August 2: Pain Before Pleasure

By Glen Frederiksen

Don’t let anyone tell you that a seven-hour car trip and move to another home isn’t stressful. It is a royal pain.

After emptying the car of all its contents at our Nipomo condo rental, my back was feeling the stress. I didn’t know exactly how much until I was getting ready for bed and did a pratfall onto the floor. Thank goodness for deep-pile shag rugs. But I was now doing a good imitation of Quasimoto as I climbed into bed.

This morning, things weren’t much better.

After hobbling around all day, and sucking down Motrin 800 milligrams at a time, I finally tried mixing in some fine wine…

Success! Add back problems to the list of medical conditions red wine can cure. At least I was able to stand up straight again.

Now, for the pleasure.

Our evening meal was at a local fish restaurant, The Jetty, in Santa Maria. The food was decent; the portions, generous. We met up for dinner with Anne and Jim Crum.

As you can read here (http://winelinesonline.com/dedication/), Dr. James Crum was my wine mentor. Some 25 years ago, I was looking for wine appreciation classes to take in the Inland Empire of Southern California. Turned out, Jim was teaching one at night at Cal State San Bernardino. Wife Mary and I took the introductory course, then the advanced course, and a life-long friendship was forged. Through Jim, I joined two monthly wine appreciation tasting groups, joined him as a wine steward at the National Orange Show’s international wine competition, worked my way up to wine judge and, when health concerns led Dr. Crum to step down from being the Director of the competition, I stepped in for two years.

So it was wonderful to break bread with him and his wife Anne again. We plan to do it often over the next four weeks. Jim will even accompany me to some of the wineries I will be visiting.

Tomorrow, we begin in Paso Robles, visiting two smaller, family-run wine concerns.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 3rd, 2012 at 12:39 am. It is filed under Appellation Trail, Blog and tagged with Central Coast Wine. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.