This morning I sent off the deposit for 1 ton of Grenache and 1 ton of
Mourvedre. I'm hoping to get more than the one tone of Grenache, and
originally we had agreed on 2, but it looks like I may get closer to
one ton than 2.
Grenache and Mourvedre, along with Syrah, are the most ubiquitous red Rhone varietals in California. Although I believe there may actually be more Carignan planted than Mourvedre, Carignan is a fading star, both here and in France. At one time Carignan was firmly entrenched in the number three slot in the Southern Rhone region (behind Grenache and then Syrah) while Mourvedre was largely confined to the Provence region where it was frequently made into some fairly notable roses, such as Tavel, and also made into some relatively "serious" wines, usually from the Bandol region. However a few growers experimented with Mourvedre in the Rhone Valley, and it took to the area readily, proving itself superior to Carignan in its assigned role, which was as a blender in a typical Cote du Rhone style blend, which usually features from roughly 40 to 60% Grenache, the remainder being divided between Syrah and, now, Mourvedre. It was actually illegal originally to grow Mourvedre in the Rhone Valley but this regulation was amended long ago, and most winemakers have never looked back.
I have never knowingly had a wine from the Rhone with Carignan in it (although it is likely that a few I've had might have contained some). I have had California Carignan. I was a member of the Ridge wine club for many years and they would usually send out a California Carignan at least once a year. I have had many California Mourvedres, both as standalone 100% Mourvedre wine and in (usually) Rhone-style blends, and in my limited experience the Mourvedre trumps the Carignan fairly handily. The Ridge Carignans (over the years they sourced from several different vineyards) shared an annoying attribute, which was that they would be fairly nice when the bottle was opened but would fade badly by the time you got to the last glass, even if a few people had consumed the entire bottle within a half hour or less. The California Mourvedres are all over the map - they can display a distinctive fruit-driven elegance, they can be jammy and overly fruit forward or, in the case of cool climate areas, they can be underripe and a little weedy, with excessive acid. These last features contribute to its value as a blender, as Mourvedre is a late ripener, so if you throw it in with some fruity high alcohol Grenache and/or Syrah it will lend some nice structure to the finished product.
I have had two well-regarded wines from Bandol on a few occasions: Domaine Tempier and Chateau Pibarnon. I have always found the Tempier to be a tannic beast, with a typically (for the southern Rhone) earthy, even "dirty" feel to it. I far prefer Pibarnon, which provides an elegance and breeding that is really pretty rare for this grape. I have to stress that my Bandol experience is very limited, and the way prices are going, will continue that way.
I bought the Grenache and Mourvedre mostly because I have a lot of Syrah coming in - 6 tons to be exact. Committing to buy this much Syrah was a move I already recognize as a freshman mistake but I'm going to run with it as well as I can. My original idea was to buy a limited amount of grapes in Santa Barbara County and base my operations there. I haven't made many contacts on the inside, as I had hoped, but I was certain I could buy some decent grapes from somewhere, make the wines there (at the time I didn't know where), and at least have a workable commute between LA and the Santa Barbara wine country.
If you do not have permanent access to a winery (like me and many others) obviously you have to rent space, time and equipment. Usually (mandatory in my case) the equipment will come with the space and time. The options are to use a custom crush facility or contract with a winery whose primary focus is to make their own branded wines.
Custom Crush is also a legal term, and it refers to any winemaking service performed by a bonded winery for a wholesaler (which is what I will be), or even an end user. Being a wholesaler means you can sell the stuff but you can't make or bottle it. However you can buy grapes and supplies and have the bonded guys make it.
The Custom Crush heavyweight in Santa Barbara County (they are in Santa Maria, at the northern tip of the county) is Central Coast Wine Services. It is owned by the Miller family, who are wine heavyweights in general. The Miller family owns Bien Nacido Vineyards, a huge ranch in the Santa Ynez Valley which has extensive vineyards and a huge annual grape tonnage output. Bien Nacido is not just huge; most of its grapes are considered absolutely top drawer and go into many highly coveted wines, usually pinot noir and chardonnay, but also quite a bit of Syrah, and many others. The wine class at Allan Hancock College received a gift of ½ ton of cabernet franc grapes from Bien Nacido, which were terrific. There are also two wineries on the property, one of which is shared by Au Bon Climat and Qupe, two relatively early pioneers of winemaking in the area (they are both now well-established with substantial annual outputs).
