Sent: Monday, February 20, 2006 10:59 AM
Subject: Orangewood Wine News - 25

To Our Wine Aficionados,

Introduction

As promised, here is a full newsletter one fortnight after the previous one.  Well it’s one and half fortnights, but who’s counting.  There is still too much happening to cover it all, but I’ll be hitting the high spots - the Sierra Foothills event, the new sales guy, the new winery, the new delivery vehicle.

Box Score

New Restaurants/bars: 5

New Retail outlets:          1

New Sales people:         1

New Wineries:                1

Contents

New Sales Person – Stanley Parkinson

Events

      Ventana Vineyards Owner Luanne Meador

March 1 at AZ Wine in Carefree

                  March 2 at the Monterrey Wine Tour in Scottsdale

      Frank Family and Napa Cellars’ Winemaker and National Sales Director

                  March 6 at Bloom, Scottsdale

                  March 7 at Sportsman’s, Phoenix

                  March 8 at AZ Wine, Scottsdale

                  March 8 at 58° & Holding, Tucson

                  March 9 at Sportsman’s, Beardsley

New Locations

El Encanto Dos, Phoenix

T. Cooks at Royal Palms Hotel, Phoenix

Cool Grapes Wine Cellar Solutions, Scottsdale

Houston’s, Phoenix

Donovan’s Steak & Chop House, Phoenix

Galo’s, Tucson

New Wineries

Mantra Wines – Dry Creek, Sonoma, CA

Sierra Foothills Event feedback

Rambling and delivery vehicles

New Sales Person - Stanley Parkinson

When I first realized that I could not handle as many accounts as were necessary for a viable business, I recruited Dick Kirkpatrick, who was a retired college lecturer, had a good pallet and a good sense of humor.  One of Dick’s good friends was a lecturer at ASU and was planning to retire soon.  I have been bugging Stanley to sell wine for the last 3 years and finally he has seen the light.  He has a house in Oracle, and while there is not a vast market for fine wine, it is an opportunity to improve our wine coverage north of Tucson.  Welcome Stanley.

Upcoming Events

Ventana Vineyards

      Doug and Luann Meador own Ventana Vineyards.  We are their Arizona representatives.  Luann is coming into town as part of the Monterey Wine Tour and is going to visit with us while she is here.  I visited the vineyards and met Doug, but this is the first time I will be subjected to the charms of Luann.  You have a chance to, too: 

1. March 1 – The winemaker dinner at the Easy Street Bistro in Carefree – associated with the AZ Wine Company, also on Easy Street.  Call AZ Wine at 480-488-6203 for more information.

2. March 2 – The Monterey Wine Tour visits the newly remodeled Valley Ho in Scottsdale.  There are over 70 wineries in Monterey County, California.  Many will be represented at this event that is open to the public from 6 – 9 pm.  For more information and to get tickets go to: http://www.montereywines.org/national_tour_2006_scottsdale.html

Frank Family and Napa Cellars

Frank Family Vineyards and Napa Cellars Winery have common ownership (Richard Frank and Koerner Rombauer).  They also have a common winemaker, Todd Graf, and National Sales Director, Scott Lloyd, if they will forgive me for calling them common.  They will both be here for a full slate of appearances.  I’ll be keeping track of which of you shows up.  No shows will get the unedited version of the newsletter!

      March 6 – 5:00 – 7:00 Meet the Winemaker at Bloom in Scottsdale

      March 7 – 5:00 – 6:30 Tasting at Sportsman’s Camelback and 32^nd St

      March 8 – 5:30 – 7:00 Tasting at AZ Wine, Scottsdale

      March 8 – 5:00 – 7:00 Tasting at 58° & Holding, Tucson (tentative)

March 9 – 5:00 – 6:30 Tasting at Sportsman’s, 67^th Ave and Loop 101

New Locations

El Encanto Dos, Phoenix

      El Encanto Cantina in Cave Creek has been a work in progress for Bill Nelson over the last 15 years.  With a pond with ducks and geese, a massive palm tree with owls nesting in it, not to mention great food, it has been an increasingly popular place for locals and tourists alike.  Recently, Bill asked his daughter Christine to give him a hand “putting together some infrastructure”.  Christine, a lawyer working in Washington, enjoyed the restaurant so much she is now the managing partner. One of her innovations was to put Vino Noceto Sangiovese on the wine list.  Another was to start a second restaurant a few miles away in the middle of a culinary, as well as actual, desert.  There is no pond or tall palm tree, but excellent food service, and Sangiovese is available.

