In this video ChrisO gives you the sights and sounds of the 19th Annual ZAP (Zinfandel Advocates & Producers) Grand Zinfandel Tasting held at Fort Mason Center in San Francisco.
Stay tuned for more on the 19th Annual ZAP Zinfandel Event including a list of recommended zins.
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Get ready, I am going to share one of the best kept secrets on how to get your hands on some of Napa Valley’s finest and rarest wines. So here is what you do: you enroll your child (provided you have school aged children) or you could borrow someone else’s, and enroll them in a Napa Valley school and then wait 6 months for their school fundraiser wine auction to roll around and then attend and bid on some incredible wine lots. Or you wait until June when you hop aboard your private Gulfstream V jet to attend the yearly Napa Valley wine auction, where you rub elbows with Jay Leno, Terry Hatcher, and Francis Ford Coppola and bid $100,000 for 2 bottles of wine. Or you regularly read vintuba.com and wait for ChrisO to give you the inside scoop on how to bid by proxy at upcoming school fundraising auctions.
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I just returned from a weekend of spirits tasting. As the Old World Old Guy, I was shocked by the prevailing attitudes I found my fellow tasters had, including the lecturer at our event, to lesser-known spirits. Everyone knows it is fashionable to like Cognac. Aficionados go for Armagnac and their dried fruit flavors. Fewer are enthusiastic about Brandy de Jerez. Surprising, to me at least, is the level of enthusiasm for the best-selling “clean spirits,” e.g. vodka. Its singular distinguishing mark is this: the less you can identify the base material, the better it seems to be.
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WARNING: If you are a redneck you may be offended by this episode!
In this episode of Vintuba TV ChrisO reviews the 2007 Stuhlmuller Vineyards Estate Zinfandel from Alexander Valley aka “The Naomi Campbell of Zinfandels”. If you like Zinfandel you are going to want to watch this episode. Stuhlmuller Vineyards is a small family winery located just past Healdsburg in Sonoma County.
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“In 1954 the village council of Châtauneuf-du-Pape was quite perturbed and apprehensive that flying saucers or ‘flying cigars’ might do damage to their vineyards were they to land therein. So, right-thinking men all, they passed an ordinance prohibiting the landing of flying saucers or flying cigars in their vineyards. (This ordinance has worked very well in discouraging such landings.) The ordinance further states that any volitional object that did alight was to be taken immediately to the pound.”
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It takes a lot of sheep to make good wine in New Zealand. Sheeps milk, to be more exact.
Not that beer is losing ground as a favorite drink for the winemaking set during harvest; and these winemakers are not necessarily guzzling back tall glasses of the white milky stuff. But if it weren’t for all of the sheep in the country, who knows how long it would have taken New Zealand to get into the international winemaking game.
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We are giving away 2 sets of 2 tickets to the 19th Annual Grand Zinfandel Tasting at Fort Mason ins San Fransisco on January 30th. Watch the video to see how you can enter to win. Good luck!
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This book is all about excess. Money apparently so easily made, competing with excessive wealth by demanding attention in a bidding war for the unreal:
Reads like a whodunit. Fascinating. There are some chilling similarities to Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme.
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ChrisO takes a look at the 2008 Fontanafredda “Briccotonde” Barbera which heralds from the Piemonte region of northern Italy. Come see what $11.99 will buy you.
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There are those who subscribe to truth-in-origin, and others who dismiss this notion as silliness. You could count the French, however you feel about them, most Europeans, the Slow Food Movement and perhaps Alice Waters among the former. The latter are of the flat-earth persuasion: the Mondovino coterie, the varietally obsessed wine lovers who discount the origins of wine and those who uphold McDonald’s uniformity of quality as something to attain as a goal.
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