May 19 2012, Grenache on the left, Mourvedre in the center (just starting), and Syrah down the hill at different stages of growth

Vine:  Not much to report except to say that I have finished another all consuming proposal and can now focus on work in the vineyard.  I talk a lot about thinning and pushing the Syrah up through the wires, so I thought I would let the pictures speak for themselves.

Jumble and doubles (two shoots out of same base) that has to be removed to two shoots per spur

Properly thinned (and also the adjacent sput)

Thinned and pushed up through the first wire (more or less)

It can be frustrating because the green shoots are delicate and it is easy to break off a perfectly good shoot, but the option is to wait until they harden and then the task is daunting as the growth is thick and the summer is getting hot.  I like to choose my winners and then force growth into them early.  It is a choice at each spur and it is one I would rather make than leave it to someone else.  I don’t always pick the hardest shoot if its position is bad, and you have to check to make sure the ones you leave actually have grapes (or the makings) on them.  It is best done early in the morning before it gets hot.  I will finish the Syrah tomorrow and start on the Grenache, and it won’t be long till the Mourvedre is ready.   Meanwhile the Syrah will take another pass to pick off any new unwanted growth and push new growth up through the wires.

This goes on till mid June and then that phase is over.  One other thing to note in the pictures is the browning out of the grass and clover cover crop.  In about 2-3 weeks I will be able to mow as the wet season is over and the grass dies and goes to seed.  I will also do some spot spraying to kill weeds that start growing in the rows.

Wine:  I will keep this simple:  Try it, you will like it.  Also Rock and Rhones next weekend and I am looking forward to tasting and the food, not to mention the wonderful people.  Carpe Diem

Brian's very drinkable Pinot (Viognier in the background).

WASHINGTON — A judge may have found unconstitutional the law that allows people to be held indefinitely without trial by the military, but the House of Representatives voted Friday to keep it anyway.

On Wednesday, Federal Judge Katherine Forrest found that the law violatesrights to free speech and due process. But House members defended it, ultimately voting 238 to 182 against an amendment to guarantee civilian trials for any terrorism suspect arrested in the United States.

Let’s see if we can connect the dots.  For conservatives who live in an alternate reality, I have given up trying, but for the rational bunch left…  The economy is depressed, balance of payments are out of whack, so the answer was a morality tale?  Cut everything and wait for the admiration for our self flagellation to instill  confidence in our economy and then let the good times role?  Didn’t work and all it did was further depress the economy making things worse.  Oh and did  I forget the rise of exteme political factions?

Well ladies and gentlemen, drum roll please, I now give you the Republican economic plan for the United States.  It is exactly the same scenario, except they keep all wealthy people whole.  Isn’t it interesting that we can’t learn from Europe on plans that work, like their health care system, and we can’t learn from their plans that don’t work, like austerity.  Let’s see, what do you call a nation that never learns from others?  Oh, I forgot, the greatest nation on earth.  Right.

I have to go thin vines which distracts me from the utterly stupid path we are on.

There is a plea in the New York Times in the editorial page for  legalizing Marijuana in New York to help cancer patients.  Meanwhile the DEA has cracked down on legal Marijuana dispensaries in California, putting many out of  business.  According to the Sacramento Bee, with nowhere to sell there CA legally grown marijuana, it is being dumped in massive quantities on the streets at record low prices.  Don’t you just love the war on drugs?  It’s that conservative mentality that we have to punish evil doers even if we just make all things worse.

John Boehner and the boys are saying they will not negotiate on extending the debt limit next time like they almost crashed the economy last time, and of course, no new revenues to pay for our debt.  These are the guys who ran up the deficit in the good times with the Bush Tax Cuts and wild spending on unfunded wars, and have offered the Ryan Budget which all analysis (except the American Enterprise Institute and Fox News) show will also break the bank.  The real question for Americans is, are you more afraid of a deficit that will just get worse under their policies, or do we need real jobs that might allow us to grow out of our deficit, you know, invest in our future?  If you are stuck in the home budget analogy, think of it this way:  If we don’t take on some debt to fix the hole in our roof, the house won’t be worth anything down the road.  The feeble minded think we care more about the deficit than having an income or a future.  We will see.

