We opened our new hospital yesterday and a monumental struggle lasting nearly four years sorta ended. There will be challenges in the new building and everyone is reporting glitches here & there but we did it. Reportedly the first new acute-care hospital built on the coast in over a generation and it’s been many years since an Oregon hospital opened and had inpatients that very first day. I was onsite 0600 on a windy and sunny morning to assist my young associate moving her post-op patient, Ms. Numero Uno, into our new digs.
By lunch I was dog-tired and dinner became some grilled shrimp, grass-fed flat-irons, and Flannery Hangers. It was a night for something special and the 1991 Old Hill was just that.
I can recall my time in the mid-90s consciously transitioning to a wine/beer only life and begin the return to wine roots I’d laid down as a teenager in NYC twenty years earlier. An old wine mentor from Chans’ on Pensacola Beach knew I was a Ridge fan and suggested Ravenswood, known only to me as a grocery store Merlot. Well, I expanded my knowledge and became a big fan enjoying well more than 100 bottles of different Ravenswood wines over the past 20+ years. I don’t think I have any more cellared but could be wrong. If this 91 Old Hill was the last it was glorious, all you could want and hope for. Lively and nervy, resolved and elegant, just a lovely drop. I think it will be Once & Future going forward rather than back-filling, and of course there’s Bedrock. I once told Chris I’d owned 80 Bottles of Bedrock before I ever uncorked one but I knew, on the inside, that Bedrock would be for me.
About 12 years ago, during our zinfandel stage, we signed up for a “wine blending class” at Ravenswood. We showed up to find out the other couples had cancelled, and it was just us - and Bob - a very kind fellow with a moustache, who taught the class.
Bob took barrel samples and showed us how to combine zin with (I think) petite syrah, and find the % we liked best. Then we bottled a little of our mix to take home.
Great fun and prescient too. For the past few years we grow our own Syrah and Grenache, make the wine, and decide on blending % before bottling.
Congrats Doc! That’s a huge endeavor. I have been fortunate to be a part of large hospital expansions and new ambulatory centers but never a new hospital. Cheers!
My prior experience had been living thru large remodels and watching new ERs get built. This is a brand new almost 65K sq ft CAH. Our ER now is ten times the size of our old ER. The old hospital was nearly seventy, a product of the Hill-Burton Act of 1946.
Bloody Italians always pushing to the front of the queue. I should have known it would be the Uno family. They always think they should come first. I can’t repeat what the Ultimo family said about them of them.
Congratulations, Glenn. That was a great read; thank you for sharing it! 1991 was a great year for Zinfandel producers, especially those whose name started with a “R”.
The first wines I remember seeking out in Med school were old Ravenswood SVD zins. I bought a few 91,93,94,97 in 2005 and these were really the first “vintage” wines I remember having. That was a long time ago in my wine evolution but I, like you, have become a huge fan of both Bedrock and Once&Future.