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

“A rosé? I’ve never heard of that.”

Okay: we were in West Hollywood, rooftop-poolside at our hotel, so I admit I wasn’t swimming in a deep demographic pool of enophiles. I’d been shocked all weekend, in fact, at how un-wine-savvy the Los Angeles scene is. Even at the popular sushi spot Koi I felt like a big thirsty fish in a little pond stocked with cocktails and sake, but not much in the way of fruits of the vine. All I could devise to drink with my jalapeno hamachi was a California sparkler, one of only two offerings by the glass. Not a riesling or a gewürztraminer in sight.

But to overhear a waiter say that not only did he not have any rosé but he hadn’t any idea what it was — click here to find out what I wanted to do. More

Dear Wine Girl:
I’m going to Bandol, France in July and looking for tips on visiting the friendlier wineries. Also, do all of them offer tastings and is it a walk-up-and-pay setup?
Thank you,
Bound for Bandol

Dear Bound:

Wine tasting in the south of France is one of my favorite life memories. In 2002, we spent three days tasting our way through the great red wines of Bandol, located just about an hour’s drive east of Marseille. Bandol is one of my favorite wines: unique, since it is made from 100 percent mourvedre (without the Provence staples of syrah or grenache); burly, because it is filled with the flavors of blackberry, brambles, earth, and to me, a tell-tale note of diesel; and long-lived, since mourvedre has a special ability to stave off oxidation. Except for the exchange rate on the euro, I’m so jealous of your trip.

Quick answer: there aren’t a lot of friendly, much less friendlier, wineries in Bandol — actually, in all of France. But don’t kill the messenger. Click here for the spots that will bountifully reward your perseverance: 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

You’d think that Tablas Creek’s remote location, more than a half hour’s drive into the oak-dotted hills from Paso Robles, would deter people. But no. In fact as we drove up, a stretch limo was disgorging a leesy troop of bachelorette-partiers; I worried they might be examples of the wine tasters gone wild phenomenon. Indeed, they were a symptom of a tasting room crowded with warm bodies getting warmer by the glass.

I shouldn’t have been surprised. One of the first large-ish wineries to set up shop in the area — France’s Beaucastel in Chateauneuf du Pape teamed up with its American importer to buy 120 acres in 1987, the Pleistocene Age in Paso terms — Tablas Creek now produces about 22,000 cases, and is pretty recognizable thanks to savvy marketing and kind associations on the part of Rhône wine lovers with Beaucastel and its owners the Perrin family.

Why am I glad I didn’t turn around and flee? Click here to find out: More

Dear Wine Girl:
I am going to Calistoga in Napa Valley with a friend at the end of the month. We are going to taste white wines because neither of us knows anything about them. We are staying at Solage on the Silverado Trail, and I was wondering if you had any good ideas for whites for us to taste. I want to go to Château Montalena and Folie a Deux. Clos Pegas and Sterling are within biking distance.
Signed,
From Vegas to the Vineyards

Dear Vegas in the Vineyards:

Napa is not the first place one goes to drink white wine, since cabernet sauvignon is king there. But you are right to checkmark the chardonnay at Chateau Montalena, since it helped Napa dominate the famous 1976 taste-off between France and Napa. You can continue your historic-whites-of-Napa tour by visiting Grgich Hills in Rutherford, which was founded by Mike Grgich, the Yugoslavian refugee who was winemaker at Montalena when they won the Judgement of Paris. Grgich Hills’ chards are widely regarded to have epitomized the big, buttery style that dominated California chardonnay for so long.

For the best whites in Napa, click here for more: More

By spousal order, I’ve had to limit my membership in wine clubs to two. So after an excruciating process of elimination, I came up with a pair of desert-island wineries. I didn’t pick them because they make my favorite or most prized wine. (That’s what mailing lists are for, and thankfully Alice didn’t say anything about them, since I’m on like a hundred.) I picked the wine clubs I did because I knew they’d send me consistently good, reasonably priced bottles I can sign for on my doorstep, unpack, and put straight on the table. Additionally, the wineries had to be within striking distance, since I like to exploit my membership to get VIP treatment when I visit, including discounts, free tastings, reserved seating, photo ops, whatever.

Justin Vineyards was one. I collect their Bordeaux-style blend called Isosceles, and at the time I signed up, they were having great success with Rhône grape varieties like syrah and mourvedre, which I love. Someday, too, I hoped to be able to stay at Justin’s pastoral-looking bed and breakfast and eat at their restaurant. (The other is Chateau St. Jean in Sonoma.)

So how did it come about that, as Alice puts it, “every time I drink a wine from Justin, a piece of me dies inside“? Click here for the story: More

Wine tasting — or gymnastic event?

That’s what I was wondering as I watched Steve Martell of Kaleidos climb up between two stacks of oak barrels, stacked three high. That and gee, I hope Paso Robles isn’t hit by the next Big One, right now.

But the earth stilled beneath our feet, and Steve’s thief sucked up enough young wine for him to lean down, aim, and release some into my glass below. Wow. Pure syrah happiness, this barrel of juice from the ‘06 harvest had been rightfully identified as special by the winemaker, worthy perhaps of a separate bottling. (The young, beflip-flopped former midwesterner, who graduated from UC Santa Cruz, did a stint at Clos Pepe, and then hung out his own shingle in Paso just four years ago, doesn’t own any vines yet. But he sources grapes from the best vineyards he can get contracts with, most of them on the prized west side of this fast-growing appellation.) Distinctly classy compared to Kaliedos’s dominant, more hedonistic style, with a lot of poise and a little pepper, for a moment it transported me out of the oak-speckled yellow knolls of Paso to the steep cliffs Côte of Rôtie in France. Formidable!

For more on this up-and-comer — plus a woeful disappointment at my formerly fave producer in Paso — click here for more: More