At the end of July, I wound up at the top of Chalk Hill in Healdsburg. It was one of those events that I should be used to by now but that make me slightly uncomfortable anyway because they a) are held in lavish settings that seem to cost a billion dollars, b) usually end…
Category: wine review
Not Much Gold In Them Thar Hills (Inside The 2011 Lake County Wine Awards, Part Three)
[ This is part three of a short series covering my tenure as a judge in the 2011 Lake County Wine Competition – for more details, check out Part The First and Part The Second. ] The Gold Rush in California dried up more-or-less 150 years ago. And the 2011 Lake County Wine Awards results…
Boozy Bargains Best Big Boys. Sort Of. (Inside The 2011 Lake County Wine Awards, Part Two)
Sensationalist headline, for sure – and not all of the wines I’m going to talk about today were boozy. And they didn’t really best the biggest boys, if by big boy we (and by “we” I really mean “me”) are talking about the best wines of the Lake County Wine Awards (more on those next…
Focus, Focus, Focus: Zeroing In On Wines For Now At Virginia’s Blenheim Vineyards
I am not a fan of small producers in emerging wine regions bottling and selling a large array of varietal wines; almost everyone loves having choices, but too often the cumulative result in this case ends up feeling like a Zinfandel that’s been watered-down in a feeble attempt to get it under 16% abv –…