"Stoner Cellars"? What's that?

Okay, good question. The short answer is that it's the name of my dream winery, and it covers all of my wine- and beer-related activities. The longer answer may be more wide-ranging.

About 10 years ago, while daydreaming at the office about what I'd do second if I won the lottery (first would be to quit my job, of course), I thought about how much fun it would be to own a winery. (That was before I realized that running a vineyard and winery starts with being a full-time farmer, and then you add the winemaking part. I suppose that if the lottery win were big enough, I could own the winery and hire someone to be the vineyard manager, but that doesn't sound quite so romantic, although certainly less tiring.) My winery would need a name, and as "Wines 'R' Us" just didn't have the cachet I was looking for, I eventually settled on Stoner Cellars.

A couple of years later, I started making beer at a now-defunct Charlottesville brew-on-premises operation, and decided that I needed to put a label onto bottles that I gave to others. I thought of the one I have for the fantasy winery, and since "cellaring" is an appropriate activity for at least some beers, I figured the name would work well for my brewing adventures, too. (And the win-the-lottery dream changed from running a winery to running a brewpub, where I was the head brewer.)

I've now started a wine-related hobby business: doing winetastings in people's homes. It seemed appropriate to use the name of my fantasy winery for the name of the business. And if I finally get a wine consulting business going, I'll already have the name and business cards.

If you'd prefer to think more metaphorically, then you can look at the nuggets being revealed here as coming from the dark and dusty, and possibly empty, underground recesses of my mind. Truly, cellars not meant to be entered into blindly. On the other hand, perhaps these cellars are merely holes in the ground, from which I can barely distinguish my elbow. I dunno: I just write 'em.