Towne House Restaurant's Neighborhood Nights brings products of local farmers and Lodi growers together on this historical site

Lodi journalist Suzanne Ledbetter (also of the Vino Farms winegrowing family) enjoying Niman Ranch carnitas at Wine & Roses Hotel's Towne House Restaurant. Jill Means Design.

This past Sunday/Monday (June 23-24), Lodi's Wine & Roses Hotel welcomed guests to the first of their planned "Neighborhood Night" events in Towne House Restaurant. 

The newly launched Neighborhood Night dinners, explains local influencer and marketing consultant Tracci Dare (retained by Wine & Roses Hotel), will entail 3-course offerings for $45 (not including tax and gratuity)... 

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Factors explaining Zinfandel's spectacular food-versatility

Cellar dinner at St. Amant Winery, a Lodi Zinfandel specialist.

The environmental factor

It's time to talk about Zinfandel. Oh, I admit, for me it's always time to talk about Zinfandel. That is because I am what people often used to call a "foodie." Better than "wine geek," I guess.

Be as it may, Zinfandel is a far, far more food-versatile wine than many wine lovers (especially the geeks) may think. I came to that conclusion after over 30 years of observation and logical conclusions working in or with restaurants, my former career. Even today, when reaching for a bottle for dinner, I am more likely to pop open a Zinfandel than any other varietal wine of any color...

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Finding ideal wines for foods is as easy as putting together ingredients in a dish

No-brainer of a food and wine match: Spicy, meaty, smoky, savory baby back ribs (in this photo, cooked by Lodi winemaker Mike McCay) with spicy, meaty, smoky, savory Petite Sirah (poured by Lodi winemaker Gerardo Espinosa of Anaya Vineyards).

Picking a perfect wine for a dish, or preparing a perfect dish for a pre-chosen wine, is a lot less mysterious than you may think. In fact, it's easy as pie.

Make that, easy as ice cream sundae. Everyone knows, for instance, that vanilla ice cream and hot chocolate syrup go great together because both the ice cream and syrup are sweet yet vanilla and chocolate are contrasting flavors that compliment each other. There can also a complimenting contrast of temperature (when hot fudge goes on cold ice cream). For textural contrast, you might add walnuts (soft/crunchy/sweet/nutty) and whipped cream (creamy/airy); and for even more and different flavors, bananas and a cherry. 

Call that dessert nirvana. It is also a basic example how we cook⏤putting ingredients together that just make sense⏤as well as how wines and foods are ideally matched... 

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Artistic colors bring new meaning to our favorite images of Lodi wine country

Artistic rendering of a caravan of Zinfandel pickers—ushered through the old vines like triumphant troops—on a colorful early autumn morning in Lodi wine country.

I spend a lot of time going over my own photos of Lodi wine country. The best ones, I think, are the accidents. It is one thing to see something beautiful in a vineyard. It is another to capture that beauty with a camera. If you're lucky you snap a photo that you find to be very expressive; but only later, when you are sitting at a desk. 

More often than not, though, even with the photos you like the best, you wish they said more. Take, for instance, this close-up below of second crop Carignan grapes taken on a blindingly bright October morning, several weeks after the harvest. I don't know what you see, but what I see is that the grapes themselves are fuzzy, like purplish mud. Not nearly as scrumptious looking as when I saw them with my own eyes in the vineyard.

The camera's eye, on the other hand, captured the leaf's intricate network of veins⏤making me imagine random roadways on a distant planet like Mars⏤etched into the Carignan leaf, which was turning red and crinkly in the aftermath of the season, long after the green color necessary for photosynthesis was gone...

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Why Lodi produces delicate, fragrant styles of red wine contradicting everything you may have heard about warm climate regions

Harvest morning in Zinfandel block over 100 years old on east side of Lodi's Mokelumne River appellation.

When a rose is but a rose

In our previous post we addressed the matter of Putting to bed the myth that light and crisply balanced whites can't be grown in warm climates.

This time around, let's talk about red wines in warm climate regions. Particularly Zinfandel.

For the longest time it has been thought that the biggest, ripest, heaviest and fruitiest Zinfandels come from the warmest regions of California, such as Lodi. Therefore, in cooler climate regions, such as Sonoma County or Napa Valley, it is assumed that most Zinfandels are among the lightest and most subtle in their varietal fruit profiles.

Problem is, as anyone who has ever compared Zinfandels grown in regions such as Lodi, Sonoma County or Napa Valley knows, this assumption is not necessarily true. In fact, it is usually wrong...

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Putting to bed the myth that light and crisply balanced whites can't be grown in warm climates

Clements Hills-Lodi harvesting of Assyrtiko, a Mediterranean grape of Greek origin known for retaining a refreshingly high acidity grown in even the hottest, dryest climate.

Albariño, Assyrtiko, Bacchus, Bourboulenc, Chenin blanc, Clairette blanche, Grenache blanc, Fiano, Kerner, Macabeo, Parellada, Piquepoul, Riesling, Vermentino, Xarel-lo and more...

The other day I was telling an old friend/colleague about a fantastic 20-year-old bottle of white wine grown in Lodi I recently enjoyed. How it tasted fresh as a daisy and, a little surprising, was made from Chardonnay⏤a grape not exactly considered the pièce de résistance of Lodi, a region better known as the "Zinfandel capital of the world."

He stopped me and said, "Wait a second... there is white wine in Lodi?" He wasn't being facetious.

Needless to say, I told my friend that Lodi is like any other commercial wine region, and any region that grows grapes for wineries that put the kazillion bottles of wine on grocery store shelves across the country has to grow white wine grapes, and lots of them...

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