As you know… I live in Tuscaaaaaaaaaaaaaany…

Oh, wait, that’s some other guy who critiques wines and makes videos.

Let’s try this again… As some of you know, I was in Colorado recently, touring the Western Slopes wine regions of Grand Valley and (the really high elevation of) West Elks, and finishing up by attending Drink Local Wine 2012 in Denver, courtesy of the Colorado Wine Industry Development Board.

During DLW 2012, one of the panels, titled “Local Food, Local Wine, and Why They Don’t Like Each Other” (manned by Dave McIntyre of the Washington Post and co-founder of DrinkLocalWine.com; Rene Chazottes from Pacific Club in Newport Beach; Evan Faber of Salt in Boulder; and Jensen Cummings from the stellar Row 14 in downtown Denver), explored the sometimes rocky relationship between local wines and local restaurants – namely exploring the open question (I’m paraphrasing here):

“Why don’t more local restaurants stock local wines, when they almost always stock local produce without much hesitation?”

This was a discussion I found timely and poignant, seeing only a day earlier how tightly Western Slopes business like the rugged-turned-luxury (and stellar) Smith Fork Ranch incorporate their local wine producers into their wine lists and menus.

Answers varied, but there was no shortage of heated debate about whether or not local restaurants should or should not be stacking the deck in favor of local wines. To understand why this isn’t such a no-brainer, I think we need to first look at local restaurants as not actually being that local…

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With the In Pursuit Of Balance tasting (which recently hit NYC), co-creators Parr and Jasmine Hirsch (of Hirsch Vineyards) have brought together some of the most exciting – and highest quality – producers of Pinot Noir and Chardonnay in California (many of which hail from the West Sonoma Coast, where those wines are rapidly reaching world-class status).

For me, their invitation to attend the NYC event was a chance to catch-up with some of the wines and producers I’d first been introduced to last year at the inaugural West Of West festival in Occidental, catch-up with Raj, and maybe get introduced to some new wines.

I expected to find some really (really!) good Pinot Noir and Chardonnay at the IPOB tasting recently at City Winery in NYC.

I just didn’t expect some of best of those wines to be Raj’s.

But there you have it – the wacky world of wine, in which a sommelier can team up with a California native (Sashi Moorman) and make better wines than some people who have been at it for decades longer. And I’m merely calling it as I see (er, taste) it – the juice is the juice, and in this case the juice is pretty damn good; in fact, it was some of the best offered in a room full of wines where sub-par offerings were hard to come by…

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Standing in between fifth generation Livermore wine producer Karl Wente (who is light, with executive-style, thick brown hair, and built like an NCAA basketball player) and his best friend (who is dark, soft-spoken, and built like an NCAA basketball player) is a bit like what I imagine standing at the bottom of a well might feel like.

It didn’t help that, as Karl and his buddy played small acoustic instruments (guitar and viola, respectively) that in their long, lanky arms looked not unlike undersized toys, all 5’5” of my frame was manning a large upright bass and fumbling my way through a jam of Karl’s laid-back, folk-inspired tunes (what he calls “Porch Rock”).

So while I certainly enjoyed performing in the impromptu concert inside Karl’s probably-in-constant-state-of-semi-renovation living room, I couldn’t shake the feeling that, when I’d been invited to Karl’s home to taste through the modern Wente portfolio, I’d actually been invited to taste a lineup of wines made in Brobdingnag (what, you’ve never read Gulliver’s Travels? As my late grandmother used to say, “what the hell AILS YOU?!??”)…

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Ok, so, let’s get one thing out of the way right now: NO we did NOT talk about that Courtney chick, okay?

During my recent jaunt to Napa Land, I stopped at the (gorgeous) Puma Springs vineyard for a quick lunch-and-tasting interview with two of the young gun winemakers behind the Envolve wine, the most famous of which is Ben Flajnik, who everyone and their sister now knows was the star of the most recent run of ABC’s The Bachelor.

Which everyone calls “ABC’s The Bachelor” as if it competes with another The Bachelor reality somewhere. Which I think is totally odd. But not as odd for me – or, more accurately, not as surreal for me! – as Playboy Playmates telling me over social media that they loved my wine article (and yet, it happened).  Anyway…

What’s gotten lost in all of the Bachelor-mania (which is a lot like Beatle-mania only over just one guy) is that Ben and his partners (Danny Fay and Mike Benziger, the latter of whom has some serious CA wine street cred running through his family tree) are making some seriously good wines, which I learned when interviewing them for the new column on Playboy.com (the title of which is “Wined Down,” in case you were playing along on the title suggestions thrown in by readers)…

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