This is the convergence of two stories. We begin 30 years ago with Vince Bryan, a successful neurosurgeon, and his wife, Carol, who had lived in Europe before establishing his practice.

Recognizing the primacy of place for wine grapes, they went on a quest to find the right land for a vineyard. For a year the Bryans pored over reports of soil samples taken around the state during the Depression by the U.S. Geological Survey, They weren't looking for the unique Jory loam of Oregon's Red Hills of Dundee, nor the Willakenzie soil of the Willamette Valley, not even the irrigable desert of the Yakima Valley. Instead, they wanted the almost infertile wasteland of Bordeaux, combined with the mild, frost-free climate of Burgundy.

They found their ideal site on a 900-foot basalt cliff overlooking the Columbia River five miles west of the town of George. In 1980, they bought 700 acres covered with the desert's pale green shrubbery and named it Sagecliffe. The first winery on the site was called Champs de Brionne, but the Bryans' first success was to develop the site's natural amphitheater as a 20,000-seat concert venue. (It's now known as The Gorge and owned by LiveNation.) To take further advantage of Sagecliffe's natural setting, the Bryans called on architect Tom Kundig to develop a luxury resort on the property, which was christened Cave B Inn. At that point, with plenty of grapes from the hilltop vineyards, it made sense to relaunch the wine as a boutique, estate winery also called Cave B.

At about the same time, Freddy Arredondo entered the picture. A chef from Southern California, he had won a scholarship to a culinary academy in Italy, where he crossed paths with a pastry student named Carrie Bryan, daughter of Vince and Carol. Long story short: Freddy and Carrie fell in love and married. Freddy got a degree from the highly respected viticulture and enology program at Walla Walla Community College and joined the family business. After a year as the assistant winemaker under the tutelage of Rusty Figgins, Freddy moved up and took over responsibility for all of Cave B wines. No small ambition, since the business plan is to grow from 4,500 to 15,000 cases.

Vince Bryan is hardly out of the picture; in fact, he's more involved than ever, shepherding the paperwork for the new Ancient Lakes AVA (more on that in an upcoming post). Although he no longer practices clinically, he's busy inventing a plethora of medical devices...and adapting them for uses that include apple picking and salmon restoration.

For his part, Freddy has some of Washington's best fruit to work with. He won double gold medals at the Seattle Wine Awards in 2012 for five of his wines. Not a single one is pinot noir, by the way, though that is what Vince and Carol Bryan thought they were going to grow. When André Tchelistcheff came to visit, in the early days, he recommended white grapes like chardonnay and gewürztraminer; he ended up recognizing the site's great potential for Bordeaux-style reds. Today, in the wind-swept vineyards that slope ever-so-gently toward the river, there are cabernet sauvignon and merlot vines that are almost 30 years old. The roots drive down through the site's entablature of glacial rubble and draw their nourishment from the mineral deposits of the tumultuous Missoula floods. The wine in the glass, you realize, is not unlike what's produced by the merlot vines on the cliffs of Saint Emilion or the cabernet from the flood plains of the Médoc. Vastly different origins, of course, but reflecting its birthplace, wine of its soil.

Cave B Inn & Spa, 344 Silica Rd NW Quincy, WA 98848, 888-785-2283  

After last week's Gatsby, this week's Tendril. Get it? (See Fitzgerald, F. Scott.)

Actually out here at SageCliffe, the spectacular setting for Cave B Inn & Spa. Tendril's the name of the restaurant. Came out for a day of touring the vineyards of Washington's latest AVA, Ancient Lakes. More about that shortly. Did I mention that the setting is spectacular? Design by Tom Kundig, by the way, one of the leading architects in the Northwest .

So much Campari! So many Negronis! In the US, it's sold at 48 proof, the Campari; at the Duty-Free it's 57 proof, and about half the price. Worth bringing back.

In Seattle, Negronis are almost invariably shaken and served up, with an orange twist that's draped or drooped, depending on the barman's finesse. You don't need to be a mixologist to assemble the Negroni: it's one third gin, one third sweet vermouth, one third Campari. In Italy, it's almost always served over ice in a rocks glass with a slice of orange. At the late, lamented Txori in Belltown, barman Brett Paulson would garnish with a quarter slice, a "flag."

Wine & spirits guy Gary "Gaz" Regan put out a slim book last year about the Negroni. A few anecdotes, a lot of "recipes." I'm not really a fan Negroni recipes (or variations, or deiviations, or "our version"). But I'll make allowances.

The other book in the picture is Italian, Sulle Tracce del Conte, "On the Trail of the Count," by Luca Picchi. He traces the life and drinking habits of a nobleman named Count Camillo Negroni, who, one day in the 1920s asked the waiter at his favorite bar in Florence, the Caffè Casoni, to serve him something stronger than his regular Americano (Campari, vermouth, soda water). The barman substituted gin for the soda water, and the Negroni was born. If you don't read Italian, this blog post by Camper English will fill you in.

If you don't have gin, you can use sparkling wine (Prosecco, Champagne, etc.), but then it's called "Sbagliato"--a mistake. You can use vodka instead, and call it a Negroski. You can use dry vermouth instead of sweet; then it's a Cardinale. There's a whole category of "white" Negronis, made without Campari. (Why bother? Just drink gin.) One recipe adds a measure of water and calls for 12 seconds in the microwave.(Ugh.)