The Millers also own Solomon Hills Vineyard, down the road near Los Alamos, a pinot-centric vineyard that, in my recent experience, accounts for better pinots these days than the venerable Bien Nacido spreads, French Camp Vineyards near Paso Robles (another sprawling holding), as well as probably a bunch of stuff I'm forgetting or don't know about. So they're players from way back.
Central Coast Wine Services (CCWS) was for a long time really the only serious custom crush facility in the area, and made it possible for many small maverick winemakers to make their wine themselves in a well-equipped environment without trying to raise the $500,000 or so it takes to start a winery facility (current estimates put this number at more like $1 million). I figured I would start with them and least get an idea of what it cost to make wine; I had no idea what a crush facility, and figured I should find out before trying to buy grapes.
By this time I had casually begun remarking (usually to classmates or when I got drunk enough, to most anyone) that I had handshake agreements to buy grapes with Michael Larner and Doug Braun. Mike Larner was my teacher in the intro to viticulture class; he runs a 33 acre vineyard inherited from his father, mostly planted to Rhone varieties.. Doug Braun is a well established grower, winemaker and entrepreneur who had given my viticulture class an interesting tour of his vineyard, one of the first in the area to be certified fully biodynamic. Both of them are terrifically nice guys, and both of them had no idea that we had a handshake agreement - this was possibly because we did not. In fact I had never spoken to either of them regarding buying grapes. I was hoping my bullshit did not come back to haunt me, as I did not want to poison the waters before I even got started.
I'd decided I'd try to get about 2-4 tons of grapes. I was focused on Syrah; it tasted great, it was widely planted, and most importantly, it was probably the easiest grape to make wine from. Common wisdom dictated that Syrah even liked to be handled roughly, as opposed to, say, pinot noir, which would roll over and die immediately if not handled tenderly.
So that was my story - I've got 2 to 4 tons of Syrah coming in, I want to make wine at your facility. I emailed CCWS with the good news, at least hoping to get a rate quote out of them so I could at least have starting point. Thankfully I was smart enough not to do my namedropping thing in the email.
I never heard back from CCWS. Shortly thereafter I emailed Mike Larner, asking if he had any grapes for sale. I never heard back from him either. Hmmmm, I was clearly not a player at this point.
Shortly thereafter I purchased some wine futures from a new wine brand called Municipal Winemakers, 6 bottles of "Bright Red", a Rhone blend. I did this, as I do very often with wine purchases, strictly on a whim, and without prior tasting. Every year The Wine Cask wine shop (and restaurant) in Santa Barbara holds a futures tastng and sale. They publish a nifty catalogue which has a large cross-section of most of the Central Coast big boy wines, as well as a lot of obscure stuff they're showcasing. The big boy wines include a lot of very limited edition stuff that can run upwards of $100, which of course is fun to read about, but absurd to buy (at least for mid level consumers like me). They hold a huge tasting where prospective customers can taste barrel samples of the futures offerings.
I had never gotten futures before this year, but this Bright Red stuff seemed interesting and it was only $14 a bottle. Since I had been in a band called Bright Red Universe I decided to go for it.
Municipal Winemakers is Dave Potter, an assistant winemaker at Fess Parker Winery; through his website I contacted him to ask if his other wine ("Bright White") was available. He offered to let me taste it down at the Fess Parker Wine Center, where he made it.
Dave never made our appointment when I showed at the Fess Parker Wine Center but I was informed by one of the employees that it was a custom crush facility. Ah, another custom crush facility. Interest rekindled, I called her shortly thereafter and set an appointment with Armando, one of the managers of the facility. OK! I'm getting on the inside. At the least I can find out what this custom crush process costs.
The Fess Parker Wine Center is a large monolithic building near the Santa Maria Airport and almost right next door to CCWS. It has a lobby area with the usual displays of wine labels, newspaper articles and photos of vineyards in a large lobby are with a hallway that branches off to a series of offices. Most of the building, though, is a massive winery.
I showed up for our appointment thinking about what bullshit I would drop on Armando to get taken seriously. I decided that I was the representative of a group of family investors and were doing a pilot project. I don't recall if I namedropped Mike Larner again (it would be the last time if I did) but I represented that I'd have somewhere between 4 to 6 tons of grapes, with an upper limit of 10 tons. Sounded good, I guess, especially since I had no grapes, no experience and no idea whatsoever about what it all might cost me. In other words, I was most likely wasting his time.
