Thanks to the Gazette-Times for providing coverage of the event. The theater is a local treasure and an amazing creative space. I hope it continues to inspire creative spirits for another hundred years.  If your in Corvallis, please come by for the show. It’s only seven bucks!

We recently interviewed Tad for our documentary project and learned that slow and steady can really sometimes win the race.

Ransom now produces gin and whiskey from barley he grows on his certified organic farm on the edge of the Coast Range, and he also produces a line of Oregon wines from area vineyards, with his own vines in the ground on his 40-acre farm outside the small town of Willamina, Oregon.

It’s been a long road paved with credit card and bank loans, but Ransom has arrived and Tad’s mother has stopped calling him to ask when he’s planning to start law school. With distillery dog Lucy by his side, Tad spoke to us about his path to independence in the wine and spirits business.

And my favorite quote from the conversation: “Making good wine involves science and focus and love…and maybe a little bit of superstition.”

Katherine’s voice combines the authority of an expert with the passionate of a true aficionado…on camera she shares that same spark that many of the winemakers we’ve talked to who’ve jumped into this business.

Tom Monroe is one of those who took a leap of faith. Along with his wife, Kate, he founded The Southeast Wine Collective as a home for not only their own Division Winemaking Company, but a number of other incipient brands, winemakers who might lack the capital necessary to plant their own wine estates in Yamhill County, but who’ve got no shortage of enthusiasm and commitment. A few of them were hanging out in the tasting room while we talked with Tom about leaving behind his career in the financial industry in New York, heading for some manual labor gigs in the Loire Valley before deciding to settle in Portland to launch a vision for an urban winery he first conceived in graduate school.

We find fascinating wine people at every turn, and it’s tempting to keep on shooting, but we’ll soon be settling into the editing phase of the project.

We’re hoping to have a solid teaser/trailer and some other production material in January, so we’ll soon be able to head out for financing and show potential investors what we can do on a budget. I’m really happy with what we’ve captured so far, and the performances of our local talent have been amazing.

Here are a few production stills:

We’ll be taking this project on the road and working the usual channels with a goal of raising funds to produce a solid indie feature.

But a revolution intervened, and though grapes were planted, they were either trampled by British horses or died due to disease and neglect. Wine was never made.

But now there’s a flourishing wine industry in Albemarle County. We traveled east to connect some of the dots and gather more footage for the film.

Andy Reagan is now winemaker on Mazzei’s former estate. The vineyards are new…now grafted on disease resistant American rootstock. But Jefferson’s dream of fine wine production in Virginia lives on after a hiatus of a pair of centuries.

And another Italian vigneron now tends the vineyards on Monticello. Gabriele Rausse helps to produce an estate wine at Monticello while also consulting with area wineries and producing his own label of Virginia grown wine. Gabriele’s connection to Jefferson goes well beyond horticulture, though, as he’s found a philosophical resonance in the words of the founding father.

And yet another Italian-born winemaker is heading production at Barboursville Vineyards, one of the oldest and most recognized wineries in the state. Luca Pascina grew up in Italian wine country and knew he wanted to be a winemaker at a very young age. And he’s settled into the lifestyle and landscape of Virginia, where the challenges of weather and excess rain don’t keep him from producing award-winning wines, or even deciding that they should skip a poor year if that’s what it takes to maintain their reputation of excellence.

We captured interviews and and tried to uncover the early roots of American winemaking in an effort to connect this story to what we’ve been covering in the Midwest and West Coast. We’ll share a video of extras from the trip soon.

Katherine brings a fresh voice to wine writing. From her column in the Oregonian to her book on biodynamic wines, she covers wine with the eye of a trained journalist, but with a passion of the oenologically obsessed. She’s not afraid to admit that some wines even reduce her to tears. We talked about how she found her way to the food beat and also discussed the state and future of the Oregon wine industry.

Darryl talked about his path from environmental attorney to restauranteur and now owner of a wine shop with a sustainable bent and a customer-driven mindset. We discussed the role of the retailer in the industry as well as trends and Cork’s unique organizational model where wines are arranged by price rather than varietal or style.

I can’t believe it’s taken me four months to get a blog post up, but we’ve been busy shooting and planning for the home stretch on the documentary, plus a few other projects. Look for a few more posts on recent interviews, including a trip to Monticello and Virginia’s wine country, plus an overhaul of the website. Cheers!

