Mystery wine for the ages: the 2010 Borra Heritage red

80 year old Church Block Carginane (Sept. 2012)

Part of being a winemaker in Lodi, evidently, is being a prognosticator; albeit, no spooky powers necessary – just good sense.

During the first week of October 2010, on the day that Steve Borra, and his Borra Vineyards field manager Manuel Maldonado picked the grapes going into their yearly “field blend,” Borra winemaker Markus Niggli took one look at the fruit coming in – plump and bursting with vivid, zesty flavors – and pronounced the quality “fantastic,” and confidently predicted, “2010 will be a great vintage” (re our original October 14, 2010 blogpost, Rhapsody in red)...

Sep 18, 2012 at 5:42 PM Permalink

Interview with George Mettler: the patriarch of Harney Lane

Harney Lane Wiinery's George Mettler

The latest wine by Harney Lane Winery – a red wine bottled as the Harney Lane Lodi Patriarch’s Promise ($40) – is as special as any that this acclaimed winery has ever made:  thick and chewy with dense, yet perfectly smooth, flavors of dried trail-mix berries, spiced with cinnamon, cracked pepper and, strangely enough, aromatic suggestions of fennel root and loamy earth, veering towards a mushroomy broth; at the same time, brightly fruited and full bodied, without tasting weighty or ponderous...

Sep 13, 2012 at 5:53 PM Permalink

Early days of harvest in Lodi

7 AM, September 10, 2012: Zinfandel picked for McCay's Truluck's bottlng (west side of Lodi's Mokelumne River AVA)

Of yearly harvests, Carl Sandburg once waxed poetic:

Under the summer roses
When the flagrant crimson
Lurks in the dusk
Of the wild red leaves,
Love, with little hands,
Comes and touches you
With a thousand memories,
And asks you
Beautiful, unanswerable questions.

… and some of our own memories of the first few weeks of Lodi’s 2012 harvest...

Sep 10, 2012 at 6:13 PM Permalink

Passport advisory: where to find Lodi wines that walk the wild side

Attention, “all you protest kids” (to quote Lou Reed’s Sweet Jane) on the look-out for something off-the-beaten-track during this month’s Passport (good through October 6) Road Trip!:  the Lodi AVA does indeed grow and produce its share of glass shattering wines… if you know wherefore or what to look for...

Sep 6, 2012 at 6:26 PM Permalink

Game plan for your LoCA Passport Road Trip!

As part of Discover California’s official California Wine Month, Lodi’s winegrowers have put together an exciting calendar of events running through the entire month of April and through October 6, 2012:  the LoCA Road Trip!

And to make it easy for you to pick and choose, there is a LoCA Road Trip Passport that will get you into everything either for free or entitling you to fantastic discounts...

Sep 4, 2012 at 5:09 PM Permalink

Allowing heritage vines to speak their piece in !ZaZin & REDS

!ZaZin Zinfandel clusters, early August 2012

Patrick Campbell – who lives in Santa Rosa, CA, and is the owner/vineyard manager of Tierra Divina Vineyards – sources grapes from his two favorite places in the world:  the Mendoza region in Argentina, and the Lodi American Viticultural Area of California...

Aug 30, 2012 at 5:31 PM Permalink

Hunters Oak’s red wines carving out their own niche

Hunters Oak Vineyard, in Lodi's Clements Hills AVA

The cool thing about Estate Crush, located in Downtown Lodi, is that a number of small lot growers’ wines are produced (as well as sold) there.  Third generation Lodi farmer Ross Schmiedt has his Twisted Roots wines made at Estate Crush; so does Bob Lauchland, who has been having fun with his whimsical Crazy Legs and Jubilee labels...

Aug 28, 2012 at 5:41 PM Permalink

Road Trip! (passport to celebrating California Wine Month in Lodi)

Hunters Oak Vineyard, in Lodi's Clements Hills AVA

Most of the cats that you meet on the streets speak of true love,
Most of the time they’re sittin’ and cryin’ at home… 
Truckin’, like the do-dah man…
- Grateful Dead

Aug 23, 2012 at 5:48 PM Permalink

Michael David does the reggay and Rhone…

Jamaica's Mystic Bowie loosens up the REGGAE & RHONE crowd...

There’s a word we used to use in Jamaica called ‘streggae’.  If a gal is walking and the guys look at her and say “Man, she’s streggae” it means she don’t dress well, she look raggedy.  The girls would say that about the men too.  This one morning me and my two friends were playing and I said,”’okay man, let’s do the reggay.”  It was just something that came out of my mouth.  So we just start singing “Do the reggay, do the reggay” and created a beat.  - Toots Hibbert (Toots & the Maytals)

Aug 20, 2012 at 5:57 PM Permalink

Photographic report on start of Lodi’s 2012 harvest

Liz Bokisch with their first pick of 2012: Vista Luna Vineyard Verdelho

This past Tuesday, August 14, we spent a day checking out the progress of Lodi‘s 2012 crop; which, in fact, was already underway — at least in the Vista Luna Vineyard in Lodi’s Jahant AVA, where we found Markus and Liz Bokisch hand picking Verdelho for their Bokisch Vineyards brand, a select group of their small batch artisanal winemaker/clients (Odisea, Forlorn Hope, Kongsgaard, and The Scholium Project), as well as machine picking Verdelho for one of their bigger clients (Constellation Brands)...

Aug 16, 2012 at 7:15 PM Permalink