The indispensable ingredient of the true Negroni is, of course, Campari itself, first concocted in Milano in the 19th century by Gaspare Campari, a pharmacist in Milan. In those days, pharmacists were the folks who knew something about distilling and had access to exotic herbs. Today, any high school kid with a chemistry set could do it, but the Europeans were the ones, back in the day, who invented the macerations and tinctures, the amari and digestivi, that we still enjoy today. I'll leave it to historians to explain why today's Campari tastes more syrupy and less distinctively bitter than when I first encountered it; I just try to enjoy one (maybe two) every day. Usually as an aperitif, but occasionally as an after-dinner drink. Yesterday, on a warm spring night, at a sidewalk café in Belltown, surrounded by high-rise condos, with music leaking out of the windows, just watching the passing parade (couples, families, strollers, dogs), with this quintessentially urban drink in your hand, I could even imagine that Seattle was a real city.

The party itself was swell: cocktails and hors d'oeuvres at Henry & Oscar's, the swanky supper club in Belltown owned by Mark and Katie Stern. Then a stroll down to The Big Picture for a preview screening of The Great Gatsby on the theater's new state-of-the-art digital system. A glass of Prosecco and a tub of the white cheddar popcorn, so far, so good, and highly recommended.

Pity that the much-hyped film itself proved to be such a fizzle, bummer, dud and disappointment. As cinema, it's lush but vapid; as a movie, it's a balk, all windup and no delivery. And it's loooong, almost two and a half hours, so there's plenty of time for set pieces on Long Island (those spectacular parties!), in Noo Yawk City (skyscrapers! drama!) interspersed with transitions designed for 3-D viewing.

Director Baz Luhrmann's from egalitarian Australia, so it's understandable that he might not have a feel for the subtle nuances of the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel. This wasn't an issue in his terrific movie from 2001, Moulin Rouge, which was all about artifice. Gatsby, on the other hand, is about social commentary, about the subtleties of class distinctions, and here Luhrmann is just plain heavy-handed.

Everything is over the top: the parties, the music, the cars, the houses, the dialog (far too many "Old Sport"s out of Leonardo diCaprio). Luhrmann sanitizes the role of Meyer Wolfsheim, the toad-like Jewish gangster who's the well-spring of all the evil in the novel, by giving the part to Amitabh Bachchan, a beloved Indian actor who barely gets one scene, and by removing all traces of Fitzgerald's anti-Semitism (except for a single, fleeting reference to "that Kike"). Where Gatsby himself is supposed to be both mysterious and lovable, DiCaprio plays him as aloof. As Daisy, the girl of his dreams, British actress Carey Mulligan is chirpy and clueless. As Nick, the story's narrator, Toby Maguire looks like he's waiting around for the cameras to roll on his next Spider-Man flick.

Luhrmann's worst offense, though, is that he takes the book's title literally: he treats Gatsby's pitiful, self-loathing, hopeless schemes as worthy of admiration, of greatness. He completely misses Fitzgerald's irony and creates, in its stead, an inadvertent portrait of modern manners: the director as charlatan.

By day, most days, Chuck Wolfe is a mild-mannered land use attorney. But he harbors another identity, little known even to acquaintances and professional associates in his hometown of Seattle. While no one's looking, Wolfe turns into something else entirely: a theorist with an international, rock-star reputation, admired for his powers of observation and his ability to synthesize from the lucky accidents of everyday urban life an overall theory of why the world is arranged as it is. Not the geopolitical world, not the agricultural or industrial world, but the world of people, of cities. (We are both contributors to Crosscut, which is publishing Wolfe's latest essay on Thursday.)

Wolfe's notes and thoughts have now been compiled in a book titled Urbanism Without Effort, published one week ago by Island Press and already a steady bestseller. "A must-read" says the blurb from none other than Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn on the publisher's website.

Urbanism Without Effort is both Wolfe's title and his motto. He recognizes that the term "built environment" means different things to different people. Paris is Paris, and Seattle is Seattle, but each person's Paris, each person's Seattle, is different. Radical as it may seem: you have to figure your city out for yourself.

Two years ago, in a column published by Huffington Post, Wolfe articulated his notion that the way to understand the urban environment was, simply, to record it. Wolfe urged his readers to bypass the academic debates over what, precisely, should be recorded, and how, precisely, it should be interpreted. Instead, he posited a citizen-journalist's approach: just observe. (Wolfe's father was a respected professor of urban design at the University of Washington who taught him that the most important thing you can do is learn how to see.) Go for a walk and write a paragraph about the experience. Take pictures of locations in your neighborhood. Videotape street life around you. Wolfe's manifesto up-ends the power structure of academics, architects and bureaucratic city planners in much the same way that hyper-local blogging eroded the power structure of newspapers.

The result is, first, a challenge: pay attention to your surroundings, everyone! And second, to empower individuals, to give them permission not just to look at the streetscape and the trees but to react to them.

Of course, you say, that's nothing new. People have always done that. Exactly! Urban planning isn't some newfangled notion dreamed up by dwellers of an ivory tower, it's always been there;from the very first settlements, man has built what was needed for protection and food with the most readily available materials. And bureaucracy has often imposed solutions that are less than ideal. "Why shouldn't we have zip-lines between Italian hill towns?" Wolfe asks. "For that matter, why shouldn't we have them in Seattle parks?"

In the end, the problem with urban planning is precisely that it looks upon the built environment as a problem in need of a solution, however admirable (comfort, entertainment, "walkability"), to be engineered through incentives for developers to act in a certain way. But people, says Wolfe, are far more resourceful. Politicians look for a desired outcome; citizens look for what works. That alley in Madrona with a concrete retaining wall? It becomes the screen for summer movies, the nexus of a community, an entry in Wolfe's own urban diary. What a radical concept!

Urbanism Without Effort, Island Press, and on Kindle at Amazon