About Me
I grew up on a farm. It was a walnut farm and if any of you know about walnuts, there is no money in it. (Except one year when the Diamond Nut Company plant caught fire and burnt to the ground. That year there was good money in walnuts!)
My step-dad was a physician and he was a huge believer that if you can read, you can teach yourself to do anything, and he had a passion for wine. At the time, where we lived in the Paso Robles wine region in California, there were only about 10 wineries in the area. Local winemakers were friendly and were more than happy to give my dad guidance if he had questions.
At the time I was in high school and most of my experience was helping in the vineyard, planting, pruning, harvesting. and the rest was left up to my dad. He slowly took out more walnut trees on areas of the farm that could be planted for grapes and he soon had more wine than he knew what to do with, even after giving out Christmas presents to friends and family. He decided it was time to go “big” and become a commercial winery selling out to the locals.
Over the years he built the winery up to about 400 cases per year. Very small and what some wineries spill in a year, but he liked being small and manageable because he was still playing doctor 50–60 hours per week.
After college and a stint in the internet boom in Silicon Valley, I came back to the farm and started working for the winery. Someone being there full time really was the missing piece we didn’t have because once I was there overseeing the day to day operations, the quality of the wine went up. It’s just too hard to produce fantastic wines when you are doing it part-time. Eventually, I was doing more and more and started helping with the winemaking and years later, opened my own very small scale brand. I had a passion for blending and Bordeaux blends were my thing as well as the Rhone whites. All was going well until my unfortunate divorce which killed my wine dreams. I was six months away from being in the black. :-(
I fell back on my internet skills and passion and got back into the web world. Today I own my own company and live in Rosarito Beach, Mexico. One of the great things about working online is you can work anywhere with internet access. We’ve got a nice and upcoming wine region here called Valle de Guadalupe and I highly recommend you check it out. It’s a great experience and the restaurants in the area are out of this world.
What made me decide to start this blog is I’ve drunk through my stock of wines I had been saving all these years and being on a budget, I’ve been focusing on wines that don’t cost a fortune. The rare finds from Trader Joes, Costco, World Market as well as places I find South of the border.
I’ll be reviewing wines I find and keep it light-hearted and fun. No snobbiness allowed here! I hope you enjoy my contributions.
