Tag Archives: Healdsburg

Preface to a Purple Tongue

As we age, our sense of taste becomes more refined. What we used to find disgusting as teenagers may now be quite delectable as adults. For example, you used to hate fish as a child and now you can’t stop cramming sushi into your mouth. You warmed up to that flavor over time and now find it highly enjoyable. Wine presents another fine example of this phenomenon.

Nature doesn’t fuck around, so of course the grape is an amazing thing. In my book, the only bad grape is a seeded grape. Even in their fruit juice or Kool-Aid forms, grapes retained their deliciousness. I haven’t always been able to say the same about wine.

When I first tried wine, I thought it tasted real funky. It wasn’t until college that I started to actually appreciate the flavor, and even then I progressed slowly. Like many people, the sweet stuff was easier to stomach, so I stuck with whites and rosés at first. Eventually, I moved up to their more pungent red cousins and never looked back. It took time to develop a taste for wine and it involved a lot of trial and error. If nothing else, you get drunk off wine from time to time and this is not a bad thing.

If experimentation is your game then there really is no better way of getting to know wine than to go wine tasting. We in Northern California are lucky enough to be surrounded by several excellent regions for a bit of vino. Napa is an obvious first choice as its number of wineries boggles the mind and causes my liver to shiver in fear. It’s quite beautiful there and the weather can be very nice, but it’s also a bit snooty for my taste. Instead, try Healdsburg and its surrounding areas for a few nice surprises.

Closer to home we have the Lodi area, which looks like a dirt patch but manages to come up with some tasty Zinfandels. I have heard great things about the El Dorado Hills region but unfortunately I haven’t been. I’ve even heard cries of Livermore enough that they should start calling the town Liverless.

All of these can be fun places, but for my money (or lack thereof), the Amador Valley is the place to be. Amador has the beauty of Napa, the civility of Healdsburg, and wine that is as good or better than any of them. Tasting is usually free in Amador, which is not the case in Napa or Healdsburg, and they will usually let you re-taste whatever you like.

The wineries are cool like that in Amador. You won’t be dealing with some sucka-ass sommelier with high opinions of him/herself. Instead your wine will more likely be poured by the owner, winemaker or friends and family of one or the other. Which is to say, no one in Amador is going to try to make you feel stupid if you don’t know shit about wine or how wine tasting works. Of course, they will appreciate it if you do.

The good news for those eager to learn is there really isn’t much you need to know to avoid looking like a total dipshit. As with most public places, you should avoid fighting, breaking things and vomiting wine all over the place. Drink what you like and pour out what you don’t into the buckets on the counter. Don’t forget to eat crackers, pretzels, cheese or whatever the winery has laying around for you. You need to cleanse your palate between different wines so you can taste the difference between them and you also need to eat something to soak up all that booze, ya lush.

Once you got all of that, the real fun can begin. You can hold your glass up and look at the wine in the light if you want, but that shit gets old pretty quick when you are tasting, so do what ya like! Once you are done staring at it, swirl the wine around lightly to aerate it and open up its flavor. Take a sip and savor it. Remember if you like it and move on to the next. Repeat the process until you are finished with your flight. Buy a bottle of that good shit if you want or say thanks and go to a different winery and repeat. Easy peasy!

Hopefully you haven’t been driving like a drunk lunatic all day. Getting a limo or car service to take you around is pretty sweet, but it can be expensive unless the whole gang comes along. If nothing else you better get your drunk ass a room near the last winery you go to and sleep it off before you kill us all on the freeway. Keep yourself alive long enough and maybe you’ll eventually become a full-fledged wino! Don’t worry, you can thank me later!

Bocephus Chigger
bocephus@submergemag.com

Not All Those Who Wander Are Lost

World travelers put a multicultural, organic spin on soft drinks

When New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg started grinding his political ax against the soft drink industry and its so-called promotion of Big Gulp-sized sodas, the sugary libation was instantly vilified as the root cause of all that is unhealthy in the United States.

While Bloomberg’s ban fizzled out, courtesy of a judge’s overruling of the law just one day before it was set to take hold of New York soda lovers, the debate continues across the nation, but for two locals—a microbiologist previously with Genentech, Srijun Srinuanchan, and a former corporate sales representative, Payam Fardanesh, turned natural soda makers—it’s really as simple as the old adage: everything in moderation.

“Soda is a treat. It has sugar, but our soda is at least made with good stuff. It’s made with real sugar. It’s organic and there are no chemicals, so it’s good as it can be for a soda,” Srinuanchan says. “And, again, it’s a treat. It’s like having a slice of chocolate cake. Sure you can make chocolate cake healthy but that takes the fun out of it.”

For the business partners, who formed a close friendship while engaging in one of their shared passions—traveling the world, the experience of launching Silk Road Soda Company, Inc. has been a dizzyingly meteoric enterprise, they say. It was only about a year ago that the two made the decision to set out and make their entrepreneurial dreams come true with their organic, Iranian-inspired sodas.

