Kelly J. Hayes/Courtesy picture
I not too long ago bumped into an old buddy from a earlier life who immediately requested me “You still got Vino?”
It struck a chord because it has been seven years this month that my black Labrador named Vino was referred to as to that Grand Cru Vineyard within the sky.
When Vino handed it prompted me to put in writing the column beneath and to achieve out to plenty of wineries for photographs of their dogs. The response was overwhelming, and a plethora of canine photographs poured into my inbox.
With a way of melancholy and a glass of purple wine in hand, I returned to the file folder with the story and seemed on the assortment of canine photographs that had been despatched. There had been dogs from the Barossa and Piedmonte, from the Willamette and Napa valleys. I puzzled if seven years on, how lots of the dogs had been nonetheless residing the wine life of their respective vineyards? I actually hope all of them.
I then reread the WineInokay and located it to be one among my faves from the final sixteen years. So, along with your indulgence, I believed I’d run this one again. He was a very good canine, certainly.
NOVEMBER, 2016
For 482 consecutive weeks, this column has closed with a notation stating that the writer, that might be me, “lives in the soon-to-be designated appellation of Old Snowmass with his wife Linda and a black Lab named Vino.”
Well, with disappointment, that’s no extra.
While Old Snowmass nonetheless awaits its designation as an appellation and, luckily, my spouse stays by my facet, this previous week our wine canine, Vino, moved alongside to what we hope is his eternity in a forever-fertile winery. Though he by no means set paw within the grime of an precise winery throughout his time on this earth, he was a wine canine simply the identical. Many an evening, he sat close to me as I tasted wines from all over the world, and plenty of a morn he dropped his giant head on crossed paws and snoozed beneath the desk the place I pecked out these 482 tales on my pc keyboard.
It is gloomy, after all, however that’s simply how it’s with dogs. Like the altering seasons, their lives are fleeting. It acquired me interested by all of the wineries I’ve visited, and the way, almost all the time, there’s a wine canine in residence. Wines, vines, and dogs simply go collectively like corks and bottles.
So I despatched out a missive and requested some people who’ve wineries to ship me photographs of their dogs. And I acquired a bunch. In truth, a complete pack of wine dogs from everywhere in the world got here charging in through .jpgs and pdfs. And for me, the pictures, however extra importantly the sentiment behind the pictures, had been as comforting as a glass of fortified Port.
Which, after all, jogged my memory of my favourite wine canine story. One that I first realized of again in 2007, the primary 12 months of this column.
THREE-LEGGED RED
I used to be in Seattle staying on the W Hotel for a soccer recreation. As WineInokay was in its infancy, simply 44 columns in, something that needed to do with wine grabbed my consideration. One morning, as I stood on the entrance desk of the resort, a person got here in carrying a field of wine with a leash-less three-legged border collie by his facet. I needed to ask …
The man was Eric Dunham, and he generously took the time to elucidate that he made wine in Walla-Walla, in japanese Washington. He was there to pour for plenty of sommeliers and wine store homeowners. The field had a photograph of the aforementioned canine and a label that recognized the wine as “Dunham Cellars Three Legged Red.” It appears in the course of the summer time of ’94, he was woke up within the wee-hours by the sounds of a dogfight. Or extra precisely, a canine mugging. A pit bull had attacked a Border collie pup and mauled him to inside an inch of his life – even taking a leg from the canine’s starboard facet. Eric scooped up the pup and rushed him to the vet, the place he was saved from a sure demise.
He named the canine Port as a result of he had two good legs on his left facet. Eric and Port turned fixed companions and finest mates. But there was, as they are saying, the remainder of the story. Eric decided to make an inexpensive purple wine from, you guessed it, three grapes (Cabernet Sauvignon/Merlot/Syrah) and identify it after Port. “Three Legged Red,” with its image of Port, turned an iconic Washington wine. The present launch acquired a 90-point score from the Wine Enthusiast.
Both Port and Eric are gone now, however their collaboration lives o,n and Dunham Cellars celebrated its twentieth anniversary final 12 months. They make distinctive single winery and single varietal wines however nonetheless produce the fabled “Three Legged Red.” And, appropriately, additionally they make a restricted launch Riesling underneath the moniker “Four Legged White,” named for the present wine canine, Maysy.
PUPPY LOVE
Not all the wine dogs who got here by my restricted bandwidth have gone on to turn into nice manufacturers. But for all the winemakers who despatched photographs, there’s a bond, a reference to their wine dogs that’s priceless. They are up early throughout harvest, greet company as they arrive to the tasting rooms, bark on the birds as they choose on the grapes, and simply lie on the cool flooring of the wineries in the course of the sizzling days within the rising season. But most significantly, from puppyhood to old age, they merely deliver good vitality.
Like an excellent bottle of wine, a very good canine could come into your life, present beautiful pleasure, after which, like that, be gone. Savor the recollections.
And please increase a toast to my wine canine, Vino. Santé.
