Music I'm Listening To: The San Francisco and Santa Rosa Symphonies

I attended the Santa Rosa Symphony concert last night (November 8 2025) at the Green Music Center. On the program was Clarice Assad's Baião ‘N’ Blues, Joaquin Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez for Guitar and Orchestra, and Manuel de Falla's El Sombrero de Tres Picos [The Three-Cornered Hat]. The soloist in the Concerto was Raphaël Feuillâtre (Guitar). The vocalist in the Three-cornered Hat was mezzo-soprano Leah Finn.

It was a very impressive performance by the symphony, I thought – among the best I've seen. Feuillâtre was impressive in the concerto as well and he wowed the crowd with an exciting encore. Tickets are probably still available for the Monday night performance. 

In San Francisco, the night before, I heard the San Francisco Symphony at Davies Symphony Hall. French pianist Alexandre Kantorow made his debut with the Symphony (in concerts on November 7, 8, and 9) playing Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto. Karina Canellakis conducted.

Plants I'm growing (and rain): Last peppers of the year

Winter approaches. Yesterday I picked what will likely be the last of the peppers from the garden this year – shishito, jalapeño, and poblano peppers. That said, winters are mild here. Yesterday I also planted two kinds of spinach, three kinds of lettuce, arugula, mustard greens, and mini turnips. Obligingly the skies dropped 1.30 inches of rain overnight. That brings the total so far in the 2025-2026 rain year to about 3.20 inches at my location.

Miscellaneous: The Warbling White-eye

You learn something new every day, they say. It seems to be so. Today I learned that the Japanese bird pictured here, known in Japanese as a "Mejiro" ("white-eye"), is not the "Japanese White-eye" I've been calling it. That name appears to have been superseded. Apparently there was a species split in 2018 I was unaware of. The bird common in Japan (along with a number of  subsepecies with ranges further south) is now properly known as  "Warbling White-eye" (still Zosterops japonicus). Closely related birds that were previously considered con-specific (along with a group of other subspecies) are "Swinhoe's White-eye" (Zosterops simplex). 

Books I'm Reading: The Joy of X – A Guided Tour of Math, from One to Infinity

I picked up The Joy of X (Marriner Books, 2013) at Haneda Airport in Tokyo on my way back to the US after my stay in Japan in September. I chose it because it's a collection of essays that can be read in any order, although they are arranged so that, read in sequence, they take the reader on a trip through mathematics, starting with simple arithmetic and progressing through geometry, trigonometry, and calculus with side trips to explore various other kinds of math, ending with thoughts on the idea of infinity. On airplanes, I like something that can be read in bursts. The essays were originally published in a series in The New York Times. 

This was for the most part a quick, entertaining read. Most of the essays were easy to follow and engagingly written. A few of the later ones were more difficult, but that is more a reflection on me than on the book. I found the discussions of prime numbers and infinity of particular interest. Worth the time. 

Wines I'm Making: Pressing the 2025 Cabernet

It's that time of year. Today I pressed our 2025 Cabernet Sauvignon/Cabernet Franc. This year, we harvested no Sangiovese at all, so we won't be making any rosé, but 104 pounds of Cabernet grapes yielded 8.5 gallons of newly pressed wine. 

After a day of rest, I'll inoculate the new wine with starter to initiate a secondary (malolactic) fermentation, which converts some of the sharp malic acid in the wine into lactic acid, considerably softening it. Malolactic fermentation takes a month or two. The wine will be resting in a warm place in the house for that amount of time. 

Sometime around the middle of December, I'll rack the wine off the lees, lightly sulfite it, and add oak staves. Then the wine will rest until it's time to rack it again, in March or April. It will continue to rest through the summer until about this time next year, when it will get a final racking before it's bottled. Also today I sanitized bottles for the 2024 Cabernet, which I plan to bottle tomorrow. 

Art I'm Making: Art Trails 2025

Today, Sunday, October 19* is the last day of the Art Trails 2025 open studios event. The weather's fine. A great day for visits to local artists. 

