Letters from Lodi

Robin Burcell is a novelist who lives in Lodi, California. She has published her own series of police procedurals, but since 2015 she has been busily co-writing international best sellers for Clive Cussler, the New York Times Best Selling author of more than 80 books of fiction — including the 1976 classic, Raise the Titanic!,…

To everything, there is a season. Especially at the start of each year’s harvest, which is the height — the culmination — of all seasons. At least in Lodi, America’s largest wine-growing region. Lodi is the largest because most of its wine grapes go into wines that most Americans actually drink. The bottlings you see…

Blair and Laura Lott got the hankering to escape the “insanity” of living and working in the Bay Area. “The traffic just got crazier,” Mr. Lott tells us, “and we didn’t think we could go on like this.” And so the couple sold their very successful business (Massage Envy) and embarked on arguably an even…

Continued from: Linden Hills Vineyard is located south of Calaveras River at the lowest reaches of the lower foothills area skirting the eastern edge of the Lodi AVA, where gravelly clay, hillside Redding series soils predominate A strong case for Lodi terroir (part 2) — the climatic factors The Language ofTerroirEstablishing the Lodi AVA When the…

Earlier this week (August 11, 2020) we asked to tag along with McCay Cellars owner/grower Mike McCay during part of his early morning vineyard walks. Typical of most of 2020’s summer days so far, the early morning started off in the lower 60°s, barely hitting 72° by 9:00 AM. Perfect morning constitution weather. Weather is…

The same deep (50 to 90-ft.), rich sandy loam soil hospitable to deeply rooted valley oaks endemic to the Mokelumne-Cosumnes River Watershed (depicted here in the 32-acre grove preserved by the Spenker family of Lodi’s Jessie’s Grove estate) constitutes the terroir that made own-rooted European grapevines so easy to grow by Lodi’s pioneering farmers in…

What is terroir and why should you care? Answer to the second part first: Because terroir differentiates Lodi from any other region in the world; and as Mr. Rogers always used to say, “There’s no person in the whole world like you, and I like you just the way you are.” The first part might…

You won’t find his name mentioned in most of the popular books touching upon the history of California wine. No Wikipedia entry, and nary an illustration or photograph to be found in “the Google.” Why? From what we gather, he was a pioneer who rested more on his labors than his laurels. Also, probably because…

The growth and success of Lodi‘s m2 Wines have been intertwined with Soucie Vineyard, located at the farthest western edge of Lodi’s Mokelumne River AVA, ever since this artisanal winery’s founding in 2002. m2 owner/winemaker Layne Montgomery has never been shy about saying, as a matter of factly, that “if Zinfandel is considered America’s grape,…

As we’ve reached the middle and end of July, Lodi wine country has been experiencing a period of time known in wine lingo as veraison: a word derived from the French term véraison, referring to the “change of color of grape berries.” Call it the annual coming of age for grapevines, or a vinous bar…

Forty or fifty years ago, shopping for a white wine to go with tonight’s dinner used to be so easy. All you needed to do was look at the backsides of the wine bottles on the shelves. Typical generic California “Chablis,” for instance, was “recommended with fish, fowl, or veal.” A “Burgundy” was for “beef,…

Lodi during the latter half of the 1800s, writes local historian Toni Christman in Our Time to Shine (2012), was “an unruly child, gathering strangers from all walks of life migrating from (nearby) Lockeford, Stockton, Sacramento in addition to other existing nearby settlements. Lodi was sometimes referred to as a ‘rum-guzzling’ town with young boys…

Last month (June 2020) we received a note from Clifford P. Ohmart — called, simply, “Cliff” by his colleagues throughout the agricultural industry as well as in Lodi, where he served as Lodi Winegrape Commission‘s Sustainable Winegrowing Director from 1996 to 2009. Prompted by our recent series detailing the history of winegrowing in the Lodi…

On its website, Lodi‘s Galloping Hills Ranch describes itself as a “winery, vineyard, bed & breakfast.” All of this is true, except for the fact that the current pandemic has prevented owners Fern and MaryAnn Simoneau from welcoming their very first guests to their Airbnb, ensconced on the floor above their horse stable and modest…

PRIE Winery, one of Lodi‘s smaller handcraft wine producers, has just released a red wine made from a grape called Marzemino. Why in the world, you may ask, should you sit up and pay attention to a wine called Marzemino when there are so many other fine wines out there, made from the usual, dependable…

Lodi’s Nostra Vita Family Winery is, as the name implies, a family affair: nostra vita being Italian for “our life,” and the Famiglia consisting of the owners Robert Indelicato (Winemaker) and Leslie Bloudoff (President), and their children Katie Bloudoff-Indelicato (Sales & Marketing) and Kyle Bloudoff-Indelicato (Assistant Winemaker/Cellar Master). Although they are still, visibly speaking, “new”…

Summer starts this Saturday, so let’s talk about white wines! It is a mistake, to begin with, to dismiss slightly sweet or medium sweet white wines out of hand. When well balanced with lots of palate freshening acidity you hardly noticed the sweetness, and that’s when they become more of a connoisseur’s wine: like the…

A couple of years ago we held a public tasting attended primarily by local winegrowing professionals in which we compared, “blind,” a 2016 Bokisch Vineyards Sheldon Hills Vineyard Monastrell grown in Lodi‘s Sloughhouse AVA with a 2015 Domaine Tempier Bandol from France’s Provence region. The comparison was a valid one in that both wines were…