Pinot Rocks: A Winding Journey through Intense Elegance

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Copyright © 2020 Michael Browne

All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-5445-1500-7

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To my wife, Sarah

Logan, Lauren, Lyvia

S.

L.L.L.

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Contents

1. Childhood

2. Kid Work

3. Life Is a Circus

4. L.A.

5. Finding Wine

6. The Kosta Browne Story

7. The Business Model

8. Storytelling, Tastings, and Connecting with People

9. The Naysayers

10. A Bit About the Wine Business

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Chapter 1

1. Childhood

My dad was originally from Boston, my mom from Utah, but they both wound up in the Bay Area, which is where they met. My dad went to San Jose State for undergrad and then got his master’s in entomology at Berkeley. My father enjoyed his time in San Francisco, but grew tired of city life; he spent his summers as a child with his brother George in Humboldt County and really enjoyed that. So when I was four, we moved to the small town of Wenatchee in Washington State, where my dad got a job as a research scientist at Washington State University’s Tree Fruit Research Center. That’s where I grew up.

I had a tough upbringing in some respects. My mom was brilliant, but she was also troubled in some areas of her life. This was before there was much understanding of what her condition was or how to treat or help her. It was difficult to live with her. Although she was very loving, she had her own battles to deal with.

When I was a little kid, she would always ask me if someone had been in our house. She thought someone was making a mess in my room, and she acted very paranoid. One time I couldn’t tell her who had been in our house—because to my knowledge, no one had been in it—and she poured a bowl of milk on my head because she thought I was lying to her. I was confused and afraid a lot. I had no idea what my mom was talking about, or what I could do to make things better.

My parents had an interesting, tumultuous relationship. They fought frequently. It seemed they were always yelling. I remember one time, lying in bed listening to an intense fight, and I felt like I couldn’t take it anymore. I went upstairs and told the two of them to shut up. I did not know what else to do. I was eight years old.

I didn’t know how to deal with that. I just wanted a peaceful home, and I didn’t understand what was going on. It was stressful, it was tough, and I didn’t have anyone to go to who could help me understand and deal with this.

I would isolate myself, unknowingly, and look at other families that seemed normal, not understanding why we were different. It was a tough time. I had a hard time navigating friendships and other relationships. I think that was based on my fear; I didn’t want people to see my mom as she was because I had no idea how to explain it, or her, or what my house was like.

I can see now as an adult how alone I was, especially with school. They were not involved in my school activities too much, whether it was show your art day or anything like that. It was not that they were not involved, they just had their own things going on and they were doing the best they could.

I look back on this now and it seems almost unreal. I had no idea how crazy things were at the time. You don’t really know any different when you’re a kid.

Even though the fighting was awful between my parents, they never fought with me or my sister. My dad was very active in our lives, outside of school. He took us hunting, fishing, and to gun clubs. He was an active participant in that part of our lives. My mom was more of an observer.

I think because she was having such a hard time navigating her world, my mom began spinning out of control. She left us when I was in fifth grade (ten years old), and moved back to San Mateo, California, with her mother. From that point forward, I didn’t really have an active mother in my life until my father got remarried when I was fourteen.

That was so hard. My friends would say, Ask your mom if you can come over to play. I would say, I have to ask my dad, and he’s not home yet. They didn’t get it. Why can’t you just ask your mom and play now? They didn’t get it, and I had a hard time saying that my mom wasn’t around.

With that said, it was a relief that she was in a different state. It relaxed our household, and I didn’t have to deal with the fighting and unpredictability of her being around.

A friend came over one day; he was walking down my street, crying, just after my parents got divorced. I asked him what was wrong. He was devastated that his parents got divorced. And I told him I was so relieved that my parents got divorced, and I was excited about it. I didn’t know any different; I was excited about this reprieve from those stressful times. And I realized further that my situation was just not normal, which only added to my lack of confidence and my confusion.

My dad was an introvert, and he didn’t know how to handle the heartbreak. He shut down. I invited him to go out with me on many occasions, but he frequently declined. He was still there for me, and he was still a good dad, but looking back, he was obviously depressed. I can’t blame him. It must have been very hard to deal with.

For a while, he became more lax in his parenting and wasn’t motivated to do much. Looking back now, he was under a lot of pressure to raise two kids as a single father. I can remember more than a few times, I asked him to throw the ball around. He would decline, and I would throw the ball against the house by myself. That happened a lot after Mom left. I felt very alone and didn’t have a lot of direction in life at that point. I was left to my own devices to navigate a lot of my world as a kid. Since my dad did the same when he was a kid, and grew up in a time when you could wander the streets of San Francisco, I guess he thought that was the way kids operated. He wasn’t necessarily inattentive; he was responsible, but he was just not that active in some parts of our lives. I did enjoy the freedom, though.

