California wine
-
Strong All Along (2025 Santa Barbara County Tasting Report)
A quick update to let you know that another 2025 tasting report in which I had a hand in creating is now available on Cristaldi & Co., this time focusing on the under-served California wine region of Santa Barbara County. 10+ wineries and 150+ wines…
-
Golden Years (Tasting Fifty Harvests Of Mondavi Reserve Cabernet)
Know how to get a cavalcade of seasoned (read: potentially jaded) wine writers, winemakers, wine growers, and wine industry insiders to go as quiet as mice (I’m talking pin-drop-sounds-like-a-jet-engine-on-fire quiet), and as stupefied as deer in the headlights? I do. I saw Robert Mondavi Winery…
-
California wine, crowd pleaser wines, elegant wines, kick-ass wines, on the road, sexy wines, wine reviewWorking Hard To Change Nothing (Williams Selyem Recent Releases)
There was so much that I didn’t want to like about Sonoma’s storied Williams Selyem. The too-cool-for-school exclusivity of their mailing list. The imposing fortress-like facade of their “barrel-evoking” tasting room and its “wall of bottles.” The fact that they used terms like “barrel-evoking.” That…
-
Mama Don’t Take No Mess (Livermore Valley, Reconsidered at Palate Press)
One of my media tours this year had me returning to California’s perennially underrated Livermore Valley, where I’d not been for a few years, and reconnecting with the likes of local vintners Karl Wente and Steve Mirassou, neither of whom I’d seen (or, more importantly,…
