“It only took me… eleven years!” remarked Ron Yates, owner of the family-run Spicewood Vineyards, which produces about three thousand cases from about forty acres in the about-as-unlikely-as-they-come-at-first-but-upon-further-review-kind-of-inevitable fine wine region of Texas Hill Country. Yates was speaking about the fact that he and Texas-native winemaker Todd Crowell can now offer an all-estate tasting list….
Category: on the road
Cairanne’s Long Game
No one could accuse the Southern Rhône cru Cairanne of rushing into things. For much of its history, Cairanne seems to have been metaphysically hiding from the fine wine world behind its own rocky outcrops. While technically part of the Côtes du Rhône designation since 1953, it took Cairanne 87 years to reach cru AOC…
Height Matters (Exceptional Gigondas)
Smack up against the Dentelles de Montmirail mountain range sits Gigondas, a former ancient Roman soldier retirement home area and Southern Rhône cru that, technically, contains more woodlands than vineyards. And that’s after a killer frost in the 1960s wiped out a good portion of olive tree plantings, ushering in a shift towards more vine…
“Big Character” (Diving Into Rasteau’s New-Old Identity)
Well… I’m in the unenviable position of having to date myself. Embarrassingly (not because of my age, about which I mostly don’t care, but because of my obvious lack of knowledge), I knew little about the Rasteau appellation prior to visiting it on a recent Rhône media jaunt, aside from the fact that it was…