April 2025 Dear Casa Carmen family, Caspar David Friedrich’s painting Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog is one of the most iconic paintings of the Romantic period. It portrays a man from behind, standing on the edge of a high, rocky ridge, overlooking a blanket of low clouds punctuated by...
Dear Casa Carmen family, We recently returned from a trip to our home country, Ecuador. Few people know much about this small patch of South American land, so I want to share with you some thoughts about its striking mountains. Imagine that the hands of some giant and formidable god...
Dear Casa Carmen family, Our wine club has many new members and these letters have become a core part of understanding what it means to be part of this humble but great house that we call Casa Carmen. As all of you know, one of our wines is called Duende...
Dear friends, It has been just a few months since we first opened the doors of our farm and vineyard in the rolling hills of southern Chester County, PA. Our family has grown since those early days in Chestertown and we have many new members, so it is a good...
As spring flowers begin to emerge from their abode deep in the earth, I’d like to share with you some thoughts about the meaning of emerging, about surface and depth, about what it means to reveal and to hide, to disclose and to conceal. Winter is a time of concealment....
We have just passed the holiday season and we stand at the beginning of a new year, one that promises to be, to say the least, contentious. We could spend much time thinking about the roots of that contention, taking sides, and being sucked into the vortex of anxiety of...
Just a little over a century ago, the Sevillian poet Antonio Machado wrote one of his most famous poems, Provervios y cantares, XXIX, also known as “Caminante, no hay camino” (“Traveler, There is No Road”). Below I’ve included it in the original Spanish and have translated it to the best...
I have mentioned in a previous letter the story of how during the Roman era, the inhabitants of the province of Hispania, which is now Spain, pronounced the word vivere (to live) as bibere (to drink). This is why it is said that Julius Caesar would joke by saying, “Beati hispani quibus vivere est...
I was recently by myself having lunch in Düsseldorf, Germany, on the shores of the Rhine River—sharing a table outside with strangers and eating chopped bratwurst with curry sauce from a food truck while drinking an Altbier. The air was crisp and the sky overcast, but the budding star magnolias on...
Wine is a solace. Wine is a pause. Wine is a vast field under the sun and a soft spot of grass under the shade. Wine is rain on parched land and sunlight after the storm. Wine is a truce and a herald of light that speaks of better places....
This compilation of letters have come to be my favorite corner of our website, which we have titled “In Search of el Duende.” The title is, of course, a nod to Spanish poet Federico García Lorca, who worked, perhaps more than anyone, to communicate the meaning of duende, a term that has...