Armando turned out to be a nice guy and we talked for a while about not much in particular, He gave me a tour of the winery facility, which clearly was set up for large scale production. The bottling line was running, bottling some Grenache Banc for local winemaker Kris Curran, and since I love watching a bottling machine in operation I stood there mesmerized for a few minutes until Armando moved me along. We strolled through hundreds (thousands?) of barrels (not all full probably) stacked 10 high, huge fermenting tanks and some real large pressing equipment. Armando stressed to me that my 4 to 8 ton lot would probably not be acceptable to upper management but he promised to check. He also handed me a rate sheet, which finally gave some idea of what it costs to do this thing: $450 a ton to start, plus storage, bottling, extra services, etc. Essentially the $450 included weighing, crushing, fermenting and doing one racking up until the first of the year, after which storage charges would kick in and much of the work would then be charges on a piecemeal basis.
It turns out that this facility was originally intended for overflow storage but had evolved into a winemaking facility, primarily for Fess Parker reds - the whites would be made at the actual (as known to tourists) Fess Parker Winery in the Santa Ynez Valley.
Fess Parker, or more accurately the Fess Parker Company, is something of a controversial entity in Santa Barbara County. Fess (famous for playing Daniel Boone on television) originally gained notoriety in the area for developing a large hotel property near the beach in Santa Barbara, which was closely followed by the winery. In addition to the winery facilities there are several wine labels (Fess Parker, Parker Station, etc), a spa in the town of Los Olivos, several vineyards that supply grapes to both Fess Parker and other wineries, and various other real estate holdings. The company is always wheeling and dealing and has not always done so in what many locals would consider an above board fashion.
Several years ago I was even in the position of sending the winery a nasty email following its filing of a lawsuit against Foxen Winery, at the time my favorite wine brand. The lawsuit was widely seen as an attempt to destroy Foxen and arose when Fess Parker started labeling some wines "Foxen". Although strictly speaking the grapes were from Foxen Canyon (which runs through the heart of the Santa Ynez Valley), they had conveniently left out the "canyon" part. Foxen winery had already established a claim to the name (Dick Dore is the grandson of Benjamin Foxen, who had pioneered much of the area, and the Foxen winery is on Benjamin's old family ranch) and it was assumed Foxen Winery had something to do with the Fess Parker Wine, which was not the case. Foxen filed a suit and Fess Parker (whose financial resources outstripped Foxen's by a huge margin) filed a massive countersuit, one that Foxen had no hope of defending.
Here is the text of my friendly little email:
Date: Tue, 18 May 1999 10:57:36 -0700
To: FParker@ibm.net
From: mike stan
Subject: foxen
Sirs
I've always disliked your winery and organization intensely, especially your perverted
marketing campaigns (eg using "American Heritage" to promote wines made from grapes of
Mediterranean origin). Additionally the wines are no great shakes either besides the odd Syrah.
While you focus your efforts on marketing Foxen has been establishing themselves as
the finest producer in the county; now you are trying to capitalize on their reputation.
I am nauseated.
Shortly I will begin organizing a boycott of your products (the world can easily live without them).
Foxen will always kick your ass both in integrity and quality.
Sincerely
Mike Stan
Los Angeles
And here's their admittedly good-natured response:
Date: Tue, 18 May 1999 12:55:34 -0700
From: Cindy Simpson <fparker@ibm.net>
Reply-To: fparker@ibm.net
Organization: Fess Parker Winery
To: mike stan
Subject: Re: foxen
Dear Mike:
We are sorry you are unable to appreciate our "American TRADITION" label on our
reserve wines. We realize we cannot please everyone and we appreciate your
colorful comments.
As for the Foxen issue, you should know that we had already agreed to cease
using the names Fluer de Foxen and Foxen Cuvee prior to Foxen's legal actions
against us. We sincerely hope that this matter will be resolved shortly.
We do hope you are feeling better soon! Have a wonderful day :).
Sincerely,
Cindy Simpson
Director of Marketing
So at least this episode had a happy ending.
Fess Parker also attracted outcry from an alliance with the Chumash tribe plans several years ago to annex 500 acres of land and built a casino and housing in the heart of the Santa Ynez Valley, a deal that fell apart. Apparently he tried to give 51% of his land to the tribe so it could be reclassified as "tribal" i.e. sovereign land, allowing the development to go forward.
Personally I made my peace with the whole Parker thing long ago and in fact I shared a couple of classes with his granddaughter at Allan Hancock College Additionally, my Intro class took a very informative field trip to the winery, where Larry Schaffer (another assistant winemaker) gave us an excellent tour. And now I had toured the custom crush facility. Since Fess Parker is now an entrenched part of the wine landscape I only hope I didn't get on his blacklist after my email, as I want to try to remain friends with everyone.
