Crush
"[To] buy a bottle of wine from me makes me a bootlegger. That's not right."
"Almost every winemaker [in Ramona] is either keeping his day job or is retired."
"People want the romance; they want the story of your winery, the story of your vineyard."
"They want to have their own private label - the family wine."
Like others before her, Gotfredson found selling San Diego wine to San Diegans a difficult business.
"The ethos," says Norby, "was to blend in and respect nature, be part of it."
"Everybody was cutting throats, giving stuff away just to bring the customer in."
"I knew I wanted mountain fruit - a little bit of a clunky, rustic quality."
"There are thousands of people in this country who would kill to design a wine label."
"We ended up making an illegal amount of wine in my garage - something like ten barrels."
"We would call them the "get drunk and take off your T-shirt" crowd."
"Wine is the only beverage on the planet that draws people together, right?"
"They paid about $300 a ton... The more sugar, the better. Flavor was not a question."
"Those of us who had been wringing our hands all that time in California said, "Well, yeah."
"France is known for great wine, but that will never happen down here, because we're just South America."
'You'll notice these labels don't look like German labels," says Damon Goldstein, walking me through his storeroom at Truly Fine Wine on Morena. What he means is that the labels are relatively simple -- no …
The first tasting was in the Rheinhessen; the cellarmaster was a 90-year-old woman.
"I would get all crazy about how beautiful the vineyards are in fall or about how the air smells like wine during crush."
Small world. Jeff Morgan, co-founder of a winery founded on the notion of making rosé its flagship product, gets invited to San Diego by the local chapter of the American Institute of Wine and Food. …
"Lancers was developed to appeal to American military servicemen toward the end of World War II."
'You're all super-palates, you know," said Jeff Morgan to the crowd gathered in the San Diego Art Institute's Palette dining room. "If you weren't super-palates, you wouldn't be interested enough to sit here and listen …
"Flavor, in terms of wine quality, is secondary. It is important, but it is secondary."
"It's valuable to see the date integrated -- if every time you log in there's a gauge saying, "Everything's A-OK.""
"Wines that sell for $65 to $90 off the mailing list routinely fetch $400 to $500 a bottle on the secondary market."
"If people are this generous and this willing to teach others about wine, it can't be a bad hobby."
"But they're Mexican wines, which most people haven't heard of, and that gives them a bit of cachet."
"My goal is to make California-class wines in Ramona."
"It's kind of a geographical expression of how I'd love my life to be!"
"What I want to sell people on is the concept of discovering."
"It's easy to believe that there are a lot of unaccounted-for vineyards in the region."
"When it's your goal to educate folks about wine, entry-level will take you only so far."
"You could do a liberal arts degree with wine as the organizing principle."
"I believe in putting everything on the floor... Stack it high and watch it fly."
'He started posting black-and-white photos of loyal customers on the inside walls.'
I think there's this kind of Puritan streak in wine writing.
'I smell red fruit - red plums, red cherries, a little cranberry.'
'If you're not here, if you're not following the format, you're sort of holding everybody up.'
'I'm overjoyed whenever I see references to Mexican wine in the literature.'
'Premium wine grapes don't thrive where ice plants and salty sea foam happily commingle.'
'I'm representing wineries that make only 200 cases for the world, [maybe] 50 for Southern California.'
Meet me at Mustafa's. I'll jump in your car and show you the valley.
'It's daunting if you're a young businessman. You take everything so personally.'
'People just went ballistic over that combination.'
I don't want to be a bar. I want to be a hangout - an oasis away from those bars.