Last night I was sitting with Richard Bennett, Klaudio Ivašić, and Miro Kopčalić in Klaudio’s café and gabbing about this and that. At some point we started talking about wine-making, one of our favorite subjects. Klaudio is from one of the few families originally from Motovun, and he knows a good deal about wine. As usual, Teran was in the focus of our discussion. It did not take us long to come up with the idea of forming a club dedicated to putting Motovun on the map, as it were. Realizing that we were onto something, we got excited about the idea. In our minds, the club was already founded. Early this morning, too excited to sleep any longer, I put together a terse press release, which could also be used as an Internet blurb:

The Motovun Teran Club was founded on the 7th of October 2003 with the aim of promoting the awareness and appreciation of this ancient Istrian red wine around the world, as well as promoting its continual quality improvement in Istria. The main vehicle for MTC’s activities is the Internet, where connoisseurs, restaurateurs, and wine producers can exchange their experiences. Annual meetings take place in Motovun in late Spring, when new Teran comes to the market.

The blurb proceeds by listing membership fees for connoisseurs, restaurateurs, and wine producers. It ends with MTC’s address, the same as Klaudio’s café, and the list of its founding members, the four of us in alphabetical order. I also designed the club’s logo, a stark entoptic form based on Motovun’s coat of arms, which features five towers. When I showed all this to Richard and Miro this morning, we immediately started an argument about the logo. Miro quickly sketched his own proposal, also based on the coat of arms. Klaudio went to Zagreb this morning, but he will undoubtedly have his own thoughts about the logo when he returns this evening. This may be seen as an early sign of trouble among the partners; however, the disagreement about the logo is a clear indication of the excitement the idea about a club has generated. In fact, the logo has only brought it out into the open.