She’s now worked her way up from cellar rat to winemaker for Airlie Winery in Oregon’s Coast Range. And in a state where pinot noir is the dominant variety…and in a business where red wines are often given preferential treatment over their pale cousins…Elizabeth isn’t afraid to unabashedly pledge her allegiance to white varietals, in whose subtlety and variety she finds more intrigue and challenge.

Elizabeth knows blending…and her biggest challenge is Airlie’s Seven, which combines seven different Willamette Valley whites. The goal is a balanced wine where no single variety dominates, and all of the flavors play nice together in an ideal combination of food friendliness and drinkability.

We had a chance to talk about the science of blending for Vino Veritas. Wine is blended for any number of reasons, not just to produce new creations like Airlie’s Seven. On the day that we spoke, Elizabeth was combining different lots of pinot gris. Blending is a painstaking process where science meets instincts, and an Excel spreadsheet is only there to augment the winemaker’s judgement.

Elizabeth’s blog is an approachable and interesting conversation about winemaking where she teaches customers and others in the industry about her craft. Blending is only one of the winemaking processes we hope to cover in the finished film.

Justin captured the personalities behind the team and followed them to Germany and the UK to document the highs and lows of the competition.

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We’re taking a break from shooting on the documentary while the winter weather keeps us out of vineyards, and so we’ve started preproduction on a narrative feature film called Vintage. We’re big fans of food in the movies, from Big Night to Ratatouille. This will be our attempt at a classic food and wine film done on a shoestring budget.

It will take us a year or three to make this feature as we simultaneously wrap the documentary, but we’re hoping to shoot the opening scene and some teaser material this winter to help with fundraising.

The lead and key roles will be non-union, paying gigs (incl. meals) while extras will be unpaid. We’ll be shooting from 2012-2013 as funding allows.

• Bruno [lead] – 40s-50s – a washed-up, frumpy restaurant critic and frustrated former bestselling writer who manages to retain some residual charm, and wh0′s about to get one last shot at resurrecting his career
• Anna – 35-45 – Bruno’s estranged wife, trying to hold it together, still has a soft spot for the overgrown child who is her ex-husband
• Sylvie – 30s-40s – French wine grower, hardworking farmer with a touch of class and business smarts
• R. Michaels - 30s-50s – Bruno’s rival wine critic; smooth
• Grovnick – 50s - Squirrely newspaper editor]
• Aleksie - 40s – 70s – Russian restauranteur and mob boss
• Chef  Berteau  - 30s-50s – No bullshit restaurant owner
• Cab Driver - 30s-50s -
• Drizzle – 20s – 40s – loan shark, wannabe rap star
• Waiter - 20s – 50s

Anyone interested should drop us a note. We’ll be casting in January, with auditions in PDX and Corvallis.

A fourth-generation chef, Chris took over the helm upon his father’s retirement in 2008, and since he’s been balancing maintaining the restaurant’s famous standbys with the invention of new dishes that allow him to pursue his creative impulses. He devotes two morning a week to kitchen experiments where he carries on his father’s “Freestyle Cooking,” a term Jack Czarnecki coined long before “fusion” was mainstream.

Chris draws plenty of inspiration from the impressive wine cellar beneath the historic home that is stocked with more than five hundred different pinots, most of them from Oregon’s Willamette Valley. He’s even created his own label through a partnership with Stag Hollow Vineyards in Yamhill County.

Because you can’t make a film about wine without talking about food, I interviewed Chris about his experiences as a chef in the midst of one of the most noted wine regions in the world. He provided a chef’s perspective on food, cooking and pinot noir.

I asked him if he ever thinks about his role in founding a new and celebrated wine region.

“Nope,” he says without hesitation.

And I believe he answers this way partly due to his confidence and humility, and partly because he doesn’t take the time to reflect. He’s too busy following his curiosity.

Now that he’s stepped aside from heading the wine label that he built from the ground up, he’s no less enthused about the pursuit to which he dedicated his life. Only he’s returned to his roots. He’s making wine in his garage, one barrel at a time. “You can experiment more when you’re working with small lots.”