Grenache and Mourvedre, along with Syrah, are the most ubiquitous red Rhone varietals in California. Although I believe there may actually be more Carignan planted than Mourvedre, Carignan is a fading star, both here and in France. At one time Carignan was firmly entrenched in the number three slot in the Southern Rhone region (behind Grenache and then Syrah) while Mourvedre was largely confined to the Provence region where it was frequently made into some fairly notable roses, such as Tavel, and also made into some relatively "serious" wines, usually from the Bandol region. However a few growers experimented with Mourvedre in the Rhone Valley, and it took to the area readily, proving itself superior to Carignan in its assigned role, which was as a blender in a typical Cote du Rhone style blend, which usually features from roughly 40 to 60% Grenache, the remainder being divided between Syrah and, now, Mourvedre. It was actually illegal originally to grow Mourvedre in the Rhone Valley but this regulation was amended long ago, and most winemakers have never looked back.
I have never knowingly had a wine from the Rhone with Carignan in it (although it is likely that a few I've had might have contained some). I have had California Carignan. I was a member of the Ridge wine club for many years and they would usually send out a California Carignan at least once a year. I have had many California Mourvedres, both as standalone 100% Mourvedre wine and in (usually) Rhone-style blends, and in my limited experience the Mourvedre trumps the Carignan fairly handily. The Ridge Carignans (over the years they sourced from several different vineyards) shared an annoying attribute, which was that they would be fairly nice when the bottle was opened but would fade badly by the time you got to the last glass, even if a few people had consumed the entire bottle within a half hour or less. The California Mourvedres are all over the map - they can display a distinctive fruit-driven elegance, they can be jammy and overly fruit forward or, in the case of cool climate areas, they can be underripe and a little weedy, with excessive acid. These last features contribute to its value as a blender, as Mourvedre is a late ripener, so if you throw it in with some fruity high alcohol Grenache and/or Syrah it will lend some nice structure to the finished product.
I have had two well-regarded wines from Bandol on a few occasions: Domaine Tempier and Chateau Pibarnon. I have always found the Tempier to be a tannic beast, with a typically (for the southern Rhone) earthy, even "dirty" feel to it. I far prefer Pibarnon, which provides an elegance and breeding that is really pretty rare for this grape. I have to stress that my Bandol experience is very limited, and the way prices are going, will continue that way.
I bought the Grenache and Mourvedre mostly because I have a lot of Syrah coming in - 6 tons to be exact. Committing to buy this much Syrah was a move I already recognize as a freshman mistake but I'm going to run with it as well as I can. My original idea was to buy a limited amount of grapes in Santa Barbara County and base my operations there. I haven't made many contacts on the inside, as I had hoped, but I was certain I could buy some decent grapes from somewhere, make the wines there (at the time I didn't know where), and at least have a workable commute between LA and the Santa Barbara wine country.
If you do not have permanent access to a winery (like me and many others) obviously you have to rent space, time and equipment. Usually (mandatory in my case) the equipment will come with the space and time. The options are to use a custom crush facility or contract with a winery whose primary focus is to make their own branded wines.
Custom Crush is also a legal term, and it refers to any winemaking service performed by a bonded winery for a wholesaler (which is what I will be), or even an end user. Being a wholesaler means you can sell the stuff but you can't make or bottle it. However you can buy grapes and supplies and have the bonded guys make it.
The Custom Crush heavyweight in Santa Barbara County (they are in Santa Maria, at the northern tip of the county) is Central Coast Wine Services. It is owned by the Miller family, who are wine heavyweights in general. The Miller family owns Bien Nacido Vineyards, a huge ranch in the Santa Ynez Valley which has extensive vineyards and a huge annual grape tonnage output. Bien Nacido is not just huge; most of its grapes are considered absolutely top drawer and go into many highly coveted wines, usually pinot noir and chardonnay, but also quite a bit of Syrah, and many others. The wine class at Allan Hancock College received a gift of ½ ton of cabernet franc grapes from Bien Nacido, which were terrific. There are also two wineries on the property, one of which is shared by Au Bon Climat and Qupe, two relatively early pioneers of winemaking in the area (they are both now well-established with substantial annual outputs).
The Millers also own Solomon Hills Vineyard, down the road near Los Alamos, a pinot-centric vineyard that, in my recent experience, accounts for better pinots these days than the venerable Bien Nacido spreads, French Camp Vineyards near Paso Robles (another sprawling holding), as well as probably a bunch of stuff I'm forgetting or don't know about. So they're players from way back.
