Vintage to Vintage is a 3½-minute read. First, let’s make it clear what vintage is. It is the year that the grapes were grown and crushed to make wine. If there is not a vintage date on your bottle, that means that the winemaker blended grape juice from multiple years together to make that bottling of wine. This is common practice with Champagne to create a consistent flavor profile from year to year. These wines are called Non-Vintage. This practice is less common with still wine unless you drink some of the low-end, industrially made mass-produced wines. For most folks,…
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Bokisch Vineyards has been on my radar for a few years now. So when my friend Allison told me that they were on the agenda to visit last May, I was thrilled. Unfortunately, then it looked like they could not fit us into their schedule (it was Mother’s Day weekend!) before we headed to the second leg of this trip, Sonoma. At which point Markus and Liz Bokisch (co-owners) invited us to their home Monday morning for a breakfast wine tasting before we head to Sonoma. A “breakfast wine tasting?” Why not! So sure enough, at 8:30 am, we arrived…
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This is a five (5) minute read I have never turned around a post as quickly as this one. EVER. Last evening, (Tues., July 20th), we went to Savi Cucina and Wine Bar for their Antinori Wine Dinner. We were both overwhelmed on so many levels. First, this was our first wine dinner here in Charleston since March of 2020, thanks to Covid. Second, it was our first wine dinner at Savi since we joined their Wine Society last July. And lastly, the six courses were absolutely delicious, and the wines paired exquisitely. I do not know what more we…
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What’s In My Glass a five minute read Social media is not for everyone. I get that. I dropped Twitter because it made no sense to me -144 characters and then 250? Nope. I reduced any Facebook activity to following a few friends, most of whom are also wine writers. I got tired of NOT seeing my friends’ posts. Tried and dumped Clubhouse after a few days – Talk about boring – listening to nobody’s talk ad nauseam -nope! And I have avoided Tiktok because I don’t see it used for business. Where I focus my social media “attention” is…
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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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I had so much to stay that Instagram would not allow me to post that much, so I moved the post here. Thank you, Alice and Brook, for partnering with @strongcoffeetoredwine. THANK YOU! One of the joys of this wine excursion was to meet with the wineries that have partnered with me. Brook from @bannisterwines and Alice from @sutrowine are two of my original partners. Meeting them and saying THANK YOU was a highlight of my trip. But, of course, we also got the added bonus of tasting their current releases. Since neither wineries have a tasting room, we met at…
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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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