SanFrancisco magazine // Scribe is The Best!

 

Sarah was delighted to oblige Editor Bruce Kelley when he asked her for a brief write-up on the bohemian wonderland of our friends’ Scribe Winery for the latest edition of San Francisco Magazine’s Best of the Bay Area:

“Rarely have backwoods and bohemian gone together so well—or with such underground notice—as they have at Andrew Mariani’s two-year-old Scribe Winery. There’s scarcely more than a crude wooden sign to it off Napa Road in Sonoma, but rampant word of mouth among the city’s celebrity artists and artisans has generated a following that thrives not only on the wine but also on the loose party scene. The 256-acre property has a checkered history spanning everything from turn-of-the-century winery to bootleggers’ brothel to industrial turkey farm…”

To read the rest, be sure to pick up a copy at your local news stand or click here!

 

The Great Pinzgauer Adventure

Why tour when you can DETOUR?

Gundlach Bundschu vineyard excursions get you off the beaten wine path to taste wines where they are grown.  And we were excited to join them on the tour with our cameras in hand to capture the experience—car bingo, hawaiian bobbleheads, African watusis, wine and all.

Enjoy the video above (produced by Sarah + Peter) and be sure to take the tour next time you have the chance—see the flyer below (designed by Mary)!

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Tuesday Night Farmers Market

Since our very first summer living in Sonoma nearly a decade ago, we’ve developed a tradition of attending the Tuesday night Sonoma Valley Farmers Market for farm-fresh picnic dinners with friends and family.  We were delighted to document the opening night of the 2011 Tuesday night season for Sonomanews.com.

Cult Sonoma video // Film Festival

We are so lucky in Sonoma to have a world class film festival every spring—the Sonoma International Film Festival.  We were even luckier this year because we were able to have access to the whole festival and document it day by day for Cult Sonoma—including filmmaker interviews, special event footage and even some playful words from Lifetime Achievement honoree Susan Sarandon.

Click through to see the other two short videos…

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Beer in Sonoma

We were recently commissioned by Sonomanews.com to update an old SONOMA magazine story Sarah had written and supplement it with a short video covering the subject of local craft beer in Sonoma.  With our love for writing, filming and beer, we did not hesitate to say “yes!”

“Ah, the alchemy of good beer. Water, yeast, malted grain, hops. It feels like such a quaint equation, and yet prattling off those four ingredients is where the simplicity ends and the darkling tide of chemistry begins, chemistry from which—after a thousand bubbly incantations—our muse emerges from behind steel and oak. There’s a primitive comfort to good beer’s complexity. While wine strives to tether its story to a geographic place, beer makes a humble home in its glass. Surely, it can be regional, but at its best, good beer is drink for the deconstructionist.

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video // A Good Baker

One of our favorite things about living in Sonoma is the bread.  Our community is lucky to have one of the world’s greatest bakers making bread just for us!  Take a look at the short feature we produced on the subject above for Cult Sonoma, which writes:

There is gravity to a good bit of bread—it carries a sort of sacramental heft that doesn’t fool around. The way the outside shatters like a mosaic as you take a carnal rip off the crust, or the way it springs forth like a cloud into your mouth, swirled with a slug of olive oil. Great bread tethers you to your mortal coil—to your teeth and tongue and bones and blood and the all the things and conversations going on around you. It keeps you from floating away into the zeitgeist and leaving nothing but status updates to show for it. Pair it with nice beer, friendly people and some amicable herbs and vegetables and you pretty much have another reason to live.

This is why we have vaulted Sonoma’s Mike [the bejkr] Zakowski to the echelon of artisanal god. What can we say? He maketh good loaves, the sort of bread that bores into your psyche, the sort that would keep ancient fishermen alive when adrift at sea or something. I guess what we’re trying to say is that there are a lot of breads out there, but his breads feels divinely necessary.

“Every town needs a good baker,” intones Mike from the shipping container in his backyard he’s converted to a professional, artisinal bread-baking shop.  We agree and we feel very blessed that Sonoma’s good baker is Mike!

Please try Mike’s bread for yourself if you get an opportunity—look for him at Sonoma Valley’s farmers markets. We look forward to a lot more from Mike as he prepares to represent the U.S. in the 2012 World Cup of baking in Paris
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music mixed by
Max Lynch

video : Auteur Winery

Few products in our marketplace harbor such a poignant, rounded evolution as wine. If you approach winemaking in the right way, you marry your skills to minerals and weather patterns, long-forgotten volcanoes and riverbeds, the unspoken arc of sun and the eventual movement from light-drenched hillsides to the cool cocoon of casks and caves. You bear witness to the grapes’ transformation, and you do your best to preserve the story of their raw ingredients. It’s time and place in a glass.

Auteur, one of Sonoma’s highly regarded boutique wineries, radiates this understanding of winemaking. This year, the winery celebrates the release of some of winemaker/owner Kenneth Juhasz’s long-awaited estate wines as well the rebirth of their logo and label. Whether it’s that culminating moment that heralds a midnight harvest or the subtle interplay of colors in a new design, Kenneth and Laura understand the importance of process—that a million hand-wrought nuances distinguish great wine from good wine.

We had the privilege to work with them over the course of a few months as they embarked on their own sort of transformation. Here we captured a glimpse of the story of their wine. It’s also worth mentioning we highly recommend the wine. The view from a glass of Auteur is pretty stunning.

Click through to see some more photos!

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poster // Beervana

We were recently tasked by the Sonoma Community Center to develop a graphic and poster to promote their first annual Beervana amateur beer brewing competition.  They asked us to create something to expressed the idea of “Nirvana for beer-lovers”—something a bit humorous.

We instantly thought of an effervescent, jolly buddha rising from the frothy bubbles of a divine brew.  And a mock beer label was created.

To attain Beervana, one must eliminate all desire and suffering through the tasting and appreciating of hand-crafted beer—and this is best accomplished by attending this sure-to-be-a-blast event.  Click here for details.

posters // Trashion Show

The Sonoma Community Center is curating a “Trashion” Fashion Show & Exhibit centered around fashions created by Bay Area artists from recycled and found materials.  We were inspired by the subject matter to make our own imagery for the posters from a collage of found items and imagery.

Click here to learn more about the April 2 event!