Category: Touring
Exploring 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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The 24-Winery Tasting Opportunity, Murphys in Calaveras County
Tucked away in the Sierra Foothills is one of the more concentrated tasting adventures in California or anywhere else: the town of Murphys, with 24 tasting rooms within easy walking distance along a one-mile stretch of Main Street. The wines carry…
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Oregon Wine Trail: Finds in the Dundee Hills and Chehalem Mountain AVAs
As with any other major wine growing area, touring in the 9,000-square-mile Willamette Valley, Oregon???s largest American Viticultural Area (AVA), is best approached selectively and in small chunks. In our misspent youth when tastings were free, we…
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Oregon Pinot Noir: soil, clones and passion for the grape
For fans of the grapes of Burgundy and wine-related travel, the Willamette Valley is worth discovering before the crowds arrive. The 150-mile long and 60-mile wide valley is Oregon???s largest American Viticultural Area (AVA). It has some 200 wineri…
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