“It’s been unreal,” Srinuanchan says. “We can’t believe the level of support we’ve received from everyone.”

It was their love of travel and appreciation for different cultures that inspired their soda creations, even the name of the company, taken from the Silk Road trade route that existed centuries ago, exemplifies their passion—Fardanesh spent his early childhood in his native Tehran, Iran, while Srinuanchan’s Laotian and Taiwanese roots drive his creative pursuits.

When the duo decided to share their cultural experiences through soda, they took to Srinuanchan’s Del Paso Heights kitchen, turning it into a lab of sorts and, drawing on his experience at Genentech, worked on the formula until it was perfected. Although they started with 10 potential flavors, the partners settled on three; mint, cucumber-mint and pomegranate-mint, but say to look out for some of the seven remaining flavors to hit the shelves in the future.

The duo then worked with a food lab in Santa Cruz, Calif., Venus Research and Development, where the formula was perfected for mass production and, most importantly, to obtain organic certification.

“Sharing a little bit of the Eastern culture with the West was kind of cool to us,” Fardanesh says. “We wanted to represent the region that [these flavors] originated in so, for instance, the gold flavor is exactly the way my grandmother made it, so it’s her recipe. Now, we had to alter the recipe some so we could lower the calorie count and get it up to organic standards.”

“From there we went to the cucumber mint; in Iran and in Greece cucumber is shaved into the drink,” Fardanesh continues. “With the pomegranate, it’s really popular in the region. In Iran people eat pomegranates like apples, so it seemed natural.”

Manufactured in Sonoma County in the sleepy town of Healdsburg, the nearest facility that could produce their product at the level they aspired, and where they could also pasteurize the drink—meaning no preservatives were added, and in the soda business that’s basically unheard of, they say.

“That in a soda pop, in and of itself, is like whack-o. It’s just not what people do,” Fardanesh says. “Soda pop companies add preservatives so they can bottle [en masse] and keep it shelf stable, but we decided we wanted to keep it pure and use a pasteurization process, and it was expensive, but the markets reacted and understood.”

Silk Road Soda-a

“Any food, actually,” Srinuanchan adds. “Even potato chips, or even candy bars, anything packaged, most of those items have preservatives, some chemical to keep it from rotting and our product doesn’t have any of that.”

The partners say their decision to use pasteurization methods over preservatives account for the price tag of $1.99 and up, depending on different retailers and restaurants.

For the two enterprising men, their success has been rooted in a community that is eager to see them succeed. From former classmates in their MBA program pitching in on the bottle design to random strangers on their Facebook page, they say community support has far exceeded their wildest expectations.

“The top restaurateurs in town, Pat Mulvaney for instance, tasted our product. You know, we didn’t even know him, and he was very interested and very supportive,” Fardanesh says. “We’re two guys basically selling our drinks out of our truck, literally. When you drive up and pull it out of your trunk, it’s kind of Ben and Jerry-ish.”

Their laid-back, homegrown style hasn’t deterred vendors from carrying Silk Road Sodas—from Sunrise Natural Foods, Corti Brothers and Nugget Markets to restaurants like Hock Farm Craft & Provisions and Thai House Restaurant, their product can be found in more than 22 locations.

Not bad for a couple of thirty-something’s selling a homemade soda out of the trunk of their car, concocted in their kitchen.

Based on a decision to keep the product organic versus local, most of the soda company’s ingredients are sourced from Southern California, Oregon (verbena) and even Florida, via a distribution company in Southern California (cucumber). The two plan on meeting with flavor consultants once again to look through each component in their products to see if they’re doing it right. For them, keeping the integrity of the ingredients is paramount.

Although the company is currently a two-man operation, they say through the community’s support it feels like they have 100 employees. Fardanesh and Srinuanchan are looking forward to taking their product nationally, but not too hastily.

“We want to create a brand identity. We want to make sure people like it, and both of those things are happening, so we think the next area will be San Francisco,” Fardanesh says. “It’s our baby, so we want to watch it while it grows, and we’ve already gotten inquiries from New York and Los Angeles, but we don’t want to stretch it out too far yet.”

“We’d love to go national, but we don’t want to bite off more than we can chew,” Srinuanchan adds.

For those on the Bloomberg soda ban-bandwagon, the soda makers say not all sodas are built alike, but again, moderation is the key.

“I even tell people don’t drink more than one a day, but there’s a cleanliness to it because of the ingredients we use; on the back end is apple cider and white vinegar,” Fardanesh says. “So those are things that aren’t in soda pop. We were even having trouble naming it; is it a soda pop or is it a tea with sugar in it? It’s kind of a tea, soda pop and Kombucha, all mixed into one—it’s from the Mediterranean diet, which the world covets being super healthy, but if you’re diabetic you shouldn’t be slamming them.”