California sparkling wine has come a long way (baby) since German draft-dodger and later NYC barber Jacob Schram decided that the hot and sunny knolls of Calistoga in the 1860s looked like a suitable place to plant vines like those he’d left behind in his beloved Rhineland (after all, he’d seen hills far steeper –…
Category: on the road
Nickel & Nickel Provides More Than A Dime’s Worth In Unexpected Napa Valley Cabernet Terroir Masterclass
One of the ancillary benefits of being hosted at Auction Napa Valley are the winery-sponsored dinners that take place during the evenings preceding the big auction event.The food is usually fantastic, the wine is flowing (often a bit too) freely, and it’s hard to beat the locations. For example, when I attended a few weeks…
The Southern Hemisphere’s Best Chardonnay? (Tasting Leeuwin Art Series 2005)
I know what a lot of you geeky-geeks (I use that as a term of endearment, by the way!) are already thinking after reading the title: Dude, WTF?!? What about Yarra Yering? Yeah, yeah, I know, I know. Here’s the thing about Yarra Yering for me: that Chardonnay is the Moriarity to my Holmes; while…
1WineDude.com TV Episode 50: When You Turn Purple (Go Inside The Haro Wine Battle 2012!)
In this (the fiftieth!) episode of 1WineDude TV, I take a few hundred years of bizarre Rioja wine tradition head-on, and live to tell about it (though my clothes clearly get the worst of things), as part of my recent jaunt to the Rioja winemaking region with Vibrant Rioja. Herein, you will witness a great…