And he’s not really retired from his other life pursuit either: he’s still working on building new wine regions from scratch. He partners with the Bostocks in Arizona, where they’re searching for just the right varieties to bring that rising wine region into wider acclaim. A few days after we met, Erath planned to travel to the Puglia region of Italy to investigate different, rare varietals that might fare well under Arizona’s harsh conditions.

Dick Erath’s pioneer days are far from over.

Here’s a wrap-up of the trip with some vignettes of the folks at Charron and Dos Cabezas, who graciously opened their wineries to me and shared their stories.

You can vote here

Everything in AZ winemaking is exactly the opposite of what you expect. In the Sonoita AVA, the problem isn’t too little water, it’s too much at the wrong time. The problem isn’t the baking heat and desiccating winds, but winter cold and spring frost. Of course, you’ll find a few expected challenges when making wine in the extremes of Arizona: snakes in the barrel room, for one.

And here you’ll also find winemakers working without a net. They’re defining a region, building it from scratch, trying to find what varietals will work the best in some of the country’s highest, driest and southernmost vinifera vineyards. You’ll find folks like Susan and Milton Craig of Charron Vineyards, who purchased a merlot vineyard between Tucson and Sonoita, where vines are tended next to prickly pear cacti. They’re refugees from the world of IT where they faced a constant struggle against “outsourcing” and “offshoring.” Making Arizona merlot is a job that can never be shipped overseas.

And in Sonoita, you’ll find Dos Cabezas Wine Works where Todd Bostock and his wife Kelly run a family operation with big ambitions, not only to create a legacy in wine for future generations of the Bostock clan, but also to prove that world class wines that evoke the unique character of the landscape where they were crafted are possible in Arizona. They want to prove the value of an entire wine region. And if releases like their Pronghorn Vineyard “El Campo” blend are any indication, they’re well on their way.

We’ve captured some great stories in Arizona and discovered that it’s a region with even more stories to tell. I’ll look forward to another opportunity to talk to folks in this region down the road.

We had a chance to talk with Jack about why the Willamette Valley is a gourmet chef’s dream, and why mushrooms and Pinot Noir are a match with perfect aesthetic and maybe even spiritual qualities. We’ll be spending more time in Dayton in the coming months as we plan to chat with Jack’s son, Chris, who is a fourth-generation restauranteur and now helms the kitchen. We’ll also head to the hills with Jack to learn how Oregon’s wild truffles and mushrooms eventually make their way to the table–next to a glass of Pinot, of course.

Lisa began her career as a food writer for the Oregonian, but she soon grew fascinated with the intellectual challenge of writing about wine. “After all, how many ways can you write about chicken?” Now she’s traveled the world exploring wine regions and brings a writer’s perspective to our project.

Lisa made the great suggestion of meeting at Boedecker Cellars, in northwest Portland, where Stuart Boedecker and his wife Athena Pappas crush Willamette Valley fruit in a gritty manufacturing district. Their urban winery is at the same time a stark contrast to the pastoral settings of many of the places we’ve visited, but once inside the lofty space it has the same magic of any winery, with stacked barrels, the hint of must in the air.

The husband and wife duo run the business from top to bottom and both are hands-on winemakers, developing two distinct styles that they bottle separately. We were able to chat with them on camera about the benefits of making wine in an urban location, and how they took the leap from their former careers.

Maybe it’s a gimmick, or maybe it’s truly part of the spirit of this wired age where we can connect with our audience and actually allow the into the filmmaking process, but we gave them the decision of where we’d film this year’s harvest. They were able to choose between three up and coming wine regions: Okanagan Valley, BC, Monticello AVA, VA, and Colorado’s Grand Mesa.

And the winner is…

Colorado. Based on our weighted system, Colorado edged out BC in a 36-30-4 score. The $1,261 that we raised will all go toward funding the travel expenses needed to bring our crew to the world’s largest mesa, which also features the planet’s highest commercially viable wine growing region.

So thanks to all of our backers for steering our film in two ways: sharing your resources and telling us what we should do with them.

We’re looking forward to sharing the results of a fascinating exploration of this new vinifera growing region, and we’re excited that our film will be able to take on more of a national scope.

I’ve written before about how we seem to be in the midst of a golden age for documentary films, and part of the reason for that is how the technical and cost hurdles have steadily dropped. (This year’s edition of the daVinci Days Film Festival, coming up next weekend, offers additional evidence, with a menu of provocative documentaries.)