Here's a recent collage: Untitled Collage No. 313 (Santa Rosa). June 9, 2025. Acrylic on paper, acrylic monotype, fabric (book cover fragment), collage. Image size 27.0cm x 18.8cm (10.6in x 7.4in). Matted to 20 x 16 inches. Signed on the mat. Signed and dated on the reverse. 

Today is your chance to come see this and other work in person, but, for more of my abstract monotype collage work, visit my website at http://ctalcroft.wix.com/collage-site/ or you can purchase my recently published book commemorating ten years of working in the collage medium – Colin Talcroft: Abstract Monotype Collage: 2103–2023 (ISBN 979-8-218-37717-5). Available on the website.

Elsewhere, my work can be seen at Calabi Gallery in Santa Rosa, Hammerfriar Gallery in Healdsburg, and at the Ren Brown Collection in Bodega Bay or in my studio by appointment. Sadly, however, Calabi Gallery is closing (although it will maintain an online presence)– a great loss for Santa Rosa and Sonoma County. Note also that the Ren Brown collection is closed through the end of next week as Ren is in Japan at the moment.

*Originally published on Facebook a couple of days ago

Miscellaneous: Local Birds

I took a walk around Spring Lake, in Santa Rosa, today for the first time in quite a while. It's a bit late for migrants passing through and a bit early for overwintering birds to be here in force, but it's always a pleasant walk and I did see some local regulars. In particular, I get some good shots of a male Common Yellowthroat, which, while not an uncommon bird, is one that's rather secretive and difficult to photograph. I also got a shot of a Ruby-crowned Kinglet showing its ruby crown – which is rather rare. 

Miscellaneous: Canned fish revolution?

I've noticed that there is something of a design revolution going on in the world of canned fish. A strange thing to notice, perhaps, but I have noticed it. In my experience, canned fish (outside of the world of canned tuna), whether it be sardines, anchovies, mackerel, or something more exotic, has usually been marketed in cans designed to suggest European tradition; can designs have typically been ornate and old-fashioned. 

Recently, however, the industry appears to have decided that a more modern look is in order – and it's not just one company, but several. Here are some examples from Oliver's, one of our local supermarkets (which, by the way, far outshines Whole Foods now in the quality and variety of its offerings, particularly in the produce department).

Art I'm Making: Untitled Collage No. 312 (Santa Rosa)

Here's a collage from earlier this summer, Untitled Collage No. 312 (Santa Rosa). Completed June 9, 2025. Acrylic on paper, acrylic monotype, collage. Image size: 13.2cm x 16.3cm (5.2in x 6.4in). Matted to 11in x 14in. Signed on the mat. Signed and dated on the reverse. 

For more of my abstract monotype collage work, visit my website at http://ctalcroft.wix.com/collage-site/ or you can purchase my recently published book commemorating ten years of working in the collage medium – Colin Talcroft: Abstract Monotype Collage: 2103–2023 (ISBN 979-8-218-37717-5). Available on the website.

In person, my work can be seen at Calabi Gallery in Santa Rosa, Hammerfriar Gallery in Healdsburg, and at the Ren Brown Collection in Bodega Bay or in my studio by appointment. Sadly, however, Calabi Gallery is closing (although it will maintain an online presence)– a great loss for Santa Rosa and Sonoma County. 

Books I'm reading: Simon Winchester's "Knowing What We Know"

In his Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge from Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic (Harper Perennial, 2024), Simon Winchester guides us with his usual skill (blending biography, intellectual history, and anecdote in lucid prose) through a broad and complex topic – human knowledge and the transmission of that knowledge – with a focus on a central question: How have we come to know what we know?

He sets out to explore the means by which knowledge (in the broadest sense) has been passed from generation to generation, covering everything from the earliest oral traditions and the emergence of writing to Wikipedia and AI language models. The digressions are many and always interesting, but sometimes the subject seems too big for a single volume. 

