2009Now might be the time to take a quick look back at some of your New Year’s resolutions. Remember any of them? You should either have check marks along most, or at least be about 50% complete. Or maybe you can’t find the list, or don’t believe in resolutions anyways.

Either way, we’re pretty much done with the first half of 2009, and onto the back 26 weeks.

In the middle of this heat wave here in the valley, I begin to appreciate little things again, like water. And more water. And a beer or two – except we ran out, and need to do another Trader Joe’s run.

I didn’t help that I forgot sunscreen yesterday on our visit with Karl Wente and the Wente estates. It didn’t take long to develop a nice red layer of pop to my skin. Olive this is not. One of my favorite moments from yesterday, and there are so many, was hanging out on Karl’s front porch enjoying a bottle of Wente Riesling, overlooking the vineyards, Karl strumming his guitar. A laid back, Livermore moment I will never forget. We’ve got over 8GB of video. The most I think we’ve shot on one location. The servers are crunching the information, and Chris is helping out with some processing. So stay tuned for some more fun, behind the scenes, winery adventures courtesy of Wente.

Next week we’ll be in Sonoma at Kaz Winery in Kenwood. It will be a meet-up full of food, wine and Loreto Bay neighbors. Later in the month we’ll be back again to Sonoma for three days at the Wine Blogger’s Conference.

Don’t forget you can follow us on Twitter: @lonikaostark, @clintonstark.

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Clinton shoots videos for Stark Insider. San Francisco Bay Area arts, Ingmar Bergman and French New Wave, and chasing the perfect home espresso shot 25 seconds at a time (and failing). Peloton: ClintTheMint. Camera: Video Gear