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Bottle Shock

Lance Sparks

In the golden years of my youth (ages 8-11), our family was transferred by the U.S. Navy to Rabat, Morocco. My mother blithely enrolled me in a French-run school. I made some friends. My closest bud was Pierrot; his dad was a sergeant in the French Air Force, his mother Bedouin. Pierrot periodically invited me to lunch at his house.

Craft Vinting

Kaitlin Anderson

Indie vintner Mark Nicholl started his own label for an elegantly simple reason: He wanted the freedom to make wines that he loved, whether that’s a dry riesling or a Müller-Thurgau white.

En Vin Air

Kevin Piaskowski

Living as a landscape painter in a geographically diverse state such as Oregon is like being a kid in a candy store. Between the coast, mountains, deserts, the gorge, old-growth forests and the rolling hills of vineyards, the Beaver State is an artist’s paradise.

Mulling the Microbe

Amy Schneider

Say hello to a winemaker’s little friend. For thousands of years, yeast has graced us with its ability to turn grape juice into wine. Wine lovers owe a debt of gratitude to one species in particular, known to professionals as Saccharomyces cerevisiae.

Vintage Vineyard

Rachael Carnes

Old School Vineyard’s 21 acres are tended by one full-time human employee, grower Stephen Hagen, and a crew of four-legged colleagues, including a team of Belgian draft horses, Ike and Olivia, who help Hagen cultivate under vine rows, till the soil and drill cover crops with precision and accuracy.

Women in Wine

William Kennedy

The Oregon wine industry is a driving economic force, particularly in Lane County. Statewide, the wine business employed approximately 14,000 people in 2010: everyone from winery managers to vintners, from servers in tasting rooms to those tending the vineyards.

Letters to the Editor: 5-9-2013

NO, YES, ONE TERM

Having just read the city of Eugene Voters’ Pamphlet, here are my opinions.

Reading Comprehension Fail

Dan Savage

I’m a 24-year-old straight, married female. I have been religiously reading your column in the Portland Mercury since I was 16. Thank you for explaining things that my parents wouldn’t and for helping me clear the hurdles of adolescence!

Arts Hound

Alex Notman

Sniffing out what you shouldn’t miss in the arts this week

Shifting the Landscape

Bronwynn Dean

With the recent influx of new businesses to downtown Springfield, the town is on its way to becoming a destination for culture, or more of a Shelbyville, if you will. And the Second Friday Art Walk, a partnership between the Eugene Storefront Art Project (ESAP), NEDCO and downtown merchants, is central to attracting a more diverse crowd to the Main Street blocks.

Enter Room 237

Alex Notman

Stanley Kubrick created The Shining to exorcise his guilt for helping fake the 1969 Apollo moon landing, to represent the genocide of Native Americans or to retell the Greek myth Theseus and the Minotaur.

Upgrading Eugene’s Old Schools

Ted Taylor

Eugene’s School District 4J has many school buildings that date to the post-war era of the 1940s and ’50s and some elementary schools have 40 doors to the outside, a security concern. Most of these cheaply built older schools would not stand in a major earthquake and some, like River Road Elementary, have such inadequate ventilation that teachers sometimes evacuate their students when air quality monitors warn of bad air.

Endorsements: 2013 May Special Election

Ballots are in the mail for the May Special Election in Oregon. Ballots can be mailed until approximately Thursday, May 16. After that they can be dropped off until 8 pm Tuesday, May 21, at any white ballot box around town or at Lane County Elections offices at 10th and Lincoln. Here are our endorsements on selected local issues and contested races. More information can be found in our election coverage this issue and past issues, in the Voters Pamphlet and on various websites.