What emerges is a recurring concern with the vulnerability of knowledge – throughout history (for example, the risk of fire destroying an ancient library), but particularly in an age of information overload based on digital storage, and he ends the book with musings about the ease with which information about virtually anything is available today with the push of a button or a spoken request directed at a handheld device. He sounds a bit nostalgic about hard-won knowledge, relating a story about navigating on the open sea before GPS systems became available and I have long wondered how London cabbies must feel about GPS navigation considering the time and effort they have traditionally had to put into acquiring "the knowledge" (referring to map-perfect memorization of the streets of London). He never really answers the question of whether this availability of knowledge represents a loss or if we should see it as freeing our minds for other things, and so the end of the book left me hanging a little, but engaging storytelling throughout the book made it very much worth the time it took to read. From Winchester, I would have expected nothing less. 

Wines I'm Making: 2025 Cabernet Sauvignon/Cabernet Franc

I was away the entire month of September, which made it impossible to monitor the vineyard at a fairly critical time – the period during which the critters have decided the grapes on the vines, even if not fully ripe, are ripe enough to eat. Despite being fully netted and an electric fence around the perimeter, something, probably raccoons, managed to get inside and completely stripped one of our two rows of vines of fruit. Zero fruit. Two vines at the front door, with no protections, were completely stripped as well. Had I been here, I might have prevented some of the damage. The second row was intact, however, and the fruit, despite some incursions and damage from yellow jackets, was in remarkably good condition with virtually no mildew or other rot.

I harvested the Cabernet on October 10. I got 104lbs of grapes from the single row of grapes, which is a very good yield and more than I expected judging from the state of things on my return from overseas. The grapes are now crushed and resting. The must (the crushed grapes, juice, skins, seeds, and all) tested at 22º Brix, which is at the low end of the acceptable range of sweetness (and may require a slight adjustment). Ideally, I would have waited another week or two in the hope of seeing the sugar levels rise a little more, but at some point it becomes a question of balancing the potential for additional ripeness with the potential for more animal damage. 

In the next day or two, I'll inoculate the must with yeast and the 2025 Cabernet will be off to the races. Almost no Sangiovese grapes were left on my return. I glean a couple of handfuls of berries (literally) from the stripped vines and chucked those grapes in with the fermenting Cabernet. We usually make rosé from the Sangiovese, but there will be none this year. And so it goes...

[Edit] Circumstances have prevented me from getting to the vineyard supply store to pick up yeast. As of today, Monday, the crushed Cabernet grapes have been sitting for three days. While I've kept them cool in the garage, they have spontaneously begun to ferment, as grapes will do, yeast naturally present on the skins starting the process. Vineyards sometimes promote their wines as natural and authentic because fermented with "wild yeasts," but I've never in 21 years of making wine tried to just let the fermentation go. The conventional wisdom is that using a commercially available yeast strain developed specifically for winemaking is more consistent and reliable. At the same time, I've read that the "wild" yeasts hanging around in winemaking areas are often the very same yeasts sold commercially, having become present in the air from decades of their introduction and use in making wines. Without analysis, it's impossible to know what strain of yeast is now working on my gape juice, but, everything else this year having been left to chance because of various circumstances (mainly my absence in September, but then being unable to go out on Saturday and Sunday because of my participation in the ArtTrails open studios event, the store being closed today, on Monday), perhaps it would be appropriate to just let the 2025 wine go and see what the result of the fermentation is. Tomorrow I'll try to confer with the experts and see what they suggest. 

Miscellaneous: Local birds

After birding in Japan last week, here are a few recent photos of local residents: Anna's Hummingbird, a preening California Scrubjay, a White-breasted Nuthatch, and a Turkey Vulture.

Places I'm Visiting: Japan – September–October 2025

Back home again after a month in Japan, I'm still working through the jet lag, but a busy schedule upon my return has helped to get me back in synch with the sun. As my visit this time was mostly to see my father-in-law before his passing, I haven't posted the extended notes I usually do as a way of remembering places visited and details noted. Most of the trip was spent on the island of Oshima, with family, but, after the funeral, we took a little time for a short trip. Just wanting to get away, we made no real plans before heading out, but I had wanted to to see Izumo Taisha, one of Japan's most important Shinto Shrines, so we headed off to Shimane Prefecture, on the Sea of Japan side of Japan's main island of Honshu. 

