The Prince

I like vintners with a sense of humor. When Vern and Maxine Boltz retired — he from the Oakland Fire Department, she from flying the friendly skies of United — they decided to try their hands at making wine. That’s intrepid, not necessarily funny. But in 1997 they found a sweet parcel of 160 acres above the Navarro River in the Anderson Valley of Mendocino County and started planting. ‘Go forth and multiply,’ they said to the grapes and the grapes (Pinot Noir, mostly) did just that. In 2002 they produced 400 cases for sale and Toulouse Vineyards was launched. ‘Toulouse’? Yes, they reasoned, ‘What to do we have to lose?’ Fair warning: their publicity deploys variations of that homophonic witticism early and often.

‘A nickel will get you on the subway,’ the saying goes, ‘but garlic will get you a seat.’ Garlic’s always possessed a pungent reputation — according to the explorer Robert de la Salle, the area of modern-day Chicago was so full of Allium tricoccum, our native wild garlic, that the Algonquin called it Che-ka-kou, ‘place of the smelly onions’. But it was Lucky Leif Erikson who brought the first bulbs of Allium sativum, the kind of garlic you buy at the grocery store, to the settlements of Vinland in Newfoundland and along the shores of the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. The Vikings didn’t remain chez nous, but garlic did, carving out a niche for itself as is its wont.