Arts Hound

Alex Notman

Sniffing out what you shouldn’t miss in the arts this week

City Service Fee Examined

Shannon Finnell

Opponents of the city service fee on Eugene’s May ballot say it is a poor budgetary path for a laundry list of reasons: Its proceeds can fund a wide swath of expenditures or even be held in reserves; it’s unfair to poor people just above the low-income cut-off; it’s unfair to small businesses; it will charge a struggling nonprofit just as much as a Walmart; and EWEB’s board could vote not to collect it, leaving the city in a bind. Five out of eight Eugene city councilors oppose the fee.

It's About Time - May 2013

David Wagner

This truly is Wildflower Month, as the majority of our valley native plants achieve their peak of bloom in May. The blue camas is at its peak early in May. People driving  south should keep an eye out for the ivory colored camas that is found along the freeway from Sutherlin to Riddle. Its ivory petal color is different from the pure white of albino forms of the related blue species.

Taxing Public Safety

Camilla Mortensen

If you’ve read the newspapers or watched the news lately, then you know that the Lane County Jail has been setting criminals and accused criminals free early for months now due to lack of funds. However, for opponents of Measure 20-213 on the May 21 ballot, the fact that the tax funds only jail beds — not increased patrols in rural areas, victims’ services or other aspects of public safety and rehabilitating criminals — means it’s not worth the $85 a year the average homeowner in Lane County will pay because it doesn’t solve the problem of public safety.

Write Because You Love Writing

Camilla Mortensen

Wikipedia is not a valid source when you’re writing academic papers, or newspaper articles, but it is a source of controversy when it comes to women writers. Recently author Amanda Filipacchi was on Wikipedia when she noticed the category “American Novelists” was losing the women that had been listed on it. The women were being moved to a subcategory, “American Women Novelists,” as if they were a genre, like crime fiction, not writers on par with men.

County Could Recover Mers Fees

Shannon Finnell

An April 23 Lane County Board of Commissioners meeting explored but did not go forward with the possibility of recovering lost filing fees from the Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems (MERS), a private company that tracks servicing rights and ownership of mortgage loans for big banks. Multnomah County is suing MERS and 18 co-defendants for $38 million, saying that it wreaked havoc on the public property records system and denied the county of required transaction fees.

County Land Sold, Coast Folks Irked

Camilla Mortensen

West Lane County residents often feel a little shortchanged by the Lane County Commission. They pay taxes to the county but say that they get less public safety and other benefits. A recent county vote to sell land near Ada Park, which is on the shore of Siltcoos Lake near the Oregon Coast, to a logging company has some West Lane residents even more upset over county politics.

County Votes Against Anti-Mining Effort

Camilla Mortensen

The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife killed sea lion number CO22 (or as activist group Sea Shepherd dubbed him, Brian) April 16, for eating too many salmon, but conservationists say that it’s suction dredge mining, sucking up riverbeds in giant vacuums, that poses a bigger threat to Oregon’s rivers and their fish.

Dalai Lama Events

A series of community events are being planned to celebrate the upcoming visit to Eugene by the Dalai Lama May 10 and to raise funds for the creation of the Palmo International Peace Center.

High Noon March For Cannabis

Nick Poust

Marijuana is legal in Washington and Colorado, and it should be in Oregon, too. That’s the goal of the upcoming Global Cannabis March to be held at high noon on Saturday, May 4, in downtown Eugene’s Free Speech Plaza. Eugene is one of 235 cities participating worldwide, and it joins Portland and Medford in a localized effort to pass legislation. 

Homeless Hope For Good Camping

Shannon Finnell

The Eugene City Council voted 7-0 April 24 to draft an ordinance to lift the city’s ban on camping in undeveloped city properties for 120 days. Local homeless people and their advocates say that the experiment could go well if measures such as sanitation and safety are taken into consideration.

Pollution Update 5-2-13

Doug Quirke

Oregon Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) sent Eugene-based Bennett’s Drain Savers a pre-enforcement notice on March 29 for performing sewage disposal services without a current license 697 times between Nov. 16, 2009, and March 6, 2013. DEQ sent Goshen Forest Products a warning letter on April 15 for failing to submit a 2011-2012 industrial stormwater monitoring report.