I was sad for him because I saw the sadness within him. He was a loving dad and did the best he could, but those times were very hard on him, and he was just trying to do what he had to do in order to provide a stable home for the two of us, which he did.

My dad came around after a while, and it was a relief when we started to do some of the fun things we used to do. He was a stable presence in my life.

For activities, we gravitated toward what he was interested in, which was mainly outdoor activities like hunting, fishing, and camping, which I also liked. Those times were enjoyable. I still enjoy those activities and feel grateful that we had those times together and that I learned so much from him.

However, his guidance didn’t stop me from making a lot of foolish decisions in my adolescence.

Playing with Fire

My dad and I were into muzzleloader rifles and guns. We attended primitive rendezvous, where people wore buckskins, hung out in teepees, and rode horses. Very cool for a kid.

There were shooting competitions at these rendezvous. My dad had cut down a 50-caliber rifle for me, and I used it in children’s competitions. He always instructed me to use no more than fifty grains of gunpowder (fifty grains is about a medium measurement of powder, and I could get a good thirty-five-yard shot with it).

The memory of this one shooting competition is still vivid in my mind. I had a special powder horn that my dad had made for me, which I still have to this day. It was a cow horn with an intricate scrimshaw of an eagle on it. It had a tiny point on it that would open the powder-measuring device and measure the quantity. I measured out fifty grains. Then my young mind thought, if fifty grains is good, wouldn’t 150 be better? I had experimented with about seventy-five to a hundred grains before, so why not increase that amount?

My dad had warned me that too much powder could blow up the gun, but I wanted to see what would happen with 150.

In the third round of the competition, I loaded 150 grains into my rifle. Boom! The sound was deafening. Everyone was looking around, trying to find the source of the explosion. All they saw was a cloud of smoke and no one there, because it blew me back a few feet.

My dad came over, looked at me, and said, I told you, only fifty grains. Don’t ever do that again. Now you see what can happen—you got lucky.

Not sure what I learned from that, because I made some more dumb mistakes with things that explode.

In another shooting competition, I won a spool of cannon fuse.

My dad was cool with it, but he told me, Just make sure you don’t break it, because if you break it, then you light it, it will probably go out in the middle, and then you have to be really careful because you have to track it for a relight.

I decided I wanted to test this theory one afternoon when I was home alone to see if it stopped. I decided I would crack it after a foot, and if it didn’t stop, I’d just put it out with water. What could go wrong?

I cracked the coil, and the fuse grew just like the one in the intro to Mission Impossible. The flame didn’t stop after the break.

I panicked.

Now I had an actual Mission Impossible situation to deal with.

Now it was time for plan B. I put the coil underneath the faucet and turned the water on. To my horror, the water spread the flame instead of extinguishing and ignited the entire coil in one big flash.

Mind you, cannon fuse is loaded with gunpowder, so it is highly volatile. It quickly started burning my hand, so I freaked out and reacted by throwing the coil onto the carpet.

The fuse broke apart as I threw it and landed on the carpet in a dozen or more semicircles. The flames kept going and burned our 1970s polyester carpet. My hand was scorched and covered in huge blisters. It was a total disaster. I couldn’t hide this one.

I didn’t know what else to do at that point, so I called my dad. I told him I had the coil in my hand while something was cooking on the stove. Somehow, the red-hot burner ignited the coil.

He believed me, and I didn’t get in trouble. But I still hadn’t learned my lesson.

I grew up in what I thought was a very good neighborhood. I had a lot of friends in the houses surrounding me, and five of us were named Mike. Our parents numbered us to keep track. I was Mike Number Three. I can still hear my dad calling out, Mike Three, time for dinner!

Three out of the Five Mikes were good friends, and I was one of them. We ran around apple orchards, climbed cherry trees, walked around our town and neighborhood, and spent a lot of time outdoors. One day, Mike One and I were messing around and bored, and I asked him if he wanted to light some black powder. He had no idea what that was. In the garage, we had this cabinet full of black powder (for our muzzleloader rifles), so I found a small plastic cocktail cup and filled it up.

There was a lot of powder in there, but as far as I knew, black powder was just for show and flash. I didn’t think we could do much damage. I put a bunch of buckshot in the cup for extra effect.

Another Mike, Mike Four, who we didn’t really hang out with, lived next door to me. We didn’t like him much at that time because he was a bit older, big, and used his size to beat us at basketball and other neighborhood games. I remember his parents were anal about cleanliness. They never let any of us in their house, and we didn’t see them very often.

So there we were, in the middle of our street in our subdivision at three thirty in the afternoon, trying to ignite black powder in a cup. We didn’t have a fuse, since I burned it up on a previous occasion, so we were just flicking matches at it. Just then, Mike