ZinFest Wine Festival – by far, Lodi’s biggest yearly event – is just a motion away: Saturday, May 14, 2016 (12-5 PM), taking place on the lush, dreamy peninsula between Lodi Lake and the Mokelumne River, where towering oaks, willows and riparian brush and birdlife set the table for a natural love-in feel to this…
The entire concept of “boutique winery” is that when winemaking is done on such a small scale – as little as a few hundred cases a year – attention to detail is a given. It becomes more possible to produce wines of exquisite quality – “handcrafted” in the best sense of the word. On the…
We are continuing our series of profiles on the Lodi wine industry’s most powerful women with a conversation with Amy Blagg, the Executive Director of the Lodi District Grape Growers Association (LDGGA). The Lodi District Grape Growers Association represents 310 grape growers plus related businesses working within California Crush District 11. The boundaries of District…
Continuing our series of profiles on the Lodi wine industry’s most powerful women, we present to you Kendra Altnow, the Marketing Manager of LangeTwins Family Winery & Vineyards as well as LCF Wines (the latter, a multi-brand product line established by the Lange family in partnership with two other families). Most Lodi wine lovers are…
In the third of our profiles of the Lodi wine industry’s most powerful women, we are highlighting Elyse Egan Perry, the winemaker of Bokisch Vineyards. Ms. Perry’s position is a huge, complex responsibility, as it not only entails vinification of Bokisch Vineyards’ cutting-edge, multi-award winning Iberian varietal wines, but also the custom crush production of…
In the second of our profiles of the Lodi wine industry’s most powerful women, we are proud to hold up Janis Barsetti Gray as one of our more admired figures – a story about one woman’s lifelong devotion to her family’s farming heritage. A story about Lodi. Ms. Barsetti Gray is the owner and CEO…
This if the first of several posts in which we will be profiling a few of the Lodi wine industry’s most powerful women, and letting them tell their own stories. There are few women as significant as Joan Kautz, who serves as Sales & Marketing Manager of Ironstone Vineyards, which has been listed among the…
Bokisch Vineyards’ Terra Alta Vineyard has always been one of Lodi wine country’s most spectacular, photogenic, yet very rarely seen (at least by visiting wine lovers) sites. It sits in Lodi’s Clements Hills Viticultural Area, east of the City of Lodi, which is a region of bucolic, rolling hills and gravelly clay soils – in…
In lieu of our last post (Is Lodi best for white wines?), would you care to put your white wine grape IQ (i.e. geek meter) to the test? Of course, for this quiz we will be focusing on white wine grapes that are grown in Lodi. We are utilizing Mr. Halliday’s tome because, as a…
More than ever, the wines of Acquiesce Winery & Vineyards – a small producer of exclusively estate grown wines located at Peltier and N. Tretheway Roads on Lodi’s east side – have come to epitomize what more and more people think about Lodi as a winegrowing region: an ideal place for white wines. Did we…
“Time changes everything,” goes that old, wonderful song by Tommy Duncan, sung with Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys. 40 years ago grapes like Merlot were strictly experimental, and Chardonnay and Pinot Noir were considered “cutting-edge” in the California wine industry. That’s because Carignan and Thompson Seedless were California’s most widely planted “wine grapes,” if…
This is the Big Week for Zinfandel Advocates & Producers (a.k.a. ZAP): their annual Experience in San Francisco, self-billed as “the world’s largest single varietal wine tasting event.” This year, three days of seminars and parties are capped by a “Grand Tasting” at Pier 27 on the Embarcadero on Saturday, February 27, 2016; when consumers…
Are you ready for Lodi’s Wine & Chocolate Weekend? We are! One of the things that excites Lodi wine lovers the most these days is that the region is no longer just about Zinfandel, Lodi’s pièce de resistance. Nor is it only about “standard” varietals such as Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay, Merlot and Sauvignon Blanc, however…
For the past four vintages the official co-sponsor of our Lodi Wine & Chocolate celebration – in 2016, taking place this Saturday and Sunday, February 13-14 – has been BRIX Chocolate (commercial message: it is not too late to get your passes online at lodiwineandchocolate.com!). Why BRIX Chocolate? Because BRIX produces chocolates that bring out…
Attention Super Bowl 50 visitors: where is the place to be this weekend or following the Big Day? Why, in California wine country, of course. Not just any part of California; even better, the historic Lodi wine region, which was recently named the 2015 Wine Region of the Year by Wine Enthusiast magazine. We won’t…
In the world of wine, there are always Davids and Goliaths. Michael David Winery, for one, has been flexing considerable muscle of late as one of Lodi‘s most dependable producers of premium wine. They certainly have turned into one of our largest: as of this date, some 700,000 cases of wine produced each year; bottled…
And the hits just keep on coming… There was a surprise announcement this past Wednesday, January 27 at the Unified Wine & Grape Symposium in Sacramento: Lodi’s Michael David Winery was named 2016 Winery of the Year! For the entire Lodi wine region, this honor was like icing on a cake. Earlier this week, a…
OMG, the 19th Annual Lodi Wine & Chocolate Weekend is less than a month away: taking place Saturday/Sunday, February 13 + 14, 2016! If you haven’t partaken of this sweet and savory experience before, here’s the scoop: this is easily the most popular passport-style event put on by Lodi’s wineries each year; for a number…
Continuing a recent trend at the San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition – the largest judging of American wines in the world – the Lodi wine region held its own in several categories. Of special note, no less than 5 wines with Lodi on the label garnered Best of Class honors – the highest rated wines…
David Phillips – who co-owns Michael David Winery, as President, along with his older brother Michael (CEO) – is feeling good about the prospects of not only the family business, but also the Lodi winegrowing region and community in general. The Phillips family traces their origin in Lodi back 152 years, when the brothers’ great-great…
It’s early January 2016, and we’ve already been assaulted by… the usual yearly onslaught of wine media “predictions” for the New Year. The widely read London based blogger Jaime Goode, for instance, has predicted that English sparkling wines as well as “natural” wines will grow in popularity in 2016. That’s great news, for wine lovers…
Tired of the same ol’ same ol’? Join the club! The beautiful thing about Lodi is that this is one American Viticultural Area – with over 100,000 acres of fine wine grapes, the most widely planted in the U.S. – that doesn’t limit itself to standard commercial varieties. There are well over 50 classic wine…
Unlike Hollywood stars, viticultural and winemaking regions are never overnight sensations. For European regions, great wines and success stories are the accumulation of centuries, if not millenniums, of practical knowledge, hard won through trial and error. New World wine regions have had the advantage of learning from the Old, and so their histories are more…
When gloomy gray Decembers are roused to Christmas mirth, The dullest life remembers there once was joy on earth, And draws from youth’s recesses Some memory it possesses, And, gazing through the lens of time, exaggerates its worth, When gloomy gray December is roused to Christmas mirth… – Ella Wheeler Wilcox (Christmas Fancies) For Christmas…