What’s local when it comes to wine? For me, based in Ventura in Southern Central California, in an eight hour drive I can get to just about every wine growing region in California — both above and below the border in Mexico! From the well known areas like Sonoma and Napa, to lesser known gems like Mendocino and El Dorado, as well as Baja’s Valle de Guadelupe, it is all relatively accessible.
But I’m only an hour away from the verdant vineyards of Santa Barbara County where a geographical anomaly allows the cooling Pacific Ocean breezes to race east along the Santa Ynez River Valley from the Pacific to Lake Cachuma. Continue reading →
While you can pair whatever food you want with your wine, we have learned time and time again that “What grows together goes together.” Some foods just make some wines so much better. Just as you can elevate a wine with food you carefully choose to pair it with, the right glass can make a decent wine better (and a great wine not so good, too!). Continue reading →
Which wine region in the world has more cattle than people (four to one!), a literacy rate of 98.7%, provides laptops to all students and teachers, and grows Tannat near the Atlantic coast? If you guessed Bordeaux, France, you guessed incorrectly: we’re talking today about the unexpected in URUGUAY. Continue reading →
March means Women’s History Month which is why I invited the Winophiles group of wine writers to find women working sustainably in France for this month’s prompt; scroll down to see who is writing about what and the questions for our twitter chat Sat. March 18, 2023.
March also means celebrating the luck of the Irish with Friday March 17 St Patrick’s Day. While we’ve learned that corned beef and cabbage pair well with the white wines from Alsace as well as similar white wines from Germany Continue reading →
Working at the outdoors tasting table at Ridge Winery in the Santa Cruz Mountains in the mid-80s is where and when I first sampled Petite Sirah. While the wines might have come from Paso Robles or Sonoma, to my memory these juicy, rich, dark, delicious wines came from California’s “gold country” — the Sierra Foothills like Amador and El Dorado Counties. Continue reading →
When I learned that David Glancy of the San Francisco Wine School was organizing a blind comparative tasting he called “Paso Robles vs The World,” my mind immediately jumped to the 1976 Judgment of Paris that put California’s wines on the world map (including Ridge where I once worked), and from there to the idea of a Judgment of Paso. While the Judgment of Paris has been recreated ad nauseam around the world, the concept still captures the imagination: how would wines from one area tasted blind compare with another? I set my sights on attending — and Continue reading →
wine predator.............. gwendolyn alley 