Wow! Congratulations to Sue and Rodney Tipton of Acquiesce Winery and Vineyards for your honors and awards at the 2022 San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition. The world’s largest wine competition of North American wines. The competition was held earlier this month, and Acquiesce Winery & Vineyards walked away with an astounding array of achievements. This year, well over 5,000 wines entered from the USA, Canada, and Mexico (who knew that wine is made in Mexico?) Not only is it the largest in North America, but it is also highly regarded by wine professionals around the world. Wine Competition? Just what…
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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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This is another edition of “what’s in my glass” or WIMG. Wines we have drunk and really enjoyed. Some are directly from the winery, and others we purchased locally. So let’s not delay and get into these wines. WIMG Suisun Valley Filling Station “Faith,” 2019 Sauvignon Blanc ($32.00) Solano County Green Valley AVA, California As I have said before, my palate for Sauvignon Blanc is specific. I like most citrus flavors but not grapefruit. I like mineral elements and some herbs but not grassy, and I am not a fan of the gooseberry flavor. As such, I stay away…
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It’s All About Sugar The two basic wine descriptors of still wine are often improperly used and, as such, can cause much confusion. What are those two descriptors? They are dry and sweet. There is actual dryness and sweetness in wine. And there is also perceived dryness and perceived sweetness. The usage of these perceived traits as levels of actual dryness or sweetness can be confusing, so I hope that I can shed some light on the subject. To do so, we need to start with the process of how one makes wine, and that begins with fermentation. The process…
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My last post was a month ago. Yikes, sorry! But it’s all good! I wish I could write more quickly and be able to post a minimum of once a week, or at least stockpile some posts for times like these, but that is just not me. I am a thinker—a ponderer. So instead, I process everything in my head for a while, and then I write. And trust me, it takes a bit for things to slosh around up there before I can spit the words back out. And when I have other big projects on the “to do”…
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After last week’s post – Dear New Wine Drinker – I realized that I should give my Charleston reader’s information about the independent wine retailers where I shop. These are the places where I buy wine for Gary and me and my concierge clients and some wine tastings. There are times I visit two or three of them on a single wine buying trip because they all offer something that the other does not. To categorize, I would say that my primary stores are The Wine Shop of Charleston and Edmund’s Oast Exchange. These two stores work hard at relationship…
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Dear New Wine Drinker is a six-minute read. A FB group that I belong to is called WINE. There are 26,100+ members. Many are newbies to wine that know very little about it but obviously want to learn more (or why would they be a member in the first place). A group member recently made his very first post on the page. As you can see, his thread merely said, “Just bought this, and it turned out to be very good.” And the flood gates opened. He was ridiculed shamelessly by a bunch of wine snobs. Others made suggestions about…
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