Finally I want to point you to a very telling blog in the Washington Post that tells you how we got feeble minded conservatives.  By the way feeble minded conservatives doesn’t mean they aren’t  smart.  They just live in an alternate reality.  Phi Beta Kappa Phyliss Schlafly is Exhibit A (Fought against equal rights for women among other stupid things).  Here is the blog in its entirety and here is what it tells you:  The Press is worthless and the requirement to have access to report he said/she said arguments has completely dumbed down reporting for fear of actually challenging these nimrods and losing access.  Whatever you do, don’t tell the emperor he has no clothes (WP Opinions)  (Also See Krugman):

By Greg Sargent  |  03:52 PM ET, 05/14/2012

But frankly all that pales relative to the debate not raging in this country about our economy.  We have endless stories about how Mitt Romney does not understand the working man or about  how President Obama  will spend us into our graves, but absolutely nothing about whether austerity actually works or is dooming our country.  What should be up for debate is not whether Congress can work together or Mitt’s lack of empathy, but whether what Congress works on, or what Mitt or Obama propose will really change our course and help ouur economy.  And it is not.  It is not about real substance, but about form.  Well let’s talk about substance.

We are suppose to be rational beings, but the last few years have shown us to be anything but.  We think and reason from our gut, not from our head.  We use our head to justify what our gut produced.  My case in point is our economy and what will fix it.  By any measure you want to apply, if you were being purely rational, we have been on the wrong path for over 50 years and we have continued to compound our errors until we have reached today.  Simply stated, wealth has migrated to a few through a government that facilitated that migration, while the majority of Americans have lost ground, and today they do not have the income to sustain a vibrant economy.  For many in this country this is a morality tale.  We wanted too much, we can’t afford it, and now we must pay the piper.  Just see Greece.  It is the model we learned from our own finances.   So our gut tells us austerity will work and our brain seizes Greece and Spain as a morality tale to justify it.

Sadly it is all wrong.  Greece was a bad penny from day one and should have never been in the Euro, but Spain was a good puppy until the real estate market crashed.  It is not about a morality play, but real world complexities.  So the answers provided by the morality play don’t address the complexities and they fail.  Welcome to Republican America.  The whole appeal of their economic slash and burn is fear of the deficit.  We have been bad, all those poor lazy people have been slurping at the trough, and now they must be punished.  What is so irrational is that if you examine any of the probable outcomes of their policies, the deficit gets much worse.  So the only conclusion is that most of America is reacting to fear and the home budget morality play analogy, and not really thinking all this through.  And when people think it through for them, they turn off the volume.

So while the media laments Dick Luger or Olympia Snow leaving politics, I wonder what they are thinking.   They still championed bad ideas, just gave a little to give us only partly bad ideas.  We are at a real crossroads.  Failure here is an option if we continue with the Republican protection of the wealthy and failure to invest in our future.  The Tea Party came to power and they are very clear about their ideas, all of them proven to fail.  It is time to take a close look at ideas, not parties, not personalities, but ideas, and examine them not in the light of he said she said, but in what history tells us.  In that light Republican economic and social ideas don’t stand a chance.

Let me add a footnote:  I don’t think like most people.  Maybe it was my training as an Electrical Engineer.  There was stuff in there I never got intuitively, but empirically, it worked.  So it taught me to ignore my gut and follow the facts.  I come from a very Republican family who were sure JFK would put the Pope in charge.  Like Molly Ivins, when I found out they were wrong about that, I wondered what else they were wrong about.  I don’t love Democrats who in my mind are spineless wonders and are a great source of the problem today, allowing what seems to keep them in office driving their politics instead of what works to improve America.  Starting in 2007 when things started to go really south, I wanted to understand it.  I have been reading economics and economic history since.  What boggles the mind is that everything we are doing wrong, we did wrong before and learned from it.  Then we forgot it.  Today Republicans don’t just have it a little wrong, they have it all wrong.  Democrats on the other had are too timid to fight for ideas that work even if they are unpopular.  Well as we gut our schools, rob our children of their future, and waste the lives of millions of people, maybe it will dawn on us.

The Republicans I know think we just need to gut all that government waste, you know like educating our kids, and they seem clueless why their kids can’t quite find jobs except, “Obama destroyed the economy by wild spending”, except he didn’t.  They are stuck in that paradigm of the family budget and when times get tough, we have to tighten our belts.  But we have two giant lessons staring us in the face, the Great Depression, and the present day European fiasco that tells us that for the macroeconomy, cutting back is exactly the wrong medicine and like leeches bleeding a patient, just makes things worse.

While I watch my children struggle; while I watch kids run up amazing debts to get an education; while I watch ppeople simply drop out of the job market and hope for the future gets tossed overboard; while I watch as we decimate our schools and continue to cut the wages of hardworking people so  the selfish don’t have to pay their fair share, we do nothing but make it worse.  I wonder if we have lost our minds.   I wonder if we understand in our selfishness and refusal to face the future with real personal sacrifice, we understand that we are eating our seed corn?

Republican economic strategy is more of the same, only, as President Obama put it, “on steroids”.  The Paul Ryan budget would gut everything in government except our war machine, and make the deficit worse.  Get out a pencil and do the numbers if you don’t believe me.  Yet half the country can’t quite seem to figure out that we are making a bad situation much worse.  Here is the part that really makes me laugh.  No Republican proposal will do anything but further increase the deficit, yet they all say the deficit is the problem.

