Honey burned my ham!

Literally.

The entire top of the roasting bag melted onto my ham as I warmed it up with a sweet honey-orange glaze. Here are the pictures to prove it.

Thank goodness I had plenty of wine to recover and keep the guests occupied while I carved the top of my ham off.

Burned the rolls too.

Blasted high-altitude cooking with a 1960s oven!

Organic Mulled Wine

My favorite drink after a nice, long day out in the cold.

1 bottle of dry, organic red wine

2 cups of hot water

a few big pinches of brown sugar

1 pinch of nutmeg

Juice and rind of 1 lemon or orange

1 stick of cinnamon

2 cloves

LEED and follow

There’s been and continues to be a lot of talk about LEED Certified wineries.

To start, a LEED Certified anything means that the building in which a business is housed has passed criteria in energy savings, water efficiency, CO2 emissions reduction, improved indoor environmental quality, and stewardship of resources and sensitivity to their impacts. LEED, after all stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design. The US Green Building Council created LEED certification in 1998 and it has been THE acronym ever since.

Stoller Winery in Oregon became the first US LEED Certified winery in 2006. Hall Wines of St. Helena became the first winery in California to achieve LEED certification from the U.S. Green Building Council. Cade Wines were the first organic winery to be awarded in Napa Valley. Goldeneye Winery became the third LEED certified winery in CA this year.

This looks like a great trend to keep watching. In the mean time, take a look at these sites for information about what a LEED winery does differently. Gravity flow anyone?

Stoller

Hall

Cade

Goldeneye

Green Frog

Drinking Green can be a lot of fun. No, I don’t mean exclusively drinking Vinho Verde.

By fun, I mean drinking wine that you know something special is going on. Take this great wine for example: Frog’s Leap 2007 Cabernet Sauvignon.

Besides being a delicious, can’t wait to have more, bottle of wine, there’s another side to this bottle. The outside. If the inside is the juice you quoff, the outside is the winery which equals the business, the environment and the people that make the inside possible.

Here’s the outside scoop on Frog's Leap and why they are one of my favorite brands (both inside and out).

Frog’s Leap is an organic winery in Napa, CA. I had the pleasure of visiting the winery years ago. I grabbed a bottle of Chardonnay on a beautiful summer day and hung out in the hammock with friends. The gardens were beautiful and with the help of friends and butterflies, it quickly became an exquisite day. Although moved by so many variables, I still wanted to learn about the winery.

Frog’s Leap is not organic to be trendy. They believe in health and sustainable farming as the mechanism for ensuring a healthy environment. Their mantra is Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Renew, Retain and Revere.

Organic and Biodynamic Farming methods are not only used in the vineyards but flow into the gardens. Everything you see is buzzing with the life of the season. The true life of Frog’s Leap is exactly where it is at that moment, surrounded in the harmony of nature.

Wine Bottle Renew

While I was researching the Green Wine Summit and reaching out to some folks about interviews, I came across some of the event sponsors.

One company that I find very interesting is Wine Bottle Renew.

Check it out: Of the 300 million cases of wine sold each year in the United States, none of the bottles are reused and 70% end up in landfills.

It is estimated that 60% of a wine’s carbon footprint is in the production of the wine bottle. Using a Renew bottle reduces that production carbon footprint up to 95%. Reuse of wine bottles not only cuts the carbon footprint, but also reduces the amount of glass that ends up in our landfills. The EPA estimates that 70% of all wine bottles are not recycled. Glass in our landfills never breaks down and will be there 5000 years from now. With 10% of landfills being glass, it is our duty to change our throwaway culture and look at reusing and recycling bottles to reduce waste and help our environment.

These guys are really cool and I was surprised by some of their investors. I will be keeping an eye on them and look forward to watching them grow.

Green Wine Summit

I JUST found out about the Green Wine Summit and wish I could attend! I can’t swing it on such short notice but next year, believe you me - I will be there.

I am so excited to see the greening of the wine industry growing. The Green Wine Summit is in its 3rd year. Topics for this year’s summit include:

Green Business: Third-Party Certification Programs
Energy Efficiency Programs and Projects for the Wine Industry
Vintners & Growers Perspectives on Certification
Impact of Consumer Values on Organic Wine Purchases
Innovative Collaborations: Engaging Workers and Community
"Climate, Grapes, and Wine: Structure and Suitability in a Variable and Changing Climate"
Green Business: Green Bucks, Economic Viability of Green Technologies Networking Break
Green Business: Supply-Chain Environmental Assessment to Improve Winery Performance

I’ll see what I can dig up from those that attended and get back to you.

Enter Etica Wines & Etica Wine Tastings

I figured that my love for wine and the knowledge I picked up over the years could not be for nothing.

I love wine, agriculture and working with interesting people. I love to travel, write and share my enthusiasm for the treasures I find.

These are the things that make up Etica Wines.

My mission: to promote ethical wines.

How? Marketing online and conduct wine tastings.

So there you have it. Plain and simple but full of passion.

I am excited again and it feels so good.

It has been a while.

Regrouped?

Check.

Circus

While in the small confines of my new house/room (I rent a room in a friend’s house), I went to work. I put my thinking cap on and figured out what I wanted to be when I grew up. This is normal regrouping procedure- the paper with the line drawn the middle. One side says Love and the other side says Hate.

I mirrored what I wanted out of work with what I never wanted to deal with again.

In a nutshell, I never want:

To own a company that is over-leveraged
To have large bank loans (those look really bad to investors)
To have non-paying customers

Those three items are a one-way express ticket to the Circus of Hell.
The ferris wheel never stops. You literally have to jump off and hope you don’t get too hurt.

Get to Work

I am not a spoiled brat. I was clearly just in the wrong job. My job as a small business owner, being passionate about my work and the cause I was steering came to an abrupt end. It was hard to transition to a customer service rep in a call center for Directv.

There is nothing like the experience of being a call center employee. Nothing has ever motivated me to get out of my current situation and regroup so feverishly. I heard my Dad’s words over and over again - “The best way to get over something is to go to work.”

Those words were really valuable to me at that time. While reviewing my life and indexing everything that I had done poorly (just to add depressing onto depression), I realized that work and change had been leaning on each other for ages.

Break up with my boyfriend - get to work.
Move to a new town - get to work.
Go to the edge of reason - get to work.
Get a job in corporate America - get to work.

I feel as if I could write forever about my experience at Directv and what I learned about big business and how I can now relate to Republican’s desire to decrease big governments but how I think big businesses seem equally inefficient .. but I’ll leave that for another time.

Re: Failure

It has been a while. I guess a while equals 17 months and 1 day.

To say the least, I have Regrouped.

Regrouped is an excellent word that literally means to become Reorganized in order to make a fresh start. Usually Regrouping happens twice a year: on New Years and on my birthday.

But this was an emergency Regrouping if you will. It was not usual because the Regrouping was do to failure. I am not big on failure. Especially when it is I who does the failing.

Etica, my baby, was falling into the abyss.

It is hard to fail.

In combination with failing in the general sense (business and livelihood), I found that I could be more specific and also fail in the “trying” category. Trying in this case included trying to fix my problems, trying to get out of debt, trying to not loose my mind and so on and so on.

For a while there I locked the doors and hid from creditors. Eventually, I came out of my house (in order to move) and went and got a job. And I got one - in Corporate America.

Although I knew I was lucky to find a job, I will be the first to admit it - I was in hell.