Results tagged “wednesdaywinetasting”

The truth of the matter is, you can drink almost anything with turkey dinner -- most full-bodied, earthy, or well-balanced red wines, and many German, or Rhône-style whites will do the trick just fine. So many diverse flavors mean that many wines are bound to taste good with at least something you have on your plate.

Not that long ago, the idea of respectable non-jug, non-box wines for under $10 -- the kind of wine you could bring to a foodie dinner party without feeling like a cheap asshole -- was pretty unthinkable. Enter Trader Joe's and BevMo and suddenly there's a lot of truly decent cheap wine out there, and we're not just talking about Two-Buck Chuck.

For the final couple of episodes, the cast of Bravo's ever so popular chef showdown relocated from Sin City to our neck of the woods, staying at the Le Mars Hotel in Healdsburg and eating at Brix in St. Helena. Cyrus was closed a week ago Thursday to accommodate the contestants along with Padma and Tom, and presumably Andy Cohen, Gail and that priggish British dude as well.

In our search for small-scale wine producers to visit in our nearby wine regions, we're always glad to find start-up wineries making excellent wines to a small, devoted audience. Astrale e Terra on the Silverado Trail is one of those wineries. The name translates as "heaven and earth," and we encountered their wines at an event in San Francisco a month or two back, and thought they were on to something special.

Nobody we know really strives to be a wine snob, but a person can always come off sounding like one in mixed (read: non-Bay Area) company when it comes to choosing or discussing what to drink with dinner. At the risk of looking like a total douche, you can now whip out your iPhone to look up wines and vintages via several apps now on the market. Herewith, we give you a couple capsule reviews, should you be one of those people who likes to be knowledgeable about wine, or should you be one of those who just likes to dork out with every app you can get your hands on.

It's harvest time in Napa and Sonoma, and a lot of grapes have already been plucked from the vines and sent to be crushed, eventually to make their way to your lips anywhere from a year to three years from now as 2009 vintages. In the Dry Creek Valley of northern Sonoma County, last week's super-hot weather has helped move things along and next weekend's Healdsburg Crush Festival is sure to be fun for those who can spring for the $60 tickets.

Just north of the center of Glen Ellen is an unassuming tasting room and winemaking facility, Loxton Wines. It's a large metal shed, essentially, and the place is owned and operated by Australian winemaker Chris Loxton who started the winery in 2001 after working for six years as Assistant Winemaker at neighboring Wellington Vineyards. Chris grew up on a Shiraz vineyard in South Australia, and at Loxton he focuses primarily on Syrah and Zinfandel in relatively small batches, sourcing excellent grapes from around Sonoma County.

After admitting our preference for the Sonoma side of things, we'll give a little attention today to Napa, where both a winery and a world-class art gallery sit atop Mount Vedeer at the southern end of the Valley.

A couple weeks back we filled in the Friday Drinks column with a post about Cline Cellars, and today we're back with the launch of a new column about local wineries which we're going to call Wednesday Wine Tasting until we come up with something better.