Sonoma County wineries are not special in at least this one detail: Every other tasting room has a “Winery Dogs” book for sale or on display, featuring a big portrait of their faithful pooch in coffee-table style. There’s Wine Dogs (including Robert Parker winery dog rating system), Winery Dogs of Sonoma, and Winery Dogs Gone Wild. Just kidding on that {…}
The Jack London Vineyard is a beautiful property perched on the foot of Sonoma Mountain. It’s easy to imagine the author surveying the rolling green waves of grapevines as he wrote the following salute in 1913, as reproduced on the back label of Jack London Vineyard wines: “I ride over my beautiful ranch. Between my legs is a beautiful horse. {…}
Many times I’ve been an advocate for the go-for-broke approach to New Year’s Eve festivities, but after the holiday shopping has been done, many of us find ourselves, well, broke. Fortunately, few people sweat the bubbly, as long as it goes “pop,” and a cheap bottle grabbed on the way to the party usually does the trick. But is there {…}
Pop the Sparkling Wine Before New Year’s Eve You’ll notice that wine scribes everywhere are keen to advocate the wider use of sparkling wine, and perennially decry the narrow notion that it’s only a once-a-year kind of treat. You’ll also notice that at year’s end, they suck it up and churn out the obligatory “sparkling wine for New Year’s Eve!” {…}
While organic and Biodynamic farming is still perceived by some as a risky endeavor, who would have thought that the challenges would include belligerent sheep? When one of Truett Hurst Winery’s sheep – normally a docile sort – went errant in the parking lot, and decided that a visitor’s Lexus was its blood enemy, it went on the attack. Presumably {…}
You know the holidays have arrived when San Francisco’s public radio station KQED announces that “This hour of news has been sponsored by Martinelli’s sparkling cider (no relation to Sonoma County’s makers of fine wine, Martinelli Winery).” The plug promises all the bubbles of champagne, but without the alcohol. That’s a fine, sweet and refreshing non-alcoholic compliment to the traditional {…}
It’s tempting sometimes to describe a wine more by what it isn’t than what it is, a pitfall that I often stumble into. It might be dismayingly unhelpful to the makers of wine, for one, and it’s a kind of backhanded smear on the other, nameless wines, entirely undeserved. I could say, for instance, that this isn’t a big, butterball {…}
If you enjoy Pinot Noir without a thought or care for swirling controversy about alcohol percentages and tiffs over terroir, then bully for you. You must not be of that persnickety ilk, the wine writer—or heaven forbid, blogger. Concurrent with the rise of big, ripe Pinot that is fashioned from long hang-times and cellar practices both real and imagined, has {…}
Why not Zin Guerrilla? Good question, because winemaker Bruce Patch created this brand with a single-minded focus on Zinfandel grown in Sonoma County. But when this label first appeared on local shelves, it was hard to know what to make of it. Each release bears novel artwork, at first depicting a cadre of lithe and wan revolutionaries, vaguely in the {…}
Years ago, I was making own little batches of wine in the garage behind a big old rented house that I shared with three housemates. One day, the girlfriend of one of my housemates, a psychology major and a serious type not given to breezy chit-chat, asked me about the wine. Then she told me levelly, “You must have a {…}
