by John A. Rippo

—California’s wine history began in San Diego. The Spanish friars who came here in 1769 planted the first vines near the Mission and some of their hardy transplants are still around today. Though the local wine industry has grown considerably in recent years, many of the local wineries are not well known, even though their output is sometimes exemplary. At a recent gathering at North Park’s Caffé Calabria last month, CEO Arne Holt tried to shed some light on some of San Diego’s vintners.

The event showcased the efforts of the San Diego Vintner’s Association, a trade group that since 1994, has worked to improve the wine business and influence the direction of the San Diego County wine industry. The event, headed by Gloriosa Vineyards’ John Brunetto, presented 20 wineries from around the county. Most of these are small operations with miniscule outputs per year, though the quaility of the wines overall were very good. It seems that the coffee roaster outed a secret that had been kept too long; San Diego’s micro wine makers know what they’re doing.

Several offerings stood out among them; Jenkins Winery offered an apple port that was unique and uncommon, to say the least. The small winery located in Julian produces less than fifty cases per year of the port and 2009 marks the seventh year of their output. In addition to the apple port, they offer a Dolcezza, a dry apple wine as well as a rosé made from Syrah grapes. Another was a fine Montepulciano from Witch Creek Winery in Carlsbad. Twin Oaks from San Marcos offered a one of a kind blend of Syrah and Viognier grape called a Syrenade; this left a particularly memorable finish.

The wineries included in the exhibition usually produce less than two hundred cases of their offerings per year and some of them offer far fewer than that. Most of the wineries on exhibition at Caffé Calabria are less than ten years old and some of them are located in places not usually thought of as wine country. Gloriosa Vineyards is located in Campo—and John Brunetto praises the conditions there as perfect for wine making. Mahogany Mountain and Lenora are in Ramona at an elevation not usually associated with California vintages. The heights do nothing to detract from their wines; Lenora’s Barbera and Mahogany Mountain’s Zinfandel were proof of that. Warner Springs, Julian, Alpine, Carlsbad and San Marcos all host vineyards—most of these are less than one hundred acres in size.

Typical for San Diego, there are some excellent creators of some of life’s better things that are too little known and under-appreciated within the larger community, and it’s no less ironic that a coffee roaster would showcase these quality wine makers and help them find a market. Caffé Calabria’s Arne Holt has expressed similar hopes to bring local beer breweries a better following in the future, too. ESPRESSO wishes all such makers of the better things in life well and prosperity in 2010 and urges the coffee connoisseurs of the region to sample what’s growing virtually under their noses and to engage local producers first when thinking of what to enjoy.

If you can remember “Incense, Peppermints”, you’re way older than 30—the age that the Hippies used to say was the cut-off date for people you could trust. A 30-year old in 1967’s Summer of Love would be 72 now. No telling how trustworthy that would be, either.

The music from that time has made a comeback with the help of Gary Raycheck, a local producer working with Ben Vereen and others to showcase the music that defined the late-’60′s eAra. Bands like the Strawberry Alarm Clock produced the sounds associated with the era of free love and turning on, tuning in and dropping out. The bands on the CD are the musicians of a movement that coalesced in San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury district— and scared the hell out of the Squares who had bought the American Dream and secretly feared anyone who may have buyer’s remorse. Now, forty years later, the music on the CD sounds quaint and kind of old fashioned, much like what Yankee Doodle Dandy sounds like to a post-Cold War generation. Yet this is the music that moved millions to do a quintessentially American thing—head west, dump the wage-slavery of nine-to-fiving for the Man, and take a new shot at life by re-inventing themselves and their world.  They were the inheritors of the spirit that moved their ancestors to cross an ocean in search of America, and to settle the West and stake the Gold Rush. They inherited the words of Thoreau, Mark Twain and O. Henry to live life on their own terms for better or worse. They were an anomalous American generation that respected poetry. And they had the input of people like Timothy Leary who urged all and sundry to consider better living through chemistry.

