In a landscape of rolling, oak-dotted hills and vineyards producing loads of forgettable wine, one Sierra Foothills winery is determined to make its mark. It’s called Cedarville Vineyard and it’s run by “tech refugees” and UC Davis oenology graduates Jonathan Lachs and Susan Marks. (That’s me with Jonathan at their tasting room.) Cedarville’s acreage is well-positioned on a hillside at a slightly higher altitude than most of the area’s wineries, so the grapes are protected from late frosts and kept cool at at night. Just as importantly, the husband-wife team is keeping quality high by keeping quantity under control: low yields in the vineyard, hands-on attention in the winery, and a very small production. (They do less than 2,000 cases a year and have no plans to grow beyond that.)

For our special favorites from Cedarville’s current line up, click here: More

Normally the words “emerging wine region” should merit a wine lover’s attention. With demand (and prices) rising for well-known labels, emerging wine regions are often the source of easy-to-find, easy-on-your-wallet palate pleasers. Such is the case, for example, with South Africa or Languedoc-Roussillon in the south of France.

Unfortunately, the term can also refer to an area that is, on the whole, still struggling to get around some of the climate and soil issues that prevented it from being a prestige wine region in the first place. Such is the case, I’d argue after a recent visit, to the Sierra Foothills in California.

Also known as Gold Country because of the famous gold strike near Sutter’s Mill in 1848, the region lies mostly in Amador and Calaveras counties, about halfway between Sacramento and Yosemite. Many wild-wild-West remnants of the great rush remain, but these days in the Sierra Foothills it’s safe to say that red, white, and rosé is the new gold.

Not in the 14-karat sense, though. For my terrifying encounter with a junk-yard dog of a chard, click here: More

What if I told you that the best wine list I ever saw didn’t really exist?

No, it wasn’t in cyberspace or science fiction. It was at Fine’s Cellar, a smart restaurant in Phoenix, Arizona I visited not long after it opened last winter. Partly because the paint was just dry, but mostly because the owner Michael Fine is himself a wine retailer, at that point the bistro-esque spot had a printed list only of wines by the glass. If you wanted a bottle, you got to wander – really, on foot – through a small but very well edited store in the front of the building, pick one out, and drink it at retail cost.

We enjoyed a relatively hard-to-find, over-the-top rich, 2004 Two Hands’ Shiraz “Bella’s Garden” for a mere $47. We were severely tempted, too, by a 2003 Carruades de Lafitte, the prêt-à-porter version of Lafitte Rothchild, for about the same price. At any other restaurant, we’d have had to slap down a hundie at least for each.

For the secret to Mr. Fine’s fine idea, click here: More

I’ve had a lucky streak with barbera. Three standout glasses of this Italian-native varietal from two very different places made a recent impression on me; the samples I drank on a recent trip to the Sierra Foothills helped redeem an entire wine region. And unlike in “Goldilocks” no personal property was vandalized in my pursuit of satisfaction.

For my list, starting at the bottom with a rich red with roasted coffee notes, click here: More

For four days now, I’ve been subject to a very strange feeling: sobriety. As in total abstinence, not a drop of wine, for 90.5 hours and counting. It’s not a feeling that I’m used to, and certainly not one I’d bring upon myself willfully. (A long weekend-long bender of progressive July 4 parties put me out of commission in this case.) But my haplessly clear-headed state has led to a lot of thoughts about the importance of wine in my life.

Here’s something of a diary of my temporary teetotaling. Pray to Bacchus it passes soon. More

There’s no question that Napa rules when it comes to California — make that New World — wine, especially cabernet. No other region outside of France makes red wine as delicious, famous, and collectible as Napa.
That’s exactly why wine lovers should set themselves a challenge when they’re pondering a shelf or a wine list: Try something not from Napa. It’ll be a trip out of your comfort zone, for sure. And even if that touriga nacional from Portugal (for example) turns out not to be your new favorite, you will be changed. You will get a red with more native flavors, unmasked by heavy-handed oak flavors and proud of its local distinctiveness. I guarantee you’ll save money, too.

I gave myself an especially difficult version of this challenge at a fancy steak house recently. For what I bagged on my safari out of Napa, click here: More

The wine was great — red, white, and sweet Bordeaux from the acclaimed 2005 vintage — but the best part of the evening was hobnobbing with a real blue blood! Yes, that’s me with Stephan von Neipperg, Count of the Holy Roman Empire and managing director at Canon-la-Gaffelière, one of the producers at a giant tasting a few weeks ago. As a happy coincidence, his Saint Emilion landed in my top five.

For my tasting report on the good, the bad, and the infantile of the 2005 Bordeaux, click here for more: More

Just in time for tax season, here’s a list of my ten favorite wines that cost less than, well, a lot of stuff, including a bouquet of flowers, three trips across the Golden Gate Bridge — even Madonna’s new CD. To make it easier to find the wines, I’ve listed the four reds, one rosé, and five whites by type, and then supplied a particular example from a producer I’ve grown to love. So if, say, you’re inspired to cop a highly-recommended cheap thrill off a pinot bianco from Italy, but can’t find my favorite from Terre di Gioia, trust me. Pretty much any pinot bianco in this price range will do the trick. For less than $3 per glass on the average, these wines will also take the edge off that check you’re writing April 15 to the military industrial complex.

For this year’s list of top ten wines less than $15, click here: More

Oops, I meant The Wine Spectator, the magazine that one of my favorite retailers likes to make fun of by mocking its cultural imperialism over the wine world. In any case, some of you may have heard of the war of words between the folks at the venerable Napa winery Beaulieu Vineyard and The Wine Spectator senior editor James Laube. The conflict broke out in 2002 after Laube accused BV’s wines of showing “high levels” of TCA (the chemical behind cork taint) and suggested that the whole winery might be infested. Beaulieu shot back that Laube was complaining about amounts of the compound that are undetectable to the average palate, and unfairly singling them out for a problem widespread in wine production.

I was prompted to revisit the hostilities by a bottle of 1997 Beaulieu Vineyard Tapestry Reserve. To find out where, after tasting it, Wine Girl stands on the battle lines, click here: More

One of the most contentious and (to many wine lovers) depressing things about wine is how much restaurants mark it up. On the average, restaurants will inflate the retail price of a bottle of wine by 100 percent — to cover, they insist, the cost of acquiring, storing, serving, and absorbing the expense of the occasional spoiled bottle of wine.

Naïfs accept this explanation; cynics, though, believe that because restaurants don’t make as much money as they want by serving food, they compensate with unfair mark ups on wine. Wine drinkers, then, are paying a surcharge to cover the penny-pinching teetotalers at the neighboring table — not to mention the greed of the restaurateur.

The truth lies somewhere between. This was brought home to me, as it were, while I recently abroad. Find out how by clicking here: More