Category: Touring
Exploring the Wines of Santa Barbara, California
The Santa Barbara County Vintners Association visited San Diego recently for a trade and media tasting featuring wines from 10 members, including wineries and wine families with more than one label. The vintners are on a...
Read MoreRioja Adventures Round Two; Classic Reds, Sprightly Rosados and Crisp Blancos
Our base was the Hotel Marques Riscal, in Elciego, a tiny town on the road to the bigger destinations of Laguardia, Haro and Samaniego. MARQUES DE RISCAL The Marqués de Riscal City of Wine, in Elciego (Álava), includes: the...
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Discovering Rioja: fine values in high quality aged wines
Matt Kramer, long-time columnist for The Wine Spectator and author of a definitive book on...
Read MoreExploring South African Red Wines
Blind tastings help calibrate your taste preferences (if you like it, it’s good, no matter what the experts say or how much it costs). This was reinforced recently in a blind tasting of eight wines from South Africa by a...
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Willamette Valley and Seven AVAs — Exploring Oregon Pinot Noir
The seminar was titled “It’s Willamette, Damnit,” to break the pronunciation barriers, and offered...
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The Winofiles — a Few Favorite Books for the Wine Lovers on Your Gift List
If any of your wine drinking friends or relatives have expressed an interest in learning more...
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New Zealand — Beyond the vineyards, great escapes in nature, cities
For fans of nature, recreation and outdoor adventures, New Zealand ranks at the top of many...
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East Side Adventures in Paso Robles — Wine, Sculptures, Parties on the Backroads
The challenge with plotting your wine adventures around Paso Robles is narrowing the field from...
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Paso Robles Rising — New Wineries, Quality All Around
It has been some five years since we last cruised into Paso Robles and stopped by its town square for a luncheon break to plan our adventures among some 110 local wineries. We had first visited in the 1970s when the area around Templeton and Paso …
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Santa Lucia Highlands: Cool Place for Pinot Noir, Chardonnay
When identifying the key elements that make fine Pinot Noir anywhere in the world, growers and producers of the best wines tend to start with enraptured discussions of their sense of place ??? the spot in the world, region, vineyard, hillside and …
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Post-Harvest Fall Colors in Paso Robles
Touring many fine wineries in the Paso Robles area. One new find, Kukkula, which means ???high place??? in Finnish. More photos and notes later.
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Oregon Wine Trail — Yamhill-Carlton and Eola-Amity Hills Discoveries
In the two previous postings on wine adventures into the 9,000-square-mile Willamette Valley, Oregon???s largest American Viticultural Area (AVA), we covered the Pinot Noir and Chardonnay clones used to make their best Pinot Noir (Dijon clones) and …
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