The Hippies were begat by the Beats, who were called “Beatniks” by Squares who couldn’t understand the times or keep their mouths shut. “Hipsters” were the folk who played the folk songs in the coffeehouses of the Haight, or L.A. or even here in the days before the the SDPD closed them down in  an hysterical bid to stop progress. “Hippies” were the young hipsters; the little brother and little sister wannabes whom the old guard grudged acceptance at first. But as time went on, the name stuck and those who rebelled against their low-numbered draft cards and Uncle Sam’s one-way excursion to Vietnam with the last stop at Arlington were the ones to radically change the social foundation of the society that raised them. The world hasn’t been the same since—thank God.
The times were ripe for changing, too. The Cold War fearmongering and anti-communist witch hunts had choked freedom too long; the great number of youth who went to college found in education a previously unknown intellectual freedom and the promise of opportunity and millions of them wanted to do more than shoehorn themselves into gray flannel suits and commute from Levittowns to windowless offices. Women had the Pill, which allowed them to choose when or if pregnancy would happen and the recent Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act opened up new avenues that hippies’ mothers never had. The rising tide of feminism altered the Old Boy’s network permanently and all the assumptions that went unquestioned before were reassessed by the young, the restless and very often, the stoned.
The echoes of that era are still with us and the cultural counterattack by the Squares of the rightwing have moved much of the tide back to where it once was when culture was more straitlaced and less free. The “post 9-11 world” shibboleth that gave license to the Man to re-impose a direction the ’60′s turned us from is back on track and if people think they are somehow more secure, they can’t help but notice they’re less free to be themselves. A new generation is learning that security trumps freedom and that their elders were just a bunch of crackpots who did too many drugs and mean nothing.

But the music in this CD is a time capsule of when millions caused a revolution just by not showing up to the fate society had in store for them and doing something different instead. It’s 108 minutes of Jesse Colin Young, Peter & Gordon, Buddy Miles, Earl Thomas and others, with a nod to Otis Redding. Come hear the music play and see what it inspired over 40 years ago. Check Adams Entertainment dot com.

—Gelato Vero Caffé quietly marked its 25th anniversary recently as San Diego’s premier gelateria—and one of the County’s most singular coffeehouses. The tiny shop has long been the center of first-class gelato making and has created no end of legends, both for its staff and customers.

Founded in 1984 by Henry Rabinowitz, a former teacher who fell in love with gelato on a trip to Italy, Gelato Vero occupies the site of an earlier coffeehouse named Sidney’s that existed from 1978 to 1983. The corner shop at India, Andrews and Washington Streets has always been a place of offbeat wonder and fascination; before Sidney’s, the corner held a record store that specialized in jazz, before that it was a bead shop, a porn bookstore and was the first site of the San Diego Jazz Festival in 1974.

When Gelato Vero opened, few here knew what gelati are. Most thought it merely ice cream and Rabinowitz developed a short and pithy speech to inform the curious about the flavorful, rich in butterfat and relatively low- calorie concoctions that he specialized in making. Gelato not only relies on fresh and excellent ingredients—it requires a high degree of hands on labor and excellent sense of timing and is not made in huge production runs. Gelati is made by the batch and Gelato Vero’s sizes in equipment and area are  made for a single operator.  Rabinowitz changed the perception of Gelato soon enough, encouraging his patrons to expand their tastes and feeding them no end of samples. His clients paid back the favor by going out of their way to patronize his house, and soon enough, wholesale orders flowed in from the better restaurants that required signature gelati from the shop. The flavor offerings are never ending and Rabinowitz created hundreds of unique gelati for restarants and other clients that held their flavors exclusively; some for almost twenty five years.

The curiously small back room, just behind the café counter was and still is ground zero for gelato making. A second room the size of a small garage exists uphill from the café and houses a second mixer and  freezer. From this small space, perhaps hundreds of tons of gelati and sorbetto are made yearly for the coffeehouse’s customers and wholesale accounts.

Right from the beginning, Gelato Vero drew an incredible wealth of creatives of all kinds as its core clientele. This may have had something to do with Henry Rabinowitz’s personality that was warm, engaging and genuinely curious about people, and that the café staff was a mirror of the kind of people who came there. Gelato Vero has a long reputation for staffers who, while competent and capable, are not tolerant of insolence, meanness or conspicuous rudeness from the clientele. Though this hasn’t always been easy for those caught in the cultural crossfire, Gelato Vero has anchored its place as a culturally inclusive and engaging place where many different kinds of people feel welcome. For many of its regular clients, Gelato Vero is a second home.

