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TheRagens Wine Tastings
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TheRagens Newsletter
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New Photographs | |
Bookmarks - Booklists | |
Wine Tasting | |
Web Sites Worth Visiting |
One of my photographs won a Photo of the Day Award at the Digital Photo Contest website! My photograph, which I called Misty Mountain Air, was taken on the North Cascades highway on my way to a day of visiting some of the bald eagle fishing sites on the upper Skagit River. I thought that there was some impact to this picture and I'm glad that at least a few other people did too! With this image, I feel that I'm starting to make some headway in taking noteworthy photographs that are more than just 'record' shots of time and place.
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I don't have many new photographs this time around -- instead, I focused on updating the basic navigation structure on my photography pages. In order to focus visitors on my better photographs (at least, in my opinion), I archived some of the lesser photographs. I'll keep this split structure for a while before I remove some of those photographs from the site.
With all of the end of year magazines having just come out, I decided it would be interesting to add some new book lists to my web site -- specifically, the holiday book guides and other selections from the best of the photography magazines. I've started with the last few years' selections from Outdoor Photographer magazine and will be adding lists more over the next few weeks.
Outdoor Photographer's Holiday Book Guide - 2004 | |
Outdoor Photographer's Holiday Book Guide - 2003 | |
Outdoor Photographer's Holiday Book Guide - 2001 | |
Outdoor Photographer's Holiday Book Guide - 2000 |
Featured Book
Noble Rot: A Bordeaux Wine Revolution Bordeaux has long epitomized fine wine. After the 1855 classification was put into place, the French reverence for tradition settled in. Fortunately, over the last 2-3 decades, some revolutionary "garagistes" (winemakers who work on smaller lots) have begun using new growing and wine-making techniques to to make extraordinary wines. There is considerable controversy in this modernist approach and this book makes the most of it. In fact, this book was temporarily pulled from bookstores due to a challenge by the old owners of Chateau d'Yquem. Wine lovers will come away from this lively account with a sense of how globalization and economics have created ferment and growth in ancient Bordeaux. |
Our vineyard has gone into winter dormancy. At some point in the next month or two, I'll prune the vines to prepare for the 2005 growing season. The goal is to get enough fruit to make a gallon or two of wine, maybe...
Speaking of wine, a few weeks ago, we pulled the corks on a couple of bottles of 1998 Domain Drouhin (Oregon) pinot noir. What a lovely wine - powerful, intense, but smooth and with quite a bit of fruit remaining. Really quite nice and a shame that I only have one bottle left.
With the Sumatra tsunami completely fresh in memory,
it seems appropriate to focus on charitable sites for this month. Two
organizations worth supporting are:
Please help out those in need. Thank you... |
2005 Index | Newsletter Index | ||||||||||||
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