Bradley N.
Yelp
Consider for a moment the Blue Ox. Now, go ahead and slaughter that ox with the aid of a decently weighted sledgehammer (the manly way preferred by the cattle-killing masters of old) or by relying on the far less satisfying support of a modern electric stun gun (the sissified alternative favored by Big Cattle). With the help of a serrated bone saw, sever its huge, horned head from its massive, blue body. Hang the carcass on a meat hook to bleed out, dry age, and be taken apart into tasty bits for your walk-in freezer slash meat locker. Place the severed head somewhere it won't be scavenged by vultures, coyotes, feral miniature schnauzers, and other assorted varmints. Maybe Damien Hirst could help. Then, slowly let the flesh rot away from your oxen skull over the course of several months, or until secondary fermentation in bottle begins.
Next, naturally bleach said oxen skull in a searingly hot desert for a year or two, before commissioning a Georgia O'Keefe obsessed wine label artist to render the resulting object into an arresting image not dissimilar to the weird sculpture thingie used at James Cole in Napa. Print this image on your wine bottles filled with sparklingly effervescent and still fermented natural wine from vineyards in Mendocino and Monterey Counties, with a few from Santa Barbara and other California wine growing regions thrown in for good measure.
Now, bestow upon those wines enigmatic names inspired by a shared love for classical cinema, music, and poetry, in the hope that this might also appeal to wine drinking, urban iGens with disposable income but no defined brand loyalties or preferred wine varietals as yet. You'll zero in on naturally pétillant, classically sparkling, and lower alcohol red wines aged in stainless steel or neutral oak as the prime contenders, in order to create a favorable contrast with the high ABV, oak-saturated fruit bombs favored by their parents and older, less hip members of the geriatric Robert Parker wine advocate set who all learned how to drink wine by watching episodes of "Falcon Crest" on TV in the 1980s. Except that almost no one under the age of 40 bothers to read Beat poets like Alan Ginsberg or watch 1950's film noir classics like "Kiss Me Deadly" anymore, although they might still be curious enough to Google them.
Finally, open a combined winery and tasting room in West Berkeley next to Donkey and Goat but also close enough to the Picante Mexican restaurant on 6th Street, so that your slightly buzzed customers can recover from too many urban wine tastings in a row by tearing into plates of manchamanteles, rajas con papas, and cochinita pibil tacos washed down by half pints of Trumer Pils and fresh hopped Sierra Nevada pale ale, before then jaywalking across Gilman Street to hunt for discounted down or fleece jackets at the North Face outlet store, jackets which they will need on a future visit simply because it is SO FRICKIN' COLD in the unheated, barrel filled, high ceilinged, repurposed old industrial facility in which the tasting room is located, right across from a rusting cement silo on the other side of street (which has the better parking options, by the way).
Frickin' cold enough, in fact, that Blue Ox's richest red wines like the Alder Springs Vineyard Mourvèdre (christened "El Topo," after an ultraviolent, allegorical Biblical Western from 1970 by the director, Alejandro Jodorowsky) risk tasting too lean, metallic, and underwhelming because they are served at like 55F in the glass and not at the sommelier recommended serving temperature of 63-65F, where the beguiling aromatics and more subtle secondary tasting notes of a wine as unquestionably high quality as this would be more evident, especially for those discerning wine drinkers who arrive punctually for the tasting room to open expressly so that their palates aren't fatigued by other planned tastings later that day.
So, in conclusion, bookmark a visit here if you prefer your Californian sparkling wines to be served with a blue oxen skull on the label, or if you just happen to enjoy yourself some really good bubbly. Don't forget to bring a heat lamp or blowtorch of some type with you if it happens to be cold, wet, or windy on the date of your visit, which is nearly all the time in Berkeley except for a few dry, sunny days in spring and fall. You'll need such tools to warm up those last few red wines on the list to determine if you actually like them enough to buy bottles for home, which you likely will if they actually are served at the proper temperature.
Now, if only the natural wine deprived lumberjacks in the upper Midwest like Paul Bunyan had easy access to lower alcohol sparkling and still wines this good! But then again, maybe brawny men like that would just order a 6-pack of Schlitz beer to go instead, which tastes better the closer to absolute zero Kelvin that it gets.
- Dedicated to the late great David Foster Wallace. We still miss you, dude.
