A sad weekend for the Tri-Valley winery scene, as Mitchell Katz Winery founder and owner Mitchell Katz was killed in a Friday automobile accident in Livermore, as his family has confirmed.  

The East Bay’s Livermore Valley is one of California’s oldest wine regions, and one of its more illustrious wineries is Mitchell Katz Winery, founded in 1998. But something seemed off on Saturday, when the winery cryptically posted to Facebook “Unfortunately, we will be CLOSED Saturday, July 22 & Sunday July 23. Thank you for your understanding.” And we now learn that’s because, as the Chronicle reports, the winery’s owner and founder Mitchell Katz was killed in a Friday car accident in Livermore. He was 59.    

“We have suffered a tragic loss,” Katz’s surviving children posted to his Facebook page late Sunday afternoon. “Our dad, Mitchell Katz, was unexpectedly taken from us this past Friday evening, July 21, 2023. At this time, we don’t have any additional information to offer. As expected, we his family and extended family, are all [devastated] and saddened by this tragedy.”

We didn’t know who the 59-year-old driver was when the Livermore Police Department posted on Saturday that “Around 3:20 p.m. on Friday, July 21, Livermore Police responded to a major injury collision on East Avenue at Mitra Street.” That post adds that “When officers arrived, they found it was a two-car crash with the driver of a white GMC SUV with major injuries. The 59-year-old driver from Livermore was transported to a local hospital where he succumbed to his injuries.”

According to police, Katz was changing lanes on East Avenue in Livermore when the driver of a black Subaru collided with Katz’s GMC. The driver of that Subaru has only been identified as a man in his 20s from Westley, California.

Livermore police say they are “awaiting toxicology results,” so will not indicate whether drugs or alcohol played a role. The cause of the crash still remains under investigation.

Related: Celebrated Bar Star at Bar Iris In Russian Hill Falls From Roof To His Death [SFist]

Image: Mitchell Katz Winery via Facebook

Having made about a hundred and nine trips to wine country, we're definitely over the big name, flashy, tchotchke- and gift-laden tasting rooms serving up merely drinkable wine at high-end prices. Give us a shitshack or a shed and some amazing wine and we're happy.

That's not to say that the tasting room at Elyse Winery is a shed -- it's just a simple room in a simple ranch house, right off of Route 29 in the heart of Napa. But they do have some amazing wine and they deserve the attention of any Zinfandel or Petite Sirah lover.

Elyse was founded in 1987 by Ray and Nancy Coursen, and the label was named for their daughter Elyse. In 1997, they purchased the property that currently houses their tasting and distribution facility, which has a couple of acres of grapes -- however the majority of their wine is blended from purchased lots. Perhaps it is the freedom that winemaker Mike Trotta and Ray have in picking and choosing the grapes they use each year, but they do have a pretty magic touch.

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.

But every year, food and wine magazines and the food sections of newspapers around the nation revisit this topic, and each year there seems to be a new trend or the beginning of a new consensus about What To Drink With Thanksgiving Dinner. Some (us included) stick to Zinfandel, because a good bottle has got all the hearty fruit and spice to stand up to the various earthy flavors of the holiday. This year in Bon Appétit, the recommendation is all Spanish -- Rioja reds and Albariño whites -- because these wines seem especially suited to cutting through the fat of the meal. Gourmet on the other hand (in their *sniff* final issue ever), highlights Alsace Gewürztraminers for a Pennsylvania Dutch-inspired menu, and Napa Valley Syrahs for a Southern-style menu.

Today, SFist brings you a mini-guide with a few suggestions from Peter Eastlake, proprietor of Vintage Berkeley:

For Thanksgiving, with that tsunami of flavors on the table, you want a user-friendly wine with minimal oak and a nice balance of fruit and acid to make the peace. We've got a couple wines in the store that stand out at me as really fun choices for the holiday -- and three of these come in unconventionally large sizes, perfect for big groups so you don't kill the bottle after pouring five glasses.