Along the way, we stopped at the Adachi Museum of Art. Although the main collection was not of much interest, a recently added wing devoted to the ceramic work of Kitaōji Rosanjin was worth the time, and the gardens around the museum are famous. Some consider them to be Japan's most beautiful. I'm not sure I agree. While they are very pretty, I thought them a little too tidy, a little too perfectly manicured. Still, I enjoyed the view. 

We visited Shimane Winery, which turned out to be mostly a tourist destination. I noticed a lot of vineyards in the area. Because of the frequent rains in Japan, grapes here are almost entirely grown in greenhouses rather than outdoors. 

We took a quick look at Matsue Castle, which is noteworthy because it is one of the few medieval castles in Japan that retains its original keep. Most castles in the country have been extensively restored, although some more than others. Quite a number have been completely rebuilt in modern times on the site of their ruins. 

We found a Lafcadio Hearn Museum in Matsue and, next door, a house that Hearn once lived in. I knew of Hearn, having often heard the name, and long ago I read his best-known book, Kwaidan, a collection of retold Japanese ghost stories, but I knew little about the man. The museum was surprisingly informative and the English labels on the exhibits were complete and written in good English, which is unusual. Often English labeling in Japanese museums is abbreviated and just as often it suffers from poor, sometimes incomprehensible, translation. 

I hadn't known that Hearn had worked as a journalist in Cincinnati or that he had lived in Greece, Ireland, and England and worked briefly in Tahiti, apparently getting to know Gauguin there. I hadn't known that Hearn had lived in New Orleans and that he even wrote a creole cookbook. He lived in various places in Japan besides Matsue, but it was there that raised his family with his Japanese wife, Settsu, who is currently the subject of an NHK serial drama. If you happen to find yourself in Shimane and have any interest in literature, the Hearn Museum is well worth the price of admission. 

Other things I learned included the fact that the area around Matsue was once an important cotton producing area and that the manga creator Mizuki Shigeru was from Sakaiminato, a nearby town just over the border into Tottori Prefecture. Cotton  production in the area began in the early 1700s, although later there appears to have been a shift toward silk production. There is a small section of the town of Hirata, between Matsue and Izumo Tashia, with buildings that date back to the cotton days, some of them restored and repurposed. On a stroll through the area, I noticed many shops with potted cotton plants out front, a nod to the local history. In Sakaiminato there is a street several blocks long dedicated to Mizuki lined with bronze sculptures of his yokai creations and some of the streetlights there project images of the monsters on the street. 

I spent my last three days in Japan in Tokyo, which afforded the opportunity to catch up with some old friends and colleagues and to enjoy a couple of good meals. On the plane home, I had the good fortune of being seated beside a young couple with interests that aligned with my own, which led to an extended conversation – always a welcome distraction on a long flight.

Shigematsu Yoshiteru (1930-2025)

Last week we said goodbye to my wife's father. It was a simple ceremony. Along with the usual rites, my wife spoke briefly about his very active life in the community in which he lived for nearly all of his 94+ years. The flowers were beautiful. 

Among the relatives who attended the funeral, was a woman who brought along an old photograph of him at about the age of 15, just after the end of the Pacific War. The little girl he is carrying in the photo (above) is the woman who brought the photo. Despite my being a foreigner and marrying his oldest daughter, he was always good to me and, on visits to the US, he helped us landscape our garden. His specialty was building traditional stone walls. RIP.

Places I'm visiting: Japan September 2025 – Life birds

Back in Tokyo now, and heading home tomorrow. On the way to the airport for my flight from Matsuyama to Tokyo on September 30,  I made a brief stop along the Tateiwa River in the town of Hojo (now absorbed into Matsuyama but I still think of it as a separate town). I lived in Hojo for a year as a teenager. Along the river I spotted an unfamiliar sandpiper. Thanks to adjustments to my camera settings recommended by my new birding acquaintance from Oshima, I was able to get a nice shot of one of the birds in flight. This is a Terek Sandpiper (Xenus cinereus). It's fairly common throughout Asia, but a very rare accidental visitor in California. Another "lifer" for me.

