Wine Fridge

This picture of Jim's newly designed and installed wine fridge under the stairs. It has a light which turns on with the wave of the hand and keeps all the wine within at a constant temperature. It must use a fair amount of power to do this and I suspect Jim knows exactly how much that is, as he has an app on his phone that tells him a real time reading of how much power his solar panels are using. 

We have a similar app for our system for which Jim thought up a creative and money saving solution when it stopped providing information because it no longer supported the 3G modem. As a thank you, we bought him some bottles of a wine from Theopolis Vineyards in Mendocino County. I bought it for two reasons... it was recommended by the wine person in the local paper, and it had a cool label which I thought would look good in the wine cabinet. We drank one bottle last night, a very nice pinot noir with a typically overblown description: The glass opens with fragrant notes of black cherry, violets and woodsy spices. Big notes of cola, vanilla and blackberry jam burst on a palate framed by velvety tannins....

When Dana was living in Michigan and working at a hospital in Detroit she met Jim, who was working near Chicago. When she announced that she was bringing Jim to California to meet us, I asked her (among other things) what he liked to drink. 'Mountain Dew and white zinfandel' she replied. Now, we weren't exactly sophisticated wine drinkers ourselves... we favored a Barossa Valley red that we bought at the Safeway for $3/bottle...but we were somewhat alarmed by the choice of white zinfandel which everybody knew was the choice of unenlightened wine drinkers.

What we didn't know was that 1)wine was hardly the beverage of choice
in the Midwest  and 2) Jim's dad, having worked for many years for Seagrams, was a teetotaler. Anyway, Jim and Dana came, we stocked up on Mountain Dew and white zinfandel, and by the time they left, we totally understood why Dana had brought him to meet us.

In the nearly 30 years they have lived in Wine country,  Jim has traveled a long way, embracing the wines of the region and designing this elegant storage for his collection. We could probably learn a thing or two from him at this point.