Viñedos Aurora, one of Lodi’s hottest new brands, is special for several reasons. First, and most importantly, the quality of Viñedos Aurora wines is impeccable: a purplish power packed yet finely chiseled Petite Sirah; a dreamily balanced and multi-scented Cabernet Sauvignon/Tempranillo/Merlot blend called Síntesis; and a light, minerally, whippersnapper of a dry white made from…
The medal winners at the ultra-prestige 2012 San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition were announced last week (January 6). Duplicating results of recent years, wines grown in the Lodi AVA took home an impressive share of top honors. This year’s SFCWC set a new American wine competition record with a palate boggling 5,500 entries, surpassing its…
You don’t need flowers in your hair, just an enthusiasm for a wine grape that was once so well loved that it was nearly forgotten. Each year for over the past twenty years, some 7,000 to 8,000 Zinfandel lovers have flocked to San Francisco for Zinfandel Advocates & Producers’ annual Grand Tasting. Clearly, if there…
It takes an inquisitive mind to even want to make a wine called Charbono, and pure skill to make something significant from this little known black skinned grape. Meet Antonio Pasos, owner/winemaker of Lodi’s Pasos Vineyards. Mr. Pasos discovered his calling fairly early in life, when his family moved from Monterey (where he was born)…
On January 1, 2012 the Lodi Winegrape Commission – representing over 750 Lodi region growers plus over 80 wineries – will embark on a new era with the departure of Mark Chandler, the organization’s first and only Executive Director since its establishment 20 years ago. Mr. Chandler, who has privately been telling friends simply that…
In August of each year in the wine country, grapes are past véraison — when sugar rises and acidity decreases in the grapes, which turn from a hard green to shades of purple, red, black, blue or gold — and are beginning their race towards their peaks of flavor. As in many other parts of…
Looking back on another fruitful year in the Delta Looking back at our favorite photos of the past year also gives us a good sense of how vintage 2011 developed, and more to look forward to in the years to come when we finally uncork and taste the year in our mouths. Some of our…
What will Lodi’s winemakers be enjoying over the upcoming Christmas holidays? We asked a few of Lodi’s finest this question, and discovered a couple of things: how much of a mutual admiration society they have going on (they love drinking their colleagues’ wines), and how much they great European or classic American wines. What they…
We’re talking about big-name, big-shot wines that cost over $100, $200, or even $500 a bottle. They’re not like a Lexus, which at least gives you a nifty package of engineering. Fine wine is more like aesthetic arts or crafts: the qualities appreciated are sensory, and therefore very much a state of mind, rather than…
If you did well in part 1 of Test your Lodi white wine grape knowledge, here’s the skinny here: part 2 is a lot more challenging. So just how big a Lodi wine lover are you? You’ll find out at the very end of this post, where you’ll find the answers. Hints: Most of these…
One of the Lodi AVA‘s brightest success stories is Macchia Wines, owned and operated by Tim Holdener and his family. Like a dozen or so other key Lodi vintners, Holdener started off as a “home” winemaker, turned professional in 2001, and hasn’t looked back since: Macchia now produces about 10,000 cases a year, most of…
So you think you know your white wine grapes? Perhaps you do, and perhaps not nearly as much as you think. Whatever the case, here’s a fun exercise: see if you can identify the following six white wine grapes captured below in recent photos, accompanied by detailed descriptions of each grape’s history and provenance, past…
November’s sky is chill and drear, November’s leaf is red and sear , wrote Sir Walter Scott. Wherefore we cannot let the season pass without at least one photographic ode to the colors exploding in our vineyards as we speak. The phenomenon, as you know, occurs when temperatures dip and leaves are divested of chlorophyll,…
A winemaker’s stuffing, cranberries with bacon or cooked in rosé, and Thanksgiving chicken dinner-winner for two! How will Lodi’s winegrowing families be celebrating Thanksgiving this year? Thoughts and recipes making up part 2 of what they have shared with us… Rick Taylor – winemaker/partner, Riaza Wines: My wife Erin’s parents have a cabin up past…
Wine country stuffing, 2 ways to do cranberries & it’s off to the races… If anything, the Lodi American Viticultural Area is all about families. With ties to the land and ties among themselves, a significant proportion of Lodi families can trace their arrival to this agricultural community as far back as the 1800s. How…
St. Jorge Winery matches bacalhau with their extraordinary Portuguese varietal wines What is bacalhau, and why is St. Jorge winemaker/grower/proprietor Vern Vierra talking about it? Bacalhau is a universal dish in Portugal and Galicia (the northwest tip of Spain); and seeing that Mr. Vierra is of Portuguese descent, his enthusiasm is understandable. Bacalhau is, in…
Many wine lovers are foodies, and foodies are defined by their inveterate, bordering on obsessive, searches wherever they may be for the “best” of what there is to eat: be it the gravity defying bread putting soufflé at New Orleans’ Commander’s Palace, the mountainous kosher pastrami sandwich in Manhattan’s Pastrami Queen, the truffle egg salad…
Lodi winegrowers extol the challenging 2011 vintage This past Saturday (October 29), Barbara Huecksteadt was out in her 3.5 acre vineyard next to her home, hand picking the season’s final two rows of grapes all by herself, as she customarily does each year. The grapes were Marzemino — a rare, spectacularly dark, handsome looking grape…
Celebrate the 2011 Lodi harvest with wine tastings straight from the barrel! The First Sip , Lodi Wine Country’s annual end-of-harvest celebration, is exactly that: over 40 wineries will be opening their doors or tasting rooms and inviting you to enjoy the very first sips from the 2011 harvest — newly born wines, still in…
How Barry Genkow and Flash Détente’s new technology helps us an understand an old concept One of Lodi’s finest wines is m2 Wines’ Soucie Vineyard Zinfandel; which, vintage after vintage, is distinguished by an almost European quality that can only be described as earthy, loamy, and often mushroomy. M2 winemaker/proprietor Layne Montgomery often likens this…
Lodi, CA (October 19, 2011) – If you see the word LoCA in an advertisement or billboard over the next few months, don’t worry — Lodi’s growers and wineries have not gone crazy. They’re simply telling the world how thrilled they are about the wines they produce, and how much they love sharing a taste…
We often forget that wine is basically an agricultural product, which is why any winegrower will tell you: Mother Nature always has the last word. Even so, sometimes it has nothing to do with weather… Last week, as he was out in the fields analyzing Cabernet Sauvignon grapes being grown for the Mettler Family label,…
When you take a tub of grapes and ferment it with the yeast that has grown naturally on their own skins, you are incorporating the vineyard’s indigenous microbiology. If those grapes happen to be Zinfandel grown in Lodi, the resulting red wine will not necessarily compare to other wines made from Lodi grown Zinfandel –…
Kodakchrome clear blue skies, perfect wine sipping temperatures, and precisely parallel white vapors trailing soaring Blue Angels like a hexagram of the heavens, the strings of Snap Jackson’s guitar, high, low, hither and yon across the San Francisco Bay: these were but some of the highlights of Lodi’s 2011 Treasure Island WineFest this past Sunday,…