Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

marypcb and I like wine. What's more we have lots of friends in the Bay Area who like wine, too. This means that when we go to San Francisco and San Jose we get to try all sorts of new wines from interesting wineries of all shapes and sizes.

This last trip we visited quite the crop, and had some very nice wines indeed.

We started out on a trip with our friend Rick and his little black Mini convertible to the Russian River district, near Sebastopol (geekily famous as the home of O'Reilly Books). Our first visit was to the Dutton Estate Winery, where we tried some rather nice chardonnay. This rather set the scene for much of our tasting this year, following on from our New Zealand adventures, where we discovered more of a taste for whites than we'd expected. Our next visit was Iron Horse, which specialises in sparkling wines. It was the 25^th anniversary of their Wedding Cuvée and they were pouring from hefty jeroboams... Iron Horse has a rather lovely outdoor winery, and we stood in the sun and watched raptors circling over the warm fields below. The trip to Kaz wasn't quite from the sublime to the ridiculous, but it was certainly from the light into the dark. Kaz's eponymous winery is a dark little room, full of excellent reds. We ended up naming their 2003 Field Red for them, when I suggested calling it "Fred". Soon the blackboard described it as "Red Said Fred". And red it was, and very good indeed. The ports weren't too bad, either...

The SF to Napa Mini Rally took us (driven by Rick again) to the imposing Niebaum-Coppola chateau just outside St Helena in the Napa valley. The wines weren't the best we've had, though still very pleasant. $15 for 3 wines is a tad on the steep side, even if they do throw in a "free" glass. Things were very different at the Greenfield Winery in American Canyon. Good people, and a range of rather lovely wines to taste. Some rather quaffable bottles there, including the "Rabid Red" and the Manzanitas Creek. Our only criticism - too many different brands and labels! However, apparently they will be consolidating on one brand soon...

Our hired convertible also took us to some rather nice little wineries, but this time in the Santa Cruz mountains, an area we hadn't explored before. Our first stop was the winery of an old favourite, Bonny Doon (home of Cigare Volante and a rather luscious Framboise). We' not experienced their range before, and we found a lot here to enjoy - from whites to reds, and the rather intriguing port/framboise blend "Bouteille Call". The latter serves very well out of little chocolate cups (we had a nice evening comparing dessert wines and liquier wines with our hosts saffronrose and mr_kurt).

spikeiowa and rowanf took us on a tour of a handful of wineries just a stone's throw from San Jose. A long climb up a twisty mountain road took us to one of the area's best known wineries, Ridge. Normally Ridge is closed on a week day. But we were lucky, as they'd had a corporate event that morning, so we were able to try a few of their wines with a most educational pourer. Ridge also has a beautiful garden, even if you do have to beware of the rattlesnakes. Down the hill, Picchetti mixes excellent wines with peacocks, and a set of rather lovely old buildings in a country park. Our final stop, Cooper-Garrod, was a small family winery, deep in the hills near Saratoga. Good wines (even a passable claret) and lots of aviation history, as it was founded by NASA's chief test pilot when he retired...

If you like mountain roads, the journey from San Jose to David Bruce's winery is one that's going to keep you enthralled. Bear Creek Road twists and turns up and over the mountains, leaving you at a winery that takes its cues from the limestone mountains of Provence - right down to an excellent Pinot Noir rose that could have come from the vineyards around Cassis. Excellent wines (it specialises in Pinot Noir), and a beautiful winery, surrounded by lavender and scented herbs.

"Andrew was thirteen the day his little brother discovered anti-gravity."

Actually that isn't true. He was thirteen the day his brother found the thing that they later discovered was an anti-gravity machine buried in the rubble of a planet-sized trash pile.

Of course that version isn't true either.

The real story is one of a couple of kids on some backwater archaeology dig of a world orbiting some no-name brown dwarf who just got bored one day and decided to see what was over the hill. But that's how things really happen. The stories we read are good, but the real story, ah, that's where we learn the truth about ourselves.

So let's stand with them, under a never-sunny sky, baking in the infra-red of another day in the back-end of nowhere. Two kids ready to go off and play. The ancient whatever-forming machines that gave the world its atmosphere are working well for once, so it's a nice enough day, a day when the world beckons and we must go run and find what it gives us.

They call it Junk Pile. Why it was there, no one knows, but for more than two million years the Mercury-sized ball of rock had been the cross roads of a dozen different star-faring races.

Not all at the same time. Intelligence doesn't last long in this unfriendly universe. Smarts aren't rare. Life is everywhere, nourished by a hundred million stars. And where there's life there's nearly always intelligence. Everywhere is busy, everywhere is bustling. But no one wants to talk, no one wants to see the stars, and it's so much easier to hunker down at home and go matrioshka in the computronium rubble of a solar system. And then it's very easy to die.

[story fragment half-dreamt flying from San Francisco to London]

...with two Guardian articles in which I introduce the term "arphid" into the mass media and marypcb and I cry "The Pentium is dead, long live the Pentium" at Intel's Fall Developer Forum.

Oh, and I seem to be Server Management magazine's new messaging columnist.

I've just switched to a new LJ icon, taken from this Flickr image. I love the textures and reflections.

Oh, and the engineering.

The plate comes from a Shay Patent locomotive (Roaring Camp Railroads Number 7) - an articulated design developed for use on logging railroads in the US. It's a solution to the same problem - getting maximum power in limited loading gauges and on tight curve radii - as the famous Fairlies Patent engines developed for the Ffestiniog in Wales. I've always had a thing for articulated locomotives, be they monstrously complex beasts like the US Big Boy, or simple solutions like the Beyer-Garrett.