Central Coast Wine Services (CCWS) was for a long time really the only serious custom crush facility in the area, and made it possible for many small maverick winemakers to make their wine themselves in a well-equipped environment without trying to raise the $500,000 or so it takes to start a winery facility (current estimates put this number at more like $1 million). I figured I would start with them and least get an idea of what it cost to make wine; I had no idea what a crush facility, and figured I should find out before trying to buy grapes.
By this time I had casually begun remarking (usually to classmates or when I got drunk enough, to most anyone) that I had handshake agreements to buy grapes with Michael Larner and Doug Braun. Mike Larner was my teacher in the intro to viticulture class; he runs a 33 acre vineyard inherited from his father, mostly planted to Rhone varieties.. Doug Braun is a well established grower, winemaker and entrepreneur who had given my viticulture class an interesting tour of his vineyard, one of the first in the area to be certified fully biodynamic. Both of them are terrifically nice guys, and both of them had no idea that we had a handshake agreement - this was possibly because we did not. In fact I had never spoken to either of them regarding buying grapes. I was hoping my bullshit did not come back to haunt me, as I did not want to poison the waters before I even got started.
I'd decided I'd try to get about 2-4 tons of grapes. I was focused on Syrah; it tasted great, it was widely planted, and most importantly, it was probably the easiest grape to make wine from. Common wisdom dictated that Syrah even liked to be handled roughly, as opposed to, say, pinot noir, which would roll over and die immediately if not handled tenderly.
So that was my story - I've got 2 to 4 tons of Syrah coming in, I want to make wine at your facility. I emailed CCWS with the good news, at least hoping to get a rate quote out of them so I could at least have starting point. Thankfully I was smart enough not to do my namedropping thing in the email.
I never heard back from CCWS. Shortly thereafter I emailed Mike Larner, asking if he had any grapes for sale. I never heard back from him either. Hmmmm, I was clearly not a player at this point.
Shortly thereafter I purchased some wine futures from a new wine brand called Municipal Winemakers, 6 bottles of "Bright Red", a Rhone blend. I did this, as I do very often with wine purchases, strictly on a whim, and without prior tasting. Every year The Wine Cask wine shop (and restaurant) in Santa Barbara holds a futures tastng and sale. They publish a nifty catalogue which has a large cross-section of most of the Central Coast big boy wines, as well as a lot of obscure stuff they're showcasing. The big boy wines include a lot of very limited edition stuff that can run upwards of $100, which of course is fun to read about, but absurd to buy (at least for mid level consumers like me). They hold a huge tasting where prospective customers can taste barrel samples of the futures offerings.
I had never gotten futures before this year, but this Bright Red stuff seemed interesting and it was only $14 a bottle. Since I had been in a band called Bright Red Universe I decided to go for it.
Municipal Winemakers is Dave Potter, an assistant winemaker at Fess Parker Winery; through his website I contacted him to ask if his other wine ("Bright White") was available. He offered to let me taste it down at the Fess Parker Wine Center, where he made it.
Dave never made our appointment when I showed at the Fess Parker Wine Center but I was informed by one of the employees that it was a custom crush facility. Ah, another custom crush facility. Interest rekindled, I called her shortly thereafter and set an appointment with Armando, one of the managers of the facility. OK! I'm getting on the inside. At the least I can find out what this custom crush process costs.
The Fess Parker Wine Center is a large monolithic building near the Santa Maria Airport and almost right next door to CCWS. It has a lobby area with the usual displays of wine labels, newspaper articles and photos of vineyards in a large lobby are with a hallway that branches off to a series of offices. Most of the building, though, is a massive winery.
I showed up for our appointment thinking about what bullshit I would drop on Armando to get taken seriously. I decided that I was the representative of a group of family investors and were doing a pilot project. I don't recall if I namedropped Mike Larner again (it would be the last time if I did) but I represented that I'd have somewhere between 4 to 6 tons of grapes, with an upper limit of 10 tons. Sounded good, I guess, especially since I had no grapes, no experience and no idea whatsoever about what it all might cost me. In other words, I was most likely wasting his time.
