Spring Quarter

Week One is already over. Only nine more to go before finals and then SUMMER!! It's too bad I'm taking classes summer quarter.
Anywho, week one was pretty uneventful, hence the lack of posts. Monday was the intro to the class and the getting of the keys. Wednesday was a holiday, thank you Cesar Chavez. And today we had precedent study presentation for two hours and then my prof had to leave early to attend his daughter's wedding rehearsal/rehearsal dinner. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
The project for this quarter is a winery at one of three sites (we get to choose). We have a pretty open program. We get to choose what kind of people we want to design for, how big the winery is, etc. It'll be interesting. I'm a bit worried because my prof seems REALLY laid back and I'm not sure I'll be able to motivate myself enough. I'm really excited to learn about wine, wine making, and wineries though.

My precedent study is on the Stag's Leap Wine Cellars (not to be confused with the Stags' Leap Winery) in the Napa Valley. I found it at the top of a Top 10 Wineries in the U.S. list, and when I first saw it I wasn't that impressed. However, I kept searching and didn't find much else that I liked and the more I thought back to it, the more I liked it. I also found out that this winery's Cabernet Sauvignon won the red wine taste test at the famous 1976 Paris tasting that pitted French wines against California wines and brought California wine making to the world stage. The movie "Bottle Shock" is about this birth of this taste test and centers around the winery that won for the white wine category with their Chardonnay, Chateau Montelena, another Napa Valley winery. I just thought that was cool.
My prof wanted a slide show for today, but a 20 x 20 board for Monday, so I'll just post that rather than individual slides. More to come!