Perhaps the house’s layout has something to do with that feeling. Gelato Vero comes in three parts; inside, outside tables on the street, and upstairs. The three sections are very different and the preferences of some for one of them is a defining characteristic of some who visit regularly. Inside is often where the new visitors, families and first dates sit. The café is cramped; there are only a handful of tables and these become cluttered quickly. Outside is where the local observers reside, readers of newspapers and books and those who want conversation with whomever is available. The upstairs was once the haven for smokers and nothing was finer than savoring a cigar on the upstairs deck on a sunny afternoon watching the street go by and seeing the sun shimmer off the bay. Unfortunately, complaints by some of the public ended that pleasure for smokers and now the upstairs is a place where solitary figures read, or more likely camp on their laptops. On chilly nights heaters edge off the chill for the serious types who catch up on their work. Otherwise, the wind breezing through the canvas awnings over the upper deck are a sensation all their own.

Henry Rabinowitz ran his business daily until April, 2006 when he suddenly died of heart failure while on the job. His son Aaron runs the business now and works to expand the wholesale gelato business and take the café side forward.  Aaron seems to be as adept as his dad was and is ever developing new and uncommon flavors for his picky restrateurs. In the last few years, several new gelaterias have opened and have gained a good following. All of the newcomers have Gelato Vero Caffé to thank for their initial ease of entry into the market. The comfortable, inviting and infinitely appealing little shop that Henry Rabinowitz created in the summer of 1984 has become a signature place that defines the flavor of San Diego not only in gelati, but in coffeehouses, too.
We look forward to the years to come at Gelato Vero Caffé.

Sarah Palin was in town last month, meeting with an editor over a coming book.  A meeting took place in a quiet corner of the La Jolla Living Room and went off without a hitch.
2 A.M. outside Honey Bee Hive: Guy sits alone at an outdoor table, laptop on tabletop, websurfing and drinking from a beer can, obviously working in a time zone all his own.
3 A. M. at Mystic Mocha: Guy sits outside the coffeehouse with a guitar, picking a 12-string. Said he prefers the place when it’s closed and that it’s great for thinking up new music. No word on what the neighbors think.
Old Guard at Brickyard cloud up the courtyard with cig smoke and negativity some mornings, bellyaching about the economy, Obama, creeping socialism and everything else. One nondescript regular regularly takes down their words for a screenplay he’s working on. Turns out he needs dialogue for the “loony fringe” characters in his story.
Misspelled at Bread &Cie.; a literate observer noticed that a sign for pecan tarts was misspelledA at the famed bakery, and complained to the clerk. She asked if it mattered. He replied, “Only if you don’t want to seem like an illiterate moron.” The sign was corrected at once.
Rebecca’s was the site of a reunion of coffeehouse patrons from the famed Quel Fromagecoffeehouse which existed in Hillcrest between 1978 and 1996. There seems to be a growing group of former patrons of the much-loved coffeehouse who got connected via Facebook. One of that who attended the reunion did so via laptop; the electronic attendee was in Japan at the time. Man, did we all love the Quel…
It was her birthday. He showed up with flowers, some little gifts, a box of her fave chocolates and something in his pocket. She took the gifts graciously and smiled at him like a woman who likes the man she’s smiling at. When he had enough of that, he gave her the little box from his pocket and whispered something in her ear. She widened her eyes, took a deep breath and wept as she slipped the ring on her finger. Then she ate the chocolate at976.
A man sat outside Caffé Calabria one morning, quietly reciting verses from his Koran. At the other end of the outdoor tables sat a man with a notebook and a New Testament.  Fortunately, no one was hurt.
Older Than Dirt Man at The Other Side lip synched to Betty Boop’s recording of  “I Wanna be Loved By You” very early one morning. So surreal was this episode that YT had to go off to Caffé Calabria for coffee.
Murphy’s Law at Bassam’s: On her day off, Mary Grace came in to fill in an unexpected absence. She didn’t change before she arrived and showed up in a gossamer silk blouse. Someone hoped she wouldn’t stain it with coffee and she didn’t—she accidentally spritzed some cherry syrup on it instead, about thirty seconds later.
Guy goes to Java Jones, orders a capp and sits down to watch the eye candy traipse by. Sees a woman, follows her with his eyes onto another one, then a third until he’s mesmerized by the passing pageantry. Does not notice that his date has returned from the bathroom, unamused, with tight lips, pulsing, gritted jawbone and clenched fist and all. Some guys are just born that way.