Armando turned out to be a nice guy and we talked for a while about not much in particular, He gave me a tour of the winery facility, which clearly was set up for large scale production. The bottling line was running, bottling some Grenache Banc for local winemaker Kris Curran, and since I love watching a bottling machine in operation I stood there mesmerized for a few minutes until Armando moved me along. We strolled through hundreds (thousands?) of barrels (not all full probably) stacked 10 high, huge fermenting tanks and some real large pressing equipment. Armando stressed to me that my 4 to 8 ton lot would probably not be acceptable to upper management but he promised to check. He also handed me a rate sheet, which finally gave some idea of what it costs to do this thing: $450 a ton to start, plus storage, bottling, extra services, etc. Essentially the $450 included weighing, crushing, fermenting and doing one racking up until the first of the year, after which storage charges would kick in and much of the work would then be charges on a piecemeal basis.
It turns out that this facility was originally intended for overflow storage but had evolved into a winemaking facility, primarily for Fess Parker reds - the whites would be made at the actual (as known to tourists) Fess Parker Winery in the Santa Ynez Valley.
Fess Parker, or more accurately the Fess Parker Company, is something of a controversial entity in Santa Barbara County. Fess (famous for playing Daniel Boone on television) originally gained notoriety in the area for developing a large hotel property near the beach in Santa Barbara, which was closely followed by the winery. In addition to the winery facilities there are several wine labels (Fess Parker, Parker Station, etc), a spa in the town of Los Olivos, several vineyards that supply grapes to both Fess Parker and other wineries, and various other real estate holdings. The company is always wheeling and dealing and has not always done so in what many locals would consider an above board fashion.
Several years ago I was even in the position of sending the winery a nasty email following its filing of a lawsuit against Foxen Winery, at the time my favorite wine brand. The lawsuit was widely seen as an attempt to destroy Foxen and arose when Fess Parker started labeling some wines "Foxen". Although strictly speaking the grapes were from Foxen Canyon (which runs through the heart of the Santa Ynez Valley), they had conveniently left out the "canyon" part. Foxen winery had already established a claim to the name (Dick Dore is the grandson of Benjamin Foxen, who had pioneered much of the area, and the Foxen winery is on Benjamin's old family ranch) and it was assumed Foxen Winery had something to do with the Fess Parker Wine, which was not the case. Foxen filed a suit and Fess Parker (whose financial resources outstripped Foxen's by a huge margin) filed a massive countersuit, one that Foxen had no hope of defending.
Here is the text of my friendly little email:
Date: Tue, 18 May 1999 10:57:36 -0700
To: FParker@ibm.net
From: mike stan
Subject: foxen
Sirs
I've always disliked your winery and organization intensely, especially your perverted
marketing campaigns (eg using "American Heritage" to promote wines made from grapes of
Mediterranean origin). Additionally the wines are no great shakes either besides the odd Syrah.
While you focus your efforts on marketing Foxen has been establishing themselves as
the finest producer in the county; now you are trying to capitalize on their reputation.
I am nauseated.
Shortly I will begin organizing a boycott of your products (the world can easily live without them).
Foxen will always kick your ass both in integrity and quality.
Sincerely
Mike Stan
Los Angeles
And here's their admittedly good-natured response:
Date: Tue, 18 May 1999 12:55:34 -0700
From: Cindy Simpson <fparker@ibm.net>
Reply-To: fparker@ibm.net
Organization: Fess Parker Winery
To: mike stan
Subject: Re: foxen
Dear Mike:
We are sorry you are unable to appreciate our "American TRADITION" label on our
reserve wines. We realize we cannot please everyone and we appreciate your
colorful comments.
As for the Foxen issue, you should know that we had already agreed to cease
using the names Fluer de Foxen and Foxen Cuvee prior to Foxen's legal actions
against us. We sincerely hope that this matter will be resolved shortly.
We do hope you are feeling better soon! Have a wonderful day :).
Sincerely,
Cindy Simpson
Director of Marketing
So at least this episode had a happy ending.
Fess Parker also attracted outcry from an alliance with the Chumash tribe plans several years ago to annex 500 acres of land and built a casino and housing in the heart of the Santa Ynez Valley, a deal that fell apart. Apparently he tried to give 51% of his land to the tribe so it could be reclassified as "tribal" i.e. sovereign land, allowing the development to go forward.
Personally I made my peace with the whole Parker thing long ago and in fact I shared a couple of classes with his granddaughter at Allan Hancock College Additionally, my Intro class took a very informative field trip to the winery, where Larry Schaffer (another assistant winemaker) gave us an excellent tour. And now I had toured the custom crush facility. Since Fess Parker is now an entrenched part of the wine landscape I only hope I didn't get on his blacklist after my email, as I want to try to remain friends with everyone.
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