Of all the challenges and hurdles of starting a new company, we never expected that selecting a name would be one of the greatest. Life is full of little surprises!

Some of our readers who have been following our progress may recall receiving an e-mail survey last year, in which we gathered suggestions for and opinions on potential names for our company. We are grateful to all of you who participated—your efforts helped us immensely.

For those of you who aren't familiar with the survey mentioned above, we had brainstormed a short list of possible names that possessed the qualities we were looking for. The chosen name

had to flow easily, had to look good in print as well as sounding pleasant to the ear, had to be easy to pronounce and easy to remember. Most importantly, the chosen name would ideally connote history and tradition as well as music—another one of our passions that we wish to promote along with wine. And it had to be unpretentious; clever, but not too cute.

We circulated our short list in order to get feedback on our ideas, and as a result we received a lot of great suggestions of other possible names from family and friends. Our short list grew exponentially.
The first part of our "narrowing down" process was to perform trademark and Internet searches on each name. Our long list was quickly cut back down to a very short one. What surprised us the most was how many of our name possibilities were either already used in the wine industry, were reserved for future use, or were close enough to a name in use as to potentially cause confusion. And here we thought we were original, able to think outside the box!

Eventually, and after much agonizing, we selected our "Top 3." We ate, drank, and slept these names, waiting to see which we would form the strongest connection to. We might still be contemplating the issue if we hadn't set May 1, 2000, the date we registered our business with the California Secretary of State, as a deadline.

The outcome of all this was Cantiga Wineworks, and we haven't looked back since. We will refrain from listing the runners up in this article as we may wish to reserve them for special labels down the road.

"What," you might ask, "is the significance of the name Cantiga Wineworks?" Without going into an in-depth music history lecture, a cantiga is a Spanish song form originating in the late Middle Ages. (The Latin root of the word, canto, means "to sing.") The best known examples of cantigas are a large collection of songs of praise attributed to the Spanish King Alfonso X, "The Wise" (1221-1284 AD). The term cantiga implies history, and it implies music. It also points to the Spanish roots of winemaking in California. Afterall, the missions that dot the entire California coast, established by the padres of the Catholic Church under Fr. Junipero Serra, were the first wineries.

The meaning of the word wineworks is self-explanatory. What it implies for us, though, is not just winemaking but a whole range of activities that relate to and complement winemaking. As our plans for the winery unfold, we will go into more depth on what sorts of activities we have in mind.

This all having been said, we are proud to introduce to you Cantiga Wineworks, and trust that the times we share with you will be full of wine and song!