Message to Sonoma: you’re no longer in your neighbor Napa Valley’s shadow. You’re not the uncool kid at the dance, the next-to-last picked for the two-hand-touch football game during recess, or the slightly-less-talented and almost-as-comely sister when compared to Napa, at least not on the high-end of the vinous spectrum. That bit of news flash…
Category: elegant wines
Raiders Of The Lost Art (Tasting Not-So-Recent Releases At La Rioja Alta, S.A.)
There’s a scene at the end of Raiders Of The Lost Ark (please don’t tell me you haven’t seen it… it’s only the greatest action/adventure flick yet made by humans) where an unnamed warehouse worker wheels a large box, presumably containing the Lost Ark of the Covenant (which turns out to be a WOMD) into…
Modern Wines, Old School Humility, And… Tank Hosing (Tasting Miguel Merino Recent Releases in Rioja Alta)
“In Spain, when you’re fifteen, sixteen years old, you have to decide what you want to study: Science or Humanities,” joked Rioja’s Miguel Merino. “I chose Humanities… so I can’t let the wine go wrong, otherwise I won’t know what to do to make money!” The diminutive Merino, who spent twenty years in various aspects…
Rare By Nature, Rare By Nurture (The Inside View Of Rutherglen Rare Topaque And Muscat)
Geographic isolation engenders resourcefulness. As well as entire rooms that smell like caramel and sultanas. Let’s start with the resourcefulness. When Scottish friends George Sutherland Smith and John Banks decided in the 1860s that they couldn’t wait for materials to be shipped in to them to build All Saints, a winemaking property on the bank…