2020 has been a difficult year everywhere in the world, and the challenges will continue in 2021. Yet in Lodi wine country, to paraphrase Louis Armstrong’s famous song, it’s still been a wonderful world. Bare vines turning green, blooms giving birth to luscious fruit, fruit turned into wines everybody loves, and vines tucking back in…
It’s been a quiet year for all of the West Coast wine regions. A pandemic will do that for you. The 2020 California wildfires were absolutely no help. There were no wildfires in the areas immediately around Lodi, but the 2020 harvest was conducted largely under cover of a smoky, sky-high dome. Media coverage has…
2020 will be a forgettable year for many of us. All the same, I think most of us, being the human creatures that we are, will continue to look on the bright side of things. Here in Lodi wine country, over the past two months, we have been celebrating heritage plantings through our Save the…
Lodi wines are pretty darned good. Many of us know that, and many still don’t. Some magazines, not all, have also been coming to a conclusion in the affirmative. This past year, for instance, the internationally read Wine Enthusiast Magazine named Lodi’s Michael David Winery its 2020 American Winery of the Year. Let’s put that…
Here in the second week of December, the big news out of Lodi wine country is this: the 2019 Klinker Brick Winery Lodi Grenache Blanc ($15) has been rated among the 2020 Wine Spectator Top 100 Sweepstakes! “Each year since 1988,” you can read in the magazine, “Wine Spectator has released its Top 100 list,…
The original populace in the area we now know as the Lodi Viticultural Area were, of course, Native, or Indigenous, Americans. Who were they? Perhaps a better question: Where were these people by the time the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo — ending the Mexican-American War and turning Alta California over to the United States —…
Lodi, more than any other American wine region, is full of old vines. Or as we have been calling on everyone to appreciate this phenomenon in our most recent campaign: Save the Old! It is commonly assumed that all the free-standing old vines, supported by single stakes rather than trellis wires, in the Lodi Viticultural…
It’s safe to say that the year 2020 will be one to remember. For good or bad. Jon Bjork of Lodi’s Winery Consulting (a wine compliance company), who also works hand in hand with the acclaimed winemaker Markus Niggli as Markus Wine Co. co-owners, has taken the trouble to file a detailed log on the…
Own-rooted Bishofberger Vineyard Carignan planted in 1936, in November 2020 Why older is better in Lodi What are the Lodi AVA‘s old vine plantings identified as vineyard-designate wines on highly regarded Lodi-grown bottlings, and why do they matter? They matter because of the precedent set in European wine countries a long, long time ago: the…
Let’s talk turkey. For most of us, if we’re doing our due diligence, next week Thursday’s Thanksgiving celebration will be a smaller occasion than what we usually prefer. Just the immediate family, spouse, or significant other — no crazy aunts or uncles, no cranky grandparents or self-centered brothers and sisters, and no screaming, or bored,…
When you taste a wine sourced from a single vineyard notated on a label, you know that the vineyard is an “old vine” growth — which, for a region like Lodi, means that most of the vines from that vineyard are at least 50 years old (planted in the 1960s or earlier), and in some…
There are 16 Lodi AVA vineyards currently registered by California’s Historic Vineyard Society (HVS). There are dozens more Lodi vineyards in the Lodi wine region that meet HVS’s requirements to be called a “historic vineyard,” but this is a non-profit, 501(c)(3) organization, and enrollment of vineyards is strictly voluntary. If a grower or vintner wishes…
They are called “own-rooted.” Growers in Lodi have also used terms like “natural roots” and “wild-rooted.” Whatever it’s called, the vast majority of old vines planted before the mid-1960s in Lodi were planted on their own, natural rootstocks, rather than grafted onto other rootstocks. On the other hand, the planting of vines on grafted rootstocks…
Let’s talk about ancient vines. What’s the difference between an ancient vine and an old vine? There are no official guidelines for any of those designations. The TTB, which controls the language of American wine labels, is pretty lax when it comes to this. This is good, because in our country we generally like a…
First, some background: The people behind this campaign are the Lodi growers themselves, who back in 1991 formed the Lodi Winegrape Commission to self-fund marketing, grower education, and viticultural research to improve the quality of their grapes and, basically, to sell more of them to the rapidly growing wine production industry. Lodi has always been…
In 1976 U.C. Davis Professor Maynard A. Amerine published WINES: Their Sensory Evaluation with Edward B. Roessler. Amerine was a plant physiologist who had served as the chairman of U.C. Davis‘s renowned Department of Viticulture and Enology during the 1950s and ’60s—a seminal period in the California wine industry—and Roessler was a mathematician who chaired…
To get a true grip on the role Lodi plays in the world of wines, you need to see where the state of California stands in it. According to California Wine Institute‘s Discover California Wines website, California has a 60% share of the entire U.S. wine market by volume. This means about 3 out of…
Continued from: Some twenty-first-century wine tasting terms, part 1 (nose) The all-time classic on how to taste wine is Michael Broadbent’s Wine Tasting, originally published in 1968 and perennially republished ever since. It started off, as Mr. Broadbent modestly put it, as a “slim pamphlet,” and didn’t grow that much bigger over the years. But…
A little knowledge goes a long way. It’s also said that a little knowledge can be dangerous. I can’t agree with that. What’s actually dangerous, particularly to yourself, is not enough knowledge. That’s what is difficult about contemporary wine tasting. Many of the wines we are often asked to appreciate today do not exactly comport…
The 2017 Tizona by Bokisch Vineyards Linden Ridge Vineyards Lodi Malbec ($32) is a lovely wine. What may be even more interesting is its provenance: Linden Ridge Vineyard, located in the “gray area” located in the south-eastern fringes of the Lodi Viticultural Area, in the vicinity of the census-designated agricultural hub of Linden (at last…
Last week Louis Anthony Chico, a sommelier living in Orlando, FL, wrote to us saying he had just experienced a déjà vu. It came upon tasting a 2016 Alquimista Cellars Jessie’s Grove Lodi Zinfandel while listening in on a recent Zoom virtual tasting broadcasted from Lodi‘s Jessie’s Grove estate, led by Alquimista Cellars winemaker Greg…
It’s not so much what the label on the 2019 19 Crimes Cali Red ($12) says than what it projects: the iconic face of the long-celebrated rapper, Snoop Dogg, in muscular black and tan, with slashes of inky red and black marking pen. It practically screams “Drink this wine… if you’ve got the guts.” So…
There is an unusual sense of “nakedness” in the immediacy of fruit and whiffs of tea leaf-like dusty/earthiness to the just-released 2019 Monte Rio Cellars Primitivo. Something strange for a California wine, but very deliberate for this particular wine brand which proclaims itself (on its website home page) devoted to the “Spirit of Old California.”…
What better way to pay tribute to Bechthold Vineyard, Lodi’s oldest continuously farmed vineyard, than to produce four different wines from its venerated fruit, which is 100% Cinsaut. This is what Estate Crush (Downtown Lodi‘s custom crush facility) owner/winemakers Bob and Alison Colarossi have done. It’s as much a tribute to the vineyard’s diversity and…