In total, at the end of my trip to Japan this time (which was not a birdwatching trip) I managed to get a total of eight life birds:

*Asian Brown Flycatcher (Kosamebitaki)

*Grey-streaked Flycatcher (Ezobitaki)

*Dark-sided Flycatcher (Samebitaki)

*Red-rumped Swallow (Koshiaka tsubame)

*Japanese Kingfisher (Kawasemi)

*Black-tailed Gull (Umineko)

*Kamchatka Leaf Warbler (Ōmushikui)

*Terek Sandpiper (Sorihashi-shigi)

Places I'm Visiting: Japan again

For the second time this year, I find myself in Japan. I visited in April with recreation mostly in mind. Now, in the oppressive heat and humidity of September, I'm here because my father in law, now 94 years old, is ill and not expected to live much longer. I wanted to see him before he dies. It was a hastily arranged trip. I arrived the day before yesterday. Afflicted not only by the heat but also by jet lag, it still fees a bit surreal to be here. That said, the place is familiar. I always find it easy to adjust. It feels a bit like stepping on to one of those moving walkways at the airport – a pull at the moment of transition, a momentary loss of balance, but then solid strides at a new pace. 

Unexpectedly, on my second day here, I was invited to help harvest grapes in a small vineyard on the island of Omishima in Japan's Inland Sea. I spent the morning picking clusters of Chardonnay. Japan is not a friendly place for Vitis vinifera, the wine grape vine. It is too rainy and too humid. Making wine successfully here requires various interventions not required in the dry climate I grow grapes in in Northern California.

The vines are trained in the cordon style but high above the ground. My vines at home are trained with their lateral branches at about 36 inches. The lateral branches here were at my eye level, the grape clusters hanging just below. The high training keeps the developing fruit away from ground moisture after rain. The rows of grapes are covered with transparent plastic stretched over frames to keep rain off the leaves and grape clusters. In addition, frequent use of ant-fungal agents appears to be required. Despite these efforts, there was considerable rot in the clusters we picked. Much of the time it took to harvest about a ton of grapes was occupied in removing bad grapes from the clusters one by one before dropping the remaining clean grapes into the collection bins. The pickers used a handy tool that was a pair of shears on one end and a set of tweezers on the other, the latter for removing bad grapes from the clusters. Later in my trip, I saw grapes being grown in Shimane Prefecture, on the Japan Sea side of the main island of Honshu. All the grapes I noticed there were being grown in greenhouses. 

We tasted three wines that the proprietors brought along, a rosé of Merlot and Muscat Bailey A, an unoaked Chardonnay from last year's grapes, and an "orange wine" from Delaware grapes. Delaware is a table grape, but the Delaware was rather good. On the nose, it was extraordinarily fruity, smelling simply of fresh grapes (which usually isn't a good sign in wine), but it turned out to be quite dry, free of excessive grapiness, and nicely balanced.  Later I tasted another Muscat Bailey A wine from this winery that had been aged 18 months in French oak. While it was a bit acidic, it was reminiscent of a Pinot Noir. I think with a little bottle age, it might even pass for a Burgundy. Most Muscat Bailey A wines I've tasted in Japan in the past have been modeled on Bordeaux wines, so this was refreshingly different. In any case, It was fun to spend a morning with people dedicating themselves to trying to make good wine in difficult conditions.

We were among about eight volunteers helping out. Omishima is about an hour away from the town of Hojo (now part of the city of Matsuyama) where I was a high school exchange student in 1977, now 48 years ago. A couple of the people helping out turned out to be from Hojo and, in the course of chatting while we worked, it became clear that I had met one of the volunteer grape pickers those 48 years ago, when I was 17 and he was about 13. Wandering around Hojo in October of 1977, a few days before the annual autumn festival in the town, I had come across a group of boys polishing the hardware on a danjiri (a wheeled, portable shrine used in the festival) and practicing their drumming. One of the boys had called me over and let me bang on the drum a bit. The man I was chatting with, harvesting grapes beside me, told me that he was that boy. I don't remember the encounter as well as he does (having been the only caucasian in a town of 30,000 people, I stood out. I didn't always know people who knew me, or at least knew of me). I don't recall drumming, but I do remember the boys polishing the hardware. Small world.