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…
Category: elegant wines
Bubbly At 150 (Schramsberg Recent Releases, And Why It’s Okay That California Is Not Champagne)
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 –…
On Planting A Vineyard By Hand, And Not Getting Your Wines Reviewed By U.S. Critics (Yarra’s Giant Steps)
“I can’t review your wines, they have too much acid.” Those were words that a reviewer at one of the U.S. wine glossies told Aussie Yarra Valley producer’s Giant Steps head honcho Phil Sexton (according to Phil, anyway). To which Phil’s reaction was, apparently, something to the effect of “but that’s the whole point!” Linear…
Roots, Reconnected (Tasting Inglenook’s 1960 Cabnernet)
Jeff Smith, of Hourglass wines (and who, incidentally, just took the rather bold move of parting ways with long-standing and celebrated consulting winemaker Robert Foley, and bringing on Cade and Plumpjack alumnus Anthony “Tony” Biagi), knows his Napa Valley wine history. Fortunately for me (more on that in a minute or two). Smith’s roots are…