12 fantastic Lodi buys that take you from the realm of the senses into heights of the intellect

Visiting wine journalists on the grape sorting line at Lodi's Bokisch Vineyards.

"Wine, women and song... why reinvent the wheel?" That's the writing on a wall I once saw in Las Vegas' Caesars Palace. While there was undoubtedly wine and singing aplenty in the historical Caesar's era, a little reading shows that the expression first became popular in Germany, during the early 1800s. Aren't you glad you know that?

It is also good to know that through good times and bad, since before the days of the Romans, we have always had wine. It was, I think, Robert Mondavi who pointed out that the civilizing attributes of wine have been known since, well, the beginning of civilization. 

Mr. Mondavi was a pioneer of the modern day California wine renaissance. There were numerous others, of course, and their collective impact was so huge that we can now say, here at the start of 2025, that American wines are far, far better than ever before... 

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Dispelling myths about wines and foods

Guests enjoying multiple wines during dinner at Lodi's Towne House Restaurant. Jill Means Design.

Let's start off 2025 talking about something a lot of wine geeks seem to have little use for. Wine in the context of food.

Every ten or twenty years, or so it seems, the anti-food factions seem to pop up in the winosphere. Old-timers can even remember back in the 1980s when the famed wine critic Robert Parker used to rail against the very idea of "food wines." That is, lighter, more subtle wines that, theoretically, were made to have higher percentage chance of complimenting a wider range of foods. To Parker, those wines were just poor excuses for weak or uninteresting wines. C'est la vie.

To a certain extent, of course, to be oblivious to wine and food pairing "conventions," as one wine educator recently put it, is to live in your own state of bliss. It's a free country. There is nothing wrong with the “drink-whatever-you-like” approach when it comes to what you put on the table. The way I see it, it's not much different than eating in general: Whenever you’re hungry, just open up a favorite canned food or stop by the nearest fast food joint on the way home...

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Is the wine industry effectively communicating with Gen Z consumers? (Part 2 of Sobering thoughts at the start of 2025)

Visiting wine influencers preserving the moment in Lodi's Abba Vineyard.

Part 2 of Sobering thoughts at the start of 2025⏤The state of the American wine industry

Since overall wine consumption began showing a statistical decline in 2022, all eyes have been on the youngest segment of demographic cohorts, identified as Generation Z, born between 1997 and 2012.

The general feeling, based on market research, is that the latest generation of consumers, who first came of legal drinking age in 2018, have not been holding up their end.

For Boomers, still identified as the largest volume consumers of wine, the idea of consumers in their early to mid-20s not being entirely enthusiastic about wine comes as no surprise. Even the youngest Boomers, now in their early 60s, can well remember what they used to drink in their early 20s: Either no wine at all, or tutti-fruity commercial products such as Blue Nun, Lancers and Riunite. If they drank "California" at all, it was jug wines such as E. & J. Gallo Hearty Burgundy or Chablis Blanc...

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Sobering thoughts at the start of 2025⏤The state of the American wine industry

Young wine lovers during a recent Lodi Wine & Chocolate Weekend celebration.

The business of Lodi is grapes. In fact, the region's climate and soils are so ideal for the cultivation of grapevines, Lodi has become the largest winegrowing region in America. 

To what extent? According to most recent USDA reports, the Lodi AVA (i.e., Crush District 11) crushes approximately 20.5% of all wine grapes grown in California. To put things in perspective, Napa Valley produces just 4% of California wine (per Capstone California).

There are, of course, wine industries in other states. Still, since 81% of all domestically produced wine is grown in California (re Wine Institute), approximately 17.1% of all American wine is grown in Lodi...

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