A Grape by Any Other Name....

Knowing that our grapes have emerged from their buds and are now basking in the California sun has made the prospect of actually having a wine of our own real. In just four short months, give or take, those little babies will be plucked from their vines and on their way to our (and your) glasses. With six months already behind us since the inception of this wine project, it seems well past time to give those fruits a name.

And we'd like your help.

As this may be the first time some of you are finding out about our wine project, we invite you to read the history of how it came to be (read from the bottom up). And then put your creative skills to the test by helping us come up with a name for our wine brand.

The four of us amateur winemakers (Ryan, Katie, Marc, and Lori) have been tossing around a few prospects via e-mail (to Marc's chagrin, everyone, including George Lucas, has vetoed Jedi Juice). You may have noticed the current name of this blog: prosewine.blogspot.com. While many of you may read that as "prose wine," the name tends toward the legal rather than the literary, and I suspect there are a fair number from the legal field who may instead see "pro se wine." Pro se, in the legal profession, refers to the practice of representing yourself in a legal battle: a pro se plaintiff, for example, prosecutes his or her case without a lawyer (heaven forbid!). In Latin, pro se means "for oneself" or "on one's own behalf." As half of our winemakers (Katie and Marc) are attorneys, and this friendship owes its origins to Katie and Marc meeting at the now defunct Palmer & Dodge in Boston, Pro Se as a name gives a nod to this history while also representing our passion to make this wine for ourselves, for our own enjoyment and love of wine.

While Pro Se is currently winning out over other potentials for the overarching name of our wine project -- think the name of a French Chateaux or California winery -- we are looking for suggestions both for this name as well as the name for our individual 2007 zinfandel bottling. Both names will be prominently displayed on the label of our own making.

So, here is where you all come in. Give us your input on this and other names we've been tossing around, and offer up some of your own. Keep in mind, the "chateaux" name should be one that'll stick as that'll be the main name on our label for this and any future barrels. For the bottling name, as this may not be the only barrel of wine we ever make, unused names may find their way onto a future vintage.

Suggestions so far:

• Pro Se (as discussed above)


• D&G (representing the last names of our winemakers: Davenport and Goldstein)


• Goldport (obvious mashup)


• 79 Sofa (79 is the atomic number for gold, and a “davenport” is a sofa)


• Ausofa (as above, Au is the atomic symbol for gold)


• Fainwood (the street upon which sits Marc and Lori's house, from whose front porch the decision to start this adventure was hatched)


• Zélé (pronounced Zay-lay) loosely translated from its native French, means "zeal, enthusiasm, or fanatical devotion to a cause or goal"


• Paradigm Shift

Click the "comments" link below to leave your suggestions, offer up your opinion on our potential names, or give feedback on those ideas other friends and family suggest. We'll compile a list of the best for both the wine "house" and the zinfandel bottling in a future post.