Letters from Lodi

Last week Friday and Saturday (August 9-10), LangeTwins Family Winery & Vineyards kicked off their 2013 harvest in Lodi by picking their 50-acre Jahant Rd. vineyard planted to Sauvignon Musqué – a clonal variant of Sauvignon Blanc that produces more flowery, less herbaceous white wines than other varieties of Sauvignon Blanc. The LangeTwins Family Lodi…

This past Monday, August 5 Lodi’s Phillips Farms (the agricultural arm of Michael David Winery) began its second week of harvest 2013 with a picking of Chardonnay at their Bare Ranch property on Woodbridge Rd. “In my lifetime,” says Kevin Phillips, the Phillips family’s VP of Operations and vineyard manager, “2013 is only the second…

TAPAS – the Tempranillo Advocates Producers & Amigos Society – has announced that this Saturday, August 3, 2013 will be the second International Albariño Day, during which wine lovers around the world are encouraged to show a bottle of Albariño some love, while sharing the experience via Twitter with the hashtag #AlbarinoFiesta . International Albariño…

So far in 2013 a number of winery releases have come out that are just begging to be cobbled together in one group. We’ll call them exactly what they seem to us: The 10 most interesting wines in Lodi. We’re not saying the “10 best,” mind you. “Best” is always subjective, and anyone would be…

What do you think of orange wines? Even longtime wine lovers and “experts” get thrown for a loop the first time they are asked that question. The first thing you think, of course, is, “I didn’t know they make wine from oranges.” Orange wines, however, are exactly that: wines made from the usual wine grapes,…

This past June the judges at the California State Fair Commercial Wine Competition voted on 2013’s “Best Red Wine in Lodi”: the 2012 Jeff Runquist “R” Alta Mesa-Lodi Grenache ($20), sourced from Ron Silva’s Silvaspoons Vineyards. Has Grenache “arrived?” First, let’s look at exactly what it is about the Grenache produced by the Amador County…

This past May there was much ado about a wine event taking place in Healdsburg called the Seven % Solution, highlighting wines made from grapes other than the 93% (such as Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Chardonnay, etc.) to which most of California’s vineyards are planted. Although the emphasis of Seven % Solution was on the products…

Attention, fine wine shoppers: Lodi is now growing some first class Pinot Noir! At least, this is what a discriminating panel thought about the 2010 Ripken Vineyards Lodi Pinot Noir ($20) when they awarded it a Gold medal and “Best of Class (of Lodi)” earlier this month, during the judging process of the 2013 California…

Nothing screams “summer” better than a good, well chilled bottle of rosé, and American grown rosés are hotter than ever. Just ask Randy Lange, co-founder/co-owner (with brother Brad) of Lodi Wine Country’s LangeTwins Family Winery & Vineyards. The family’s 2012 LangeTwins Family Lodi Sangiovese Rosé ($14) is dry as a bone, yet stunningly lush, bright…

In this blogpost, we have a guest writer: San Francisco’s Catherine Fallis MS. MS stands for Master Sommelier, which is a lofty title. According to the Court of Master Sommeliers Web site, only 133 wine professionals in North America have earned the title of Master Sommelier. Of those, 114 are men and only 19 are…

Kosher Lodi grown Zinfandel? Maybe not something you can say was “bound to happen,” but there now is one, and it’s a doozy – produced and bottled by the Napa Valley based Covenant Wines. The newly released 2011 Landsman Lodi Zinfandel ($40), crafted by Covenant winemaker/owner Jeff Morgan, is a genuinely rich, vivid, powerfully aromatic…

Michael McCay, the owner/winemaker of McCay Cellars, believes that Lodi might have discovered “its own Pinot Noir.” He’s thinking, however, that it may be red wines made from the Grenache grape. “There is a lot of potential for Grenache in Lodi,” says McCay. “It may become one of the great grapes of Lodi, right up…

If you dig super-rare wines no one else knows about, lend us your ears: the 2011 Michael Klouda Lodi Stem Theory ($26) is a worthy follow-up to winemaker/owner Michael Klouda’s debut wine from last Spring, the 2010 Michael Klouda Broken Vine Lodi Zinfandel. A couple of things going for Stem Theory: 1. Mr. Klouda handcrafted…

Catherine Fallis MS & Cindy Della Monica share “Secrets of Wine & Cheese Matching” “ZinFest wine lovers,” says Master Sommelier Catherine Fallis, “prepare your taste buds for lift-off!” In her 4-4:40 PM ZinFest Wine School presentation on Saturday, May 18, 2013, Ms. Fallis – a.k.a. the one and only grape goddess® – is teaming up…

Michael David Winery hosted their yearly Grower Barrel Flight Tasting for their Zinfandel growers this past April 24 and 25 at the winery’s Bare Ranch facilities. This annual rite of Spring, organized Kevin Phillips –Michael David’s Vineyard Manager and VP of Operations – is put on to give the winery’s Zinfandel suppliers the opportunity to…

Quietly, pretty much under the radar, Watts Winery & Vineyards has been growing before our eyes. From 1999 to 2011, Watts was one of many winemaking tenets in Vino Piazza, near the little Lodi CDP of Lockeford. At the Watts family’s “new” tasting room/winery on Locust Tree Rd., just south of Victor/Hwy. 12, Watts’ French-born…

It is so ironic: that many contemporary American winemakers, who by resorting to Old World methodologies, are now considered to be the most daring winemakers of today. The new style is the old style; or as The Youngbloods once sang, the moonshine is the sunshine, shining twenty minutes later… Do you have a “contemporary” taste…

Are there wines capable of as much inexpressible intensity as those made from the black skinned Tempranillo grape? Even wine geeks have difficulty putting a finger on exactly what makes a great Tempranillo appealing: all you know is that it feels great, it tastes great, but more often than not, is very hard to describe….

Up until only recently, according to wine journalist Rod Byers CWE, Zinfandel has been presented as “the Oakland Raiders of wine… loud, proud, unruly, and unapologetic.” But at this past January’s ZAP (Zinfandel Advocates & Producers) Grand Tasting, Byers noticed an increased “sophistication” in the Zinfandels. In a report entitled Zinfandel grape comes of age,…

A sommelier, according to standard dictionaries, is the person in a restaurant in charge of buying, storing and serving wines. You can say “wine steward,” which sounds pedestrian. And so people prefer to say sum-uhl-YAY; which, as you might surmise from the hoity-toitiness, is originally a French concept. The word itself is derived from the…

When certain vintners speak, many others are listening. Bruce Neyers, who has owned the acclaimed Napa Valley based Neyers Vineyards (tucked into Conn Valley, in the eastern mountains surrounding the shimmering Lake Hennessey) since 1992, has recently been spreading the word to his legions of wine savvy followers, in every state from Hawai`i to New…

Hundreds of related family, friends and colleagues gathered at Vinewood Community Church and Harney Lane Winery today to remember and celebrate the life of George Mettler (born March 14, 1943), who passed away this past February 15, 2013 (please see our September 2013 post, the patriarch of Harney Lane). In many ways, the Harney Lane…