But, even though the equipment has changed, some essentials remain: You still need to be able to sniff out good stories — and then figure out the best way to tell them. “Vino Veritas” looks to be on the right track, but — like some vintages — we won’t know for sure until it’s time to uncork it.

We’ve been hitting Twitter and our other social networks harder lately because of our fundraising campaign, and as a result, Matt Compton, who co-owns Spindrift with his wife Tabitha, noticed the chatter and invited us to an industry tasting to try their lineup.

I’m a filmmaker, not a wine writer, so I’m not used writing tasting notes. But I have to say the ’08 reserve Pinot is a steal. The ’10 Pinot Gris stood out. I liked the Gewurtz from 30 year old vines, and they offered an interesting Rose made from Pinot Noir that had a twist on a blush wine…it had bright acidity like a typical WV white. I guess I’ve been learning a few things about vino since starting this project. Or at least I know what I like, and Spindrift offers enough range at great prices to make this corner of the Valley worth a visit.

Matt got his start managing vineyards and worked throughout this section of the WV before striking out on his own, and they now produce around 4,000 cases. Sometimes you don’t have to look far for wine stories, and I’m sure we’ll be touring some of Matt’s vineyards down the road.

l should also note that I ran into Claire Cady of the Oregon Wine Blog, which is in the midst of being rebranded as “WestToast,” to cover an expanded range of topics in food and wine in the Northwest.

We spent a few days with Jay Selman, Rusty Gaffney, Eric Anderson and Brian Clark as they shared the inside scoop on the origins of the show, the “epiphany bottles” that turned them into lifelong connoisseurs, and some of their favorite moments during the course of interviewing nearly five hundred of the most noted personalities in the wine industry.

We filmed the recording of one of their shows in their Orange County studio and followed Jay as he prepped for an interview with guest Chad Kearns of Giracci Vineyards, a winemaker who recently opened a tasting room in the canyons southeast of Los Angeles. We toured Chad’s newly planted Granache and Mourvedre vineyards on his 10 acre wine and horse farm and then sat in the studio for the interview on the following day.

We collected 250 gigabytes of footage, photos and audio, heard tales of wine adventures that would have made Miles from Sideways proud, and shared a few bottles of some fantastic wine during the course of capturing another side of the American wine landscape: enthusiasts with encyclopedic knowledge who use the latest technology to share their passion with thousands of fans around the world.

The indie wine media universe grows more cluttered by the day, with new blogs, podcasts and Twitter feeds popping up everywhere you look. We even have to add our own project to the mix. But the Grape Radio crew continues to outpace the field, recently winning their second James Beard Award. Once we’ve sifted through the footage we hope to show what drives them to continue to share their enthusiasm for wine and get their insight on what wine means to our culture, what’s the definition of the term wine geek, the tendency of wines to share the personality of the person who made them, and what makes this drink such a significant part of life and culture.

You’d think that this traditionalist and Burgundy aficionado would be a winemaker who arrived at his particular mature and minimalist style after a long and storied career in the wine business, but for Scott, wine is his second calling. For the past ten years he’s been perfecting the craft of making Oregon Pinot in a French style, but prior to that he was hanging out with the Beatles and planning marketing strategies for Ozzy Osbourne.

Scott was once the most listened-to radio personality as a rock DJ and later a recording industry executive. The story of his transition and transformation into a hands-on winery owner is a fascinating tale of revelation, relocation and giant rabbits.

We had a fantastic interview and were able to learn the inside story that carried him from the LA airwaves to the Willamette Valley. Winemakers everywhere are storytellers, and Scott is no exception. We’re looking forward to integrating the footage from his gorgeous refurbished granary winery in the sleepy town of Carlton, Oregon.

It’s so nice to be back to some of our home wine turf after an interview with the Great Plains winegrower Michael Amigoni and then a whirlwind tour of Sonoma County. The rainy side of the Cascades is begrudgingly making way for some sunshine, and we’re looking forward to spending a lot of time in our local vineyards this season capturing footage on our trusty Canons.

But up next is a trip down to southern Cal for a chat with the godfathers if indie wine media over at Grape Radio. And we’ve got some more surprise visits coming together. Should be a productive second year of filming for Vino Veritas.