As the head gardener at UCSC’s Alan Chadwick Garden, Orin Martin knows plenty about fruit trees. He’ll bring the knowledge at a workshop Saturday. Photo by Chip Scheuer.
Fruit trees are glories of the botanical world, producing fragrant blossoms in spring and luscious fruit in late summer. There's very little that Orin Martin—head gardener at the UCSC Alan Chadwick Garden—doesn't know about selecting trees, preparing the soil, finessing proper irrigation, controlling pests and pruning like a surgeon. Martin will be sharing his considerable knowledge about the subject at the workshop Fruit Trees 101: Basic Fruit Tree Care this coming Sat., Jan. 25 from 10am to 1pm at the UCSC Farm. The workshop is priced at $30 for general public ($40 at the door, and $20 for Friends of the UCSC Farm and Garden). Prepare to walk around, bring a snack if you like and learn a lot about successful fruit tree care and maintenance. For more details, call (831) 458-3240 or email casfs@ucsc.edu.
Venus on the Westside: Fans of the new, the old and the very artisanal will want to stay poised to peek in at Venus Spiritssometime this spring. That's when Sean Venus, a veteran of food business development at Gordon Biersch, hopes to have his distillery up and running. You heard me, Venus plans to offer tastings of his new high proof creations at the tasting room located at 427A Swift Street. “We should be making product in March,” the distiller told the Santa Cruz Weekly. “We will first be releasing our gin and blue agave spirits. Our small barrel aged product should be released sometime in the fall.” Eventually, the tasting room will include fine aged whiskey in the production mix, and right now slabs are being poured for the actual production area. Imagine a botanically complex Santa Cruz-made gin in your martinis next summer!
Wine Tips: Lately we've revived our passion for the Quinta Cruz line of intriguing wines made by Jeff Emery, whose flagship label—Santa Cruz Mountain Vineyard—delivers some of the top wines of our region. The Quinta Cruz wines were inspired by several trips Emery made to Portugal, and soon the crafty winemaker began sourcing locally grown grapes that push the oenological envelope way past pinot. Now available at the tasting room (Emery is one of the Surf City Vintners who work their sorcery in the flourishing Ingalls Street complex), Quinta Cruz' delightfully crisp, fragrant Verdelho offers as much substance as any white wine can deliver. But it's the 2011 Tempranillo ($18) that currently adorns our dinner table. A large, generous wine, it opens into different flavor territory than its Spanish versions. This wine offers strawberry topnotes, a mid-bandwidth of spice and even citrus, and a long, lower register of plums. It can handle every food that isn't shellfish. In fact, it proved outstanding with a take-out order of barbecue pork spareribs from Gayle's Rosticceria, which themselves absolutely blew us away—moist, juicy, loaded with meatiness and thick, assertive sauce. I refused to share my portion, even though I profess not to be a ribs person. The following week I sampled another two-fisted take-out dish—classic, flawless, utterly satisfying chile con carne—from Gayle's. I just hadn't expected such heartland flair with meat dishes from an establishment whose reputation was originally built on consummate sweets. Believe it or not, the last two visits to Gayle's (well, the time before last) I sailed right by the cakes, cookies and pies and made straight for the grilled sausages and peppers. Last time I couldn't make it past the apple and cream cheese Danish, though. So I surrendered. With Verve coffee. An offer I couldn’t refuse.
