Today I met a local wine writer for a tasting with a winemaker and a jaunt through a very awesome mountain vineyard property, which I'm going to refer to as AME because acronyms are official-sounding. (Also, I don't want to be accidentally Googled by a co-worker and listed on the monthly media coverage report.)
Anyway, as I was saying, I was hosting a writer. On AME. We bounced along in the winemaker's four-wheel-drive vehicle, off-roading in the vineyards. The three of us talked about wine and grapes, of course. But we also talked about wildlife, and how you know it's summer in wine country when you start seeing snakes. And then we talked about the other animals on AME -- the buzzards, the deer, the rabbits with their big floppy ears. The winemaker said he's even seen cougars.
The wildlife is just one example of how awesome AME is. The place is freaking gorgeous: Terraced vineyards, soils that vary in color and type from one block to another (and you can literally see the changes -- the diversity is amazing), huge bay trees, old ranch buildings, etc. But the most unbelievable part is the view -- you can see all of Alexander Valley from this place.
Naturally, the winemaker wanted to show this to the writer; she needed to have the full experience. So he drove us to a little outlook, and we got out of the car to walk to a patio area that juts out on the edge of the mountain.
We took a few steps.
And the writer said: "There's a snake. And it has a rattle."
And the winemaker said: "That's a big daddy."
And I watched as the winemaker -- who is a very manly man from South Africa -- made the widest path possible around the giant rattlesnake and then got on his cell phone to call someone else to come up and "take care of it."
"I really don't like snakes," he said.
We piled back into the winemaker's SUV. And after that, the writer was very reluctant to get out. "I'll look from here," she kept saying.
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