As you all know, my favorite vacation is a wine-tasting vacation. What is available at the source is so much better than what distributors choose to bring to our wine and grocery stores back home. At the winery, the variety is greater, the limited production wines are available, the scenery is beyond beautiful, and you always get to try before you buy. I could keep the list going, but there is no need. I am sure you get the drift. Recently, Gary and I traveled to Paso Robles for an annual wine writers event. The “deets” on our trip After…
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It’s Who We Are Tasting In January The very first winery that Gary and I visited on our last trip to wine country was Harney Lane Winery and Vineyards in Lodi, California (you can read my intro post about Lodi here.). They made a great first impression that set the bar quite high for all the other wineries that followed. We enjoyed these wines so much that we are putting together a tasting in January. If you are interested, you can join in either locally or virtually. Email us or leave a comment if you are interested. Harney Lane Winery…
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I first started my reporting of Suisun Valley wineries and AVA back in September. I genuinely have no idea where the time went, but it is time to get back on this. So this post will continue sharing many of the other wines we sampled and the fabulous and enthusiastic winemakers we met on our first day of presentations. Two of the winemaker’s families have been working this land for decades. Parents, grandparents, and sometimes great-grandparents settled here to become fruit farmers growing cherries, plums, and others. Some slowly moved into wine grapes as supply and demand proved to be…
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Suisun Valley Part One – A seven-minute read. This is part one of a four-part series. If you are like most folks, you have probably never heard of Suisun Valley. But, just for fun, let’s assume you did not see the title of this blog post. Ok, quickly, name every wine region, AVA, or nested AVA you can think of in California. On your mark. Get set. GO! The first name out of most folks’ mouths would probably be Napa Valley and then Sonoma. After that, it starts to get dicey depending on your wine enthusiasm for details. Depending on what…
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Zhuzhing up Basic Costco Buys Costco is my favorite store. Yes, we are a household of two, but I can not imagine not shopping there. I especially like shopping at Costco because they have some products that can easily turn into something even better than what they intended. And these products save me lots of time. For example, I often make the food pairings for our wine tastings from Costco buys. Below are several creations that I have made that are now fan-favorites. I created the first two appetizers for the recent Pedroncelli Wine Tasting I hosted last Thursday. These…
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… And So Can You This is a 6-minute read. When we were in California, we had the pleasure of spending some time with the folks at The Wine Foundry. Like every other visit during this trip, we assumed we were there to taste their wine. We were. And we did. But truth be told, The Wine Foundry is more than a winery, and we were quickly enthralled at their business model. While they make wine to sell under two different labels, their primary mission is to help people make their own wine. The Wine Foundry Concept: The concept is…
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Ramey Wine Cellars recently hosted me and my friends Amber & David, @winetraveleats Allison Levine, @plsthepalate, and my new friend Erin Hunt Moore @erinelisa. Over the past couple of days, I have been listening to my recording of the tasting, and it brought me right back into the tasting room. Ramey is family-owned and operated. It was such an enormous treat tasting 5 of the current 2018 Single Vineyard Chardonnay releases along with their 2017 RRV Pinot Noir, the 2015 Rodgers Creek Vineyard Syrah, the 2015 Annum Cabernet Sauvignon and the 2011 Annum Cabernet Sauvignon. We tasted nine wines. In…
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Sorry that I have been incommunicado, but we went to Northern California Wine Country. If you follow us on Instagram, you may have seen some of our social media posts. Just know, we were hard at work exploring, learning, tasting, and more tasting of wine from Lodi, Sonoma, Napa, and Suisun AVAs. We traveled with friends and fellow wine writers Amber & David Burke of Wine Travel Eats and Allison Levine of Please The Palate. This trip would not have been possible without them and the countless others that set us on this journey. In eight days, we visited 36…
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