Loss of the Geology Samples

One of my friends Mario had given me some advice ahead of the development phase. He turned out to be right. While the earth is opened, just after the “ripping” phase, he said, there will be a plethora of interesting rocks and geology that you’ll be able to find. This window closes quickly though, the ground gets sealed back up & cover crop seals everything back up, never to be seen again. It was just as he described, right after the dozers started pulling the 24” wing shanks through the meadows, it all started popping up. I quickly ran down to the Steve’s hardware in St. Helena and bought a stack of a dozen 5-gallon paint buckets. There were so many diverse and interesting rocks that I wore myself out for days walking around and collecting them. Many were bordering on semi-precious with their wild coloration. I couldn’t believe all the interesting parent material existed here to make up the soil composition. It was exactly as the Paul Anamosa had described it to me years before, as though someone had scraped all the leftovers off the plate here at the top of the mountain. There were deep purple stones, red sandstones, midnight blue rocks of incredible hardness, jade green samples, black glass onyx, white quartz, granites, even some bits of wild mint green serpentine & shale that crumbled under light pressure. I eagerly collected it all and looked forward to someday studying further with a geologist and telling the complete story of the geology of the site.

Under my favorite oak trees on the property, I stacked the buckets of stone samples and figured would someday later sort them out. They buckets were near a giant mount of stones which had been fished out of block 4 by an excavator with something called a skeleton bucket. It was like a giant sieve for separating stones from the soil. Later the stones were indiscriminately thrown into the pile with the other stones and re-buried into the hillside as that pile of stones were used to build up a flat bench for parking farm equipment. It was an honest mistake that happened while I was away by an arborist hired to work on revitalizing some of the fire damaged oaks. He saw the buckets and they filled an immediate need, so he threw the stones into the giant pile nearby which was soon after buried. Now the secret of what all is within the blocks is something that will remain a secret. It would have been a pleasure to share with you all the special specimens that are hidden underground. Each one could have painted a thousand words about the special nature of these vineyard blocks. To understand it even partially, I suppose you’ll have to taste the wine.