Had one of those magic moments today when things just fall into place. I was digging through the Oregon Wine History Archive at Linfield College (home of the International Pinot Noir Celebration), looking for whatever I could find in the Dick Erath collection to illustrate our documentary. I found a number of fantastic documents and slides. [...]
Archives for category: behind the scenes
Last Saturday we shot the live motion portions of our upcoming music video project, ‘The Wind Kept,’ with guitarist Brave Julius. With an amazing, cinematic song to work with, our hard-working crew and artist Santiago Uceda directing, we’re looking forward to an amazing final product. We hope to debut the video on March 16, 2013 [...]
Like any good suburban neighbors hatching a scheme over beers and barbecue, Thomas Jefferson hatched a scheme with Filippo Mazzei, an Italian patriot living on the next hill over from Monticello. Mazzei was an Italian patriot from a well-known wine family. They decided that they’d form a company to produce fine, European style wines on [...]
Back in February we captured a fantastic pair of interviews from different vantage points on the wine industry. So far we’ve been mainly talking to winery owners, growers and winemakers, but the oenological universe is much bigger. We stopped at Cork, an innovative bottle shop on Portland’s trendy Alberta Street where we talked with owner Darryl Jonnides [...]
Spending a few days in Arizona wine country gave me the bug almost more than anywhere else I’ve been. They’re just starting out, just figuring out what works and what doesn’t, and it’s the closest thing I’ve seen to capturing that incipient, pioneering spirit that must have been present in the early days of Oregon. [...]
A trip to Arizona wine country is full of contrasts. You climb out of a valley baking at 117 degrees, where massive dust storms swallow mountains, and you round a bend and see a sign welcoming you to Arizona wine country, rolling green pastures in all directions and nightly monsoons slipping over the mountains to drop curtains of rain on vineyards, delaying the harvest.
While we’re traveling the continent looking for wine folks with stories to tell as part of Vino Veritas, it’s easy to forget that we’re living in the middle of an up and coming, exciting wine region in the southern part of the Willamette Valley. Spindrift Cellars is less than three miles from our home base, [...]
When it comes to independent coverage of the world’s most captivating beverage, nobody has been doing it better, longer, and with as much enthusiasm as the guys from Grape Radio. They’ve been podcasting since it first came out, recording interviews and videos with sommeliers, wine writers, vignerons from around the world and just about every rockstar [...]
The right way to make wine for Scott Paul Wright is through the gentle handling of Pinot Noir grapes and minimalist intervention. This includes avoiding some of the modern techniques like killing the wild yeast and using lab cultures, extended maceration, cold soaks and additions and subtractions of acids and enzymes. You’d think that this [...]
Here’s a different cut of our experiences on our recent foray into Northern California wine country. We visited Sonoma and interviewed folks at three different wineries. We decided to each edit our own take on the trip. Kegan rolled his behind the scenes piece out a couple weeks ago. Here’s another version. The sound is [...]
We drove nearly 1,500 miles in 4 days to acquaint ourselves with Sonoma wine country and interview our first group of winemakers in California. Despite starting off rough (late start, hail, snow, standstill traffic, rain) conditions improved so that by Sunday afternoon the sun came out and we were able to enjoy fascinating stories, hospitality [...]
While working on our feature doc, Vino Veritas, we had the chance to meet Mary Olson, owner of of Airlie Winery. Mary treats her guests like family, and nothing shows this better than the annual Starry Starry Nights campout where she invites her favorite customers for a night of music, wine and community. Kegan Sims [...]
Here’s a video we put together for the cast and crew of our 2010 short, A Country Wedding. Shot in Summer 2009, we screened at the Da Vinci and Salem Film Festivals in 2010. This was our first narrative project and we’re pleased with how it turned out. We had an all-volunteer cast and crew, [...]
As we combed the streets of Corvallis during the annual Rhapsody in the Vineyard wine walk, my partner-in-crime Kegan Sims pointed out to me that three of the greatest fears of modern humans include public speaking, being on camera and asking strangers for money. We just experienced all three as we passed out postcards on [...]
We’re going to do our best to document the process of making our latest film, a feature about wine and winemakers. This is the first installment, from a trip we took to the high desert wine region of eastern Washington.