T. Cooks at Royal Palms Hotel, 5200 E Camelback Rd, Phoenix

      Szymon has been a captain at T. Cooks for many years, and has now managed to get two of our wines on their wine list.  You can ask for Szymon’s wines when you dine there.

Cool Grapes Wine Cellar Solutions, 3011 N 73^rd Street #110, Scottsdale

      What a great concept.  Scott will build you a wine cellar in a new or existing house.  He’ll worry about insulation and will custom build an appropriate AC unit.  Then he will help you stock your new wine cellar.  He has a retail license, but no retail location.   He doesn’t need one because he’s building his client base one cellar at a time.

Houston’s, 2425 E Camelback Road, Phoenix

      The Rutherford Grill in Napa Valley is part of the restaurant group that owns the Houston’s restaurants.  The manager there, Chris, was a buddy of Dennis at the Frank Family winery and tasting room and sold a lot of Frank Family wine.  When Chris moved to the Houston’s in Phoenix, there was no question he was going to be selling Frank Family wines there, too.  How can we help?

Donovan’s Steak & Chop House, 3101 E Camelback Road, Phoenix

      Just down the road (up the road?) on Camelback is Donovan’s.  It replaces the Harris steakhouse.  They are also beginning to explore our portfolio.

Galo’s, 7854 E Wrightstown Road, Tucson

      I really know nothing about this latest Tucson restaurant, but I think its name is darkly humorous!

New Wineries

Mantra Wines – Dry Creek, Sonoma, CA

      At Christmas 2004 (sic) Dyane, a good friend and former wines sales person for us, brought along a bottle of Mantra Red Wine that she had been given.  We thoroughly enjoyed it.  I was also drawn by the label that showed a Möbius strip in the shape of an infinity sign (a number 8 lying on its side).  As someone who spent hours with paper, glue and scissors dissecting Möbius strips, I was fascinated.  The empty bottle sat on my desk for several months.  I found that Mantra wines were not brought into Arizona, so I contacted them and on a subsequent trip to Napa I made an appointment to visit.  They don’t have a tasting room, but they do have a wonderful piece of property just up Dry Creek from the Russian River.  My daughter, Debby, and I visited last March.  We were let into the private area and still had to drive a couple of miles of rolling hills, half buried boulders and vineyards.  I wanted to be a kid again to play hide and seek there.  We met Lorene Kuimelis who had us try the wines.  Since my pallet is not the greatest, we offered to take away the wines for evaluation back in Phoenix.  We tasted, we drank we loved the wines and expressed an interest…but not hearing anything for 6 months I had all but given up.  Then Lorene’s son, Mike, called to follow up.  He has now given up his day job to be a full time wine maker, vineyard manager and marketer.  The current vintage tastes great, so look out for it.

Sierra Foothills Wine Tasting Event

Dick has been leading the charge on our Sierra Foothills focus, so it was natural for him to suggest we have an event so focused.  Given little direction (we call it delegation), Dick put together a terrific event that featured all our Sierra Foothills wineries and attracted many of our customers, newsletter readers and others.  Fairly late in the game we realized that our customers in Tucson would not be able to make the event, so we took it to them.  At 8:30 am we headed south to Acacia at St Philips Plaza for lunch and tasting.  Then at 2:00 pm we were heading back to Phoenix, hoping the traffic would not be too bad.  Back in Scottsdale, the Culinary Institute put on a great food spread that worked well with the wines that were presented.  Great wines, great food, and fun people talking about their wines: it doesn’t get any better than this.  If you missed it in 2006, pay more attention in 2007,

Rambling – about delivery vehicles

            Some time ago we realized that our ’94 Celica and our driver, Greg, with his 1/2 ton pickup, where insufficient for deliveries, so we bought a Scion xB.  It turned out to be an ideal vehicle, easily carries 10 to 12 cases of wine, 20 at a stretch.  It does over 30 mpg around town.  Still, as we grew we found we were stretching capacity more and more.  We really didn’t want a full sized cargo van -  10 to 12 mpg is not what we had in mind.  We poked around and found another funky Japanese vehicle, a Honda Element.  It gets 22 to 24 mpg and can carry 40 cases of wine, according to Allison Whiteside owner of Bella Vida Vineyards.  Now Greg drives the xB and I am the fill-in driver with the Element.  OK, Frank, did you make it to the end of this one?

Ciao,

Richard and Laurie

Richard (newsletter writer) and Laurie Corles (editor)

Orangewood Consulting LLC

480.488.4794 or 602.410.3774

http://www.orangewoodwines.com

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