculturalists and loyal subjects of the Spanish Crown. The mission effort met with mixed success. The whole history of the endeavor is terribly fascinating. More of it will be told here in time because we plan to visit all of the missions while we are out here.

San Luis Obispo is where it is because of a mission. The town grew up around the mission of San Luis Obispo de Tolosa and took its name from the mission. It was founded in 1772 as the fifth mission and as a base for hunting the numerous bears in the nearby Los Osos Valley. Apparently, bear meat helped several of the missions survive long enough to get their farms and cattle herds up and running. The mission is just west of the scenic downtown these days. The building has been renovated several times and has looked quite different throughout its history. The last time it was renovated, it was restored it its original appearance. We went through the museum (former living quarters for the padres) and looked at the stuff there. The church itself was closed for some kind of maintenance so we didn’t get to see that. We plan to go back sometime and take the official tour. Visiting this mission came with strong recommendations so we need to really see all of it sometime. For now, we’re not checking this one off the list.

There is a lot of quaint shopping in the downtown area. There are some book stores, lots of clothing shops and various resultants and food shops. Driving in the area is a challenge because of the wall-to-wall people that are always crossing the street. Also when we were there the streets were swarming with little kids on skateboards. Ah summer! We visited one book store and a vintage clothing store, just to say we had seen something. This was just a preliminary investigation so we’ll most likely go back one of these days and see everything. We also have heard about a “gum wall,” which is supposed to be exactly what it sounds like. We’ll have to look for that too!