Ok so perhaps a stretch on the Niel Young lyrics but the sentiment sure is there. It would totally rock to live on Mt Veeder like the Fontanella’s. You see Jeff and wife Karen have something of a paradise property where Jeff crafts some exceptional wines for his own label, as well as for custom crush clients.
I love wine. This probably will not come as a surprise to any of you. Why else would I author a wine blog right? Spend my nights drinking and studying this elixir of life? What I love about wine is the journey of discovery, meeting the people, finding new and unique wines, and sharing both with you, the reader of this blog. On Monday of this week my journey of discovery took me to an event hosted by Paul Mabray of Vintank in Napa. Paul is the godfather of all things tech and wine on the west coast, but more than that, he has the ability to get some pretty amazing people in the same room and let them get to know each other and make connections.
Switzerland is not generally known abroad for its wines. Several factors contribute to that: the climate is much different from that of sun-drenched California, production is expensive due to the cost of real-estate and labor costs are well above the EU, and especially South America. In a world accustomed to increasingly powerful wines at competitive prices, Swiss wines will have a difficult time against wines from Argentina, Australia and Chile, for example…. Read more
All sorts of things probably spring to mind when I say Texas – big, oil, Houston we have a problem, wide open spaces, women with big hair, Texas twangs, over the top state pride, cowboys, former presidents who are cowboys – but my guess is that wine probably doesn’t really make it onto most people’s list.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.”
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.
