by Christina Waters | Sep 8, 2009 | Wine |
Big Basin Vineyards celebrates the crush of 2009 this weekend, September 12 & 13, from noon til 5pm at the scenic winery property above Boulder Creek.
Join winemaker Bradley Brown for the annual celebration of harvest at Big Basin Vineyards, famed for its Rhone varietals and earth-shaking Syrahs.
A variety of Big Basin’s new releases, along with library wines and barrel samples, will be available for tasting – seven syrahs, three pinot noirs and a few select blends! Plus taste treats from Vino Locale.
The Harvest event is free for Friends of the Vineyard (up to two passes), $10 for those picking up wines and $20 for others. Everybody gets a 22 oz. crystal Big Basin wine glass.
Music by 3hree Bro’s Down. Contact Big Basin Vineyards, or call 831-621-8028, for all details.
by Christina Waters | Sep 4, 2009 | Art, Home |
Paintings by the late Eduardo Carrillo are currently on display through November 22, in the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. Carrillo was a true shaman of light and color — prepare to be dazzled.
A bravura practitioner of magic realism in hallucinogenic large-scale oil paintings as well as subtle watercolor miniatures, Carrillo cast a long shadow in his ancestral Baja, his early Los Angeles stomping grounds, and ultimately in the Bay Area. Two dozen of his major works – including his neon-hued masterpiece of mythic time travel, Los Tropicanos — fill the main Solari Gallery of MAH. Even the final unfinished painting — a searing self-portrait — is on display, next to his studio table, chairs, easel and palette, in this retrospective of one of California’s path-breaking, multi-cultural iconoclasts.
Public reception will be held this coming First Friday, September 4, from 5-9pm.
by Christina Waters | Sep 2, 2009 | Food, Home |
If you’re like us, you live for August and September — dry-farm tomato season! The best, the most intensely-flavored, the juiciest – tomatoes the way the Great Mother intended them to be.
And there are lots of terrific tomatoes out there at our farmers markets. But now I know the source of the very best.
Meder Street Market is a boutique stand open at the bustling (ha!) crossroads of Meder & Western Drive on the Westside.
Sundays from 10am until 3pm, you can find neighbors hanging out over bins of brilliantly-hued flowers, basils, onions, tomatoes, squashes, beans. It’s a charming, laid-back scene where the best tomatoes in the area go for a mere $3/lb.
Organic, home-grown, yeah baby!
by Christina Waters | Aug 24, 2009 | Home, Wine |
The best white wine you’ve never heard of. The initial opening of jasmine and mineral salts, continues into a center of golden delicious apples, green and crisp. The piquant finish offers hints of tangerine and lime. At 13% alcohol you could drink this all day long.
Made from central coast grapes by oeno-gurus John Locke and Alex Krause, this mysteriously perfumed yet utterly dry wine is so far available only in Canada (there’s a long story here), and at Soif. But soon, it will be all over your neighborhood. And in your glass.
by Christina Waters | Aug 23, 2009 | Home, Movies |
Nora Ephron’s new film is just a trifle. A mere bon bon. An amuse bouche for baby boom nostalgics. But for providing the cinematic feast that is Meryl Streep playing Julia Child, Ephron deserves our unrestrained gratitude.
Streep is as joyous in her over-sized portrayal as the real Julia Child was in everything she did. Large, generous, and graced with a huge appetite for life’s sensory possibilities, the real Child was the savvy gastro-entrepreneuse who made “cuisine” a household word in post-war America. Streep, by all accounts our greatest living actress, not only retrieves the most Childesque mannerisms – the perpetually tossed head, the rolling eyes, the warbling chortle – she goes further. Not into an over-the-top impersonation. Dan Ackroyd already did that.
Mais non! Streep does something even better. She offers us Julia Child transfigured. Julia Child as we remember her, as the collective “we” created her — a robust, hulking, darling of a woman who brought joy, memorable recipes and most of all empowerment to several generations of hopeful gourmet cooks. Streep is blindingly accurate in portraying our cultural memory of this icon. Not Julia as she exactly was, but Julia exactly as we recall her. (more…)
