Hedonia

Wine country picnic

Summertime, and the living is easy ...

What a crock. The living's no easier in the summer. Work goes on every day as normal, tourists flood the farmer's market and a thick blanket of fog ensures that I lose my hard-earned trucker tan. Summer, feh.

But it is easy to get a small taste of the simple life, to bask in a carefree afternoon of food, friends and frivolity under a balmy summer sun. Certainly chief among the reasons we love living in San Francisco is fast and easy access to the wine country.

DPaul and I make excursions pretty frequently; in fact, we explicitly joined a few wineries' clubs just to have the excuse to get out of town once in a while. We've long been big fans of the Dry Creek Valley area in Sonoma County, but for the last year and change we've been enamored with Carneros, the region alongside the north side of San Francisco Bay that straddles the southern ends of both Sonoma and Napa counties. And even more specifically, we're best buds with Bouchaine.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Bouchaine rocks. I won't pretend to be any kind of wine expert, and certainly cannot rank their wines against comparable quaff from more esteemed producers (though their rosé of syrah got good marks in our taste-off). All I know is that I enjoy their wines immensely. But what Bouchaine does excellently, better than most, is deliver a flawlessly enjoyable wine country experience. No tour buses and limos, no snotty bling-laden tourists and harried winery staff. Just a sun-dappled back deck overlooking vineyards and serenity interrupted only by a cooling bay breeze.

Bouchaine is an ideal spot for a picnic, and so for DPaul's birthday last week, that's precisely what we did. Ten of us met to enjoy a flight of tastings alongside some tasty treats. Bouchaine does offer a picnic program, where you can purchase baskets of meats, cheeses and other goodies, and that's all well and good. But I thought it would be fun to bring our own picnic of wine-friendly foods to enjoy.

Fractured fairytale

I'm going a bit off-topic here, but bear with me. The above pic of yours truly in front of the Donut Pub was taken and composited by my very dear friend Christine during my last trip to New York. First my husband's composite shot of our kitchen, and now this. I guess I'm attracted to people with a fragmented view of the world.

Christine and I have known each other for nearly 20 years now. (Eek!) We were total BFFs for the two years we were both at SUNY Stony Brook, and remained close ever since. In 1995, she, DPaul and I started a small business together, designing and distributing graphical tees.

Just before Christmas of that year, at the tender age of 26, Christine suffered a massive stroke due to a congenital arteriovenous malformation (AVM), a contidion later made famous by Nate Fisher on Six Feet Under and most recently by Senator Tim Johnson (D-SC).

The first miracle was that she survived. The second miracle was that, though her mobility and language were impacted, her ability to design, and to use Photoshop, Illustrator and Quark, were magically untouched. The brain works in mysterious ways indeed.

In the years since the stroke, she has had a lot of time on her hands, and a continued itch to design. She began taking photos of neon signs, a longtime fascination for her, and digitally "painting" them in Illustrator with astonishing attention to detail. We have three of her works hanging in our office.

More recently, she has taken a more abstract approach, shattering the images, which always include words, and recomposing them with faces of people in her life. To me, these are poignant and powerful. I love her designs, and you can see more of them here.

Today she lives in an adorable apartment in Harlem and is rebuilding her career. If you are in the New York area and need a graphic designer hungry for the work, bring it on.

I have many relationships of considerable longevity in my life, and my friendship with Christine is one that I treasure very much.