Sanguis The Highlands

"Sharing my notes from my first tasting of this composition here would be nothing if not inappropriate. It also recalls me of walking, wrapped in warm coats, through the damply-cold Paris December-night, arm-in-arm in lock-step (to keep the cold at arm’s length), sharing a cigarette (ditto). There is a French-ness to Cabernet Franc that somehow our southern California (here, the Happy Canyon area of the Santa Ynez Valley) sun manages to bring out with a degree of loveliness that might be more like an early-Hollywood version of what we – some of us – think French-ness is…I’m good with either or both. Cabernets Franc & a little Sauvignon natively fermented with about 20% whole clusters and grown up in those lovely Cigar-shaped barrels that those French people make for us…

Food: The way the French roast a chicken, properly trussed, set on your oven rack with the little potatoes and maybe some carrots positioned in a pan below to catch all those chicken drippings…and a fresh salad

Music: Mary Don’t You Weep (live from Amazing Grace), Aretha Franklin; My Back Pages, The Brothers & Sisters; Rock’n’roll Suicide (live from ‘David’), David Bowie; Rio, Part VIII, Keith Jarret; Comes Love, The Wood Brothers; Saint Nothing, Daniel Rossen; The Man I Love, Rokia Traoré; A million years, David Gray"