This year I once again had the honor of judging alongside several of my wine biz cohorts at what has become one of my favorite weekends all year: the San Francisco International Wine Competition, held at the swanky and suave Hotel Nikko in downtown SF. The 2019 SFIWC incarnation took place November 9th through November…
Category: kick-ass wines
Putting a Thermal Spring in Your Step (the Wines of Thermenregion)
Back in May (I know, I know…), I was a media guest for the 2019 Austrian Wine Summit, during which I was lucky enough to participate in a tour “along the Danube,” visiting and tasting through Austria’s classic wine producing regions. It was pretty much as awesome as that sentence makes it sound. Even so,…
Making Hay (Rowen Recent Releases)
The word rowen – which is of Middle English ancestry, from an Old Northern French variant of regain, and almost certainly will have your phone’s auto-correct annoyingly trying to change it to rower – almost literally means to make hay. Well, technically, it means “a second growth of grass or hay in one season” –…
Scandal-Less is More (Flowers Winery Recent Releases)
There’s nothing like a good scandal to encourage a hit of the reset button. Or, in the case of Sonoma’s venerable Flowers Winery, it’s more akin to just hitting the next-phase button. Flowers has always seem to operate a bit under-the-radar by upper-tier California wine brand standards; which makes sense, considering that founders Joan and…