No, it isn’t.  Forget the deficit.  If we don’t creat jobs and start the economy pumping again, all the austerity in the world isn’t going to bring us economic progress, it will just continue to make things worse.  It is so hard standing here  watching my children’s future being thrown away because we have surrounded ourselves by truly stupid and selfish people.  We are running out of time and it is time to take the gloves off.  Republicans and small minded thinking (it is those lazy people over there) is at the root of all our problems and until they are “rooted” out, we destroy our future.

So Governor Brown, go ahead and cut more.  Just remember that next year you will even have to cut more, and it will continue like that until we understand what we are doing is just stupid and self-defeating.

But here is what is really interesting about those religious arguments:  Who cares?  Jews and Muslims (most) don’t believe we should eat pork.  Should it be banned for all religions?  What would happen to all that pulled pork?  What the religious nuts want is to use government to institute their religious beliefs on the rest of us.  How un-American.  They are perfectly free to believe and practice what they want, just not use religious intolerance and government to force the rest of us to believe the same thing.

When you finally get down to it, this is a simple Constitutional question.  You know, that old, “We hold these truths to be self-evident…” thing.  Either we should all be equal under the law or not and our whole concept of government is based on the former.   Discussing national policy in any other terms whether religious or personal preference just demeans the whole concept of freedom  and our Constitution.  Think of it this way.  Sometimes free speech is hard to listen to.  Get over it.  It is the basis of everything we stand for.

Spring grows wild in the vineyard

Vine:  Okay I am late.  Another long week working on a proposal to pay for my grape habit.  It is truly spring in the vineyard and the beauty is just astounding.  This year is at least three weeks earlier than last year.  Everything is popping, but we are not really that warm to warrant it.  I wonder what Mother Nature is thinking?  I probably learned the most important lesson in life the spring my Dad died.  It seem such a horrible moment, and yet spring happened anyway, and life simply moved on.  There is a lesson there.  For us grape growers it is another new beginning (another life lesson?).  So what is happening?

Red Clover in the Rows

Well everything in the vineyard is leafing out, even the Mourvedre so the season has officially started.  Pruning was completed in March and I actually got a flailing mower up here to end my torment at trying to pick up all the pruning debris and burn it.  I have retied all the vines (that needed it) and so now what I am getting behind in is moving through the vineyard and removing unwanted shoots (along the trunk and cordon), and start to thin the shoots on spurs.  Remember that grapes only produce on last year’s new wood (pruned shoot from last year), but those silly old buds push out lots of shoots and we only want two well positioned shoots on each spur.  So starting in the morning I will start moving through the vineyard and removing excess shoots.  It is a long process and will take me about two weeks working about two-hours per day.  Then it will be time to start pushing the Syrah up through the first wires.  Once the growing really starts, shoots can grow a couple of inches a day.  If you really want to know about pruning and thinning see LightnerVineyards.com

The one thing we growers worry about right now is a frost that could damage the young shoots.  So far that is not an issue and with the Syrah and the Grenache well developed, they are well beyond their most fragile state.  Mourvedre is right in that state right now, but cold weather is not forecast.  This is the wild time in the vineyard.  Although I have the rows sprayed out, the grass is growing and I must now let it go to seed and die before I mow it.  That will be in June.  So we look a little unkept, but it is all in the interests of a good cover crop next year.  And that my friends is where we are in the vineyard.

Leafing out on s spur (last years shoot pruned back) on a syrah cardon

Wine:  I was in New York a couple of weeks ago and had a wonderful Bordeaux  provided by my daughter’s very best friend Stephen.  Here is the measure of a man.  He doesn’t like red wines, but he found a lovely one for me.  That is being considerate.  I am sitting in my very favorite place right (my patio overlooking my vineyard with my dog Sophie at my feet) now enjoying a Mira Flores Methode Ancieanne Syrah 2008.  It is a lovely wine to watch the day end.  The only advice I have for you today in the wine category is that we have the upcoming Rock & Rhones tasting over the Memorial day weekend and I can not recommend it more.  If you want some great food, and taste some Rhones that have structure and complexity, that is the place.  I will be there looking for you.  Carpe Diem.

Moon over Camino May 2012

“At a certain point, I’ve just concluded that for me personally, it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same sex couples should be able to get married.”

Now he should never discuss it again as a personal choice, but simply a civil rights issue, but that would require that you don’t just personally approve, but that you must champion the issue.  In other words what he said was I cannot be against it, but I won’t be championing it either.  Language is interesting isn’t it?