Morgan Peterson at Bedrock Wine Co. has a liter jug of a red blend called Sherman & Hooker's Shebang ($16). It's what the farmers used to call "mixed blacks," which is a blend of all the dark grapes on a vineyard including Zin, Carignane, and Syrah. It takes its inspiration from Preston's jug wine that they sell only on Sundays -- and Morgan's dad is Joel Peterson who started Ravenswood, so he knows a thing or two about blending grapes. The wine screams not to take it too seriously, and it's got great balance.

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.

We're not huge wine snobs, but we do prefer our reds to be more than just "drinkable," and we like our whites to be layered and complex too (also we hate most California Chardonnay, particularly the buttery stuff). While we know wine is totally subjective and you can feel free to tell us how much you love Chardonnay and Merlot and the two-buck-chuck Sauvignon Blanc, we're offering here a selection of wines we think rise above bargain-bin status that are currently on shelves at Trader Joe's. Sure, by publishing this we're risking that some of these will disappear off SF TJ's shelves before we can stock up ourselves, but hey, it's almost the holidays, and we're feeling generous.

We hope you've been keeping up with the crazy family rape-and-money scandal going on between Korbel Champagne Cellars owner Gary Heck and his 39-year-old daughter Richie Ann Samii. They just settled in court for an undisclosed sum (after she'd been seeking tens of millions), ending a long and heated battle over insurance money, trust funds, and other inherited wealth that Richie Ann thought she was being denied. Court documents refer to the father and daughter dropping all claims against each other "from the beginning of time" and "throughout the universe" -- language we're guessing the daughter came up with to be dramatic.

This all goes back to a sex scandal in which Richie Ann and her husband Chris Samii were accused of raping two 23-year-old female winery employees beside the estate's champagne-bottle-shaped pool one night after work. Richie Ann claims this was a totally consensual orgy, but her father freaked out and kicked her off the compound. She also got fired from her official duties taking care of the estate's menagerie of animals, which includes two zebras. Criminal charges were dropped but Richie Ann never stopped protesting the millions of dollars she claimed she was getting screwed out of.

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.

The winery is owned by a group of friends led by Paul Johnson, a one-time Air Force fighter pilot who owned a resort in Jamaica and did a turn as a Chicago banker before settling in the Napa Valley in the 90s. Their consulting winemaker is Scott Harvey, who sold his successful brand Folie a Deux in 2004, and who also now makes his own delicious, complex wines under the Scott Harvey Wines label and has his own tasting room in Gold Country, on Main Street in Sutter Creek.

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.

Wine Enthusiast Guide - $4.99
First we have Wine Enthusiast's entry to the iPhone fray, which is a handy guide for the serious wine drinker and connoisseur. It gives you access to over 74,000 wine reviews, about half of which are from the last five years/vintages. Given the wealth of magazine content in its database, the app provides vintage comparison charts as well as some handy reference bits, like a Wine 101 guide and buying guide for beginners. Also because of this wealth of content, it could seem daunting to many, and like too much app for the casual wine drinker who just wants to know if a bottle is good or not.

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.

But for anyone wanting to try some excellent, small-production wines at fairly decent prices, we'd gladly point you to Quivira (pronounced KEE-VEE-ra), on West Dry Creek Road, not far from the Dry Creek Road exit on 101 in Healdsburg. The Quivira Estate was named after the Spanish legend of Quivira Regnum, a mythical kingdom of gold to the north of Mexico. The modern Quivira winery was founded in 1987 and since 2005 they've been producing certified bio-dynamic wines at their solar-powered winery, including Zinfandel, Grenache, Syrah and Sauvignon Blanc.

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.

The stand-out wines for us each year have been the Zinfandel ($24) -- a nicely peppery and ultra-cherry-jammy wine that goes great with all kinds of food, only 512 cases produced of the '06 vintage -- and the Rosé ($17), which is one of the best and most complex California rosés we've tasted. But the Syrahs are nothing to sneeze at either, with the '05 taking home the Gold Medal at the Sonoma County Harvest Fair.

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.

We couldn't help but notice the focus on food and wine at this past weekend's Outside Lands fest, which we associated with the Gen X demo of many of the bands, but also it's kind of what makes the two-year-old event so very San Francisco. (SF Weekly's SF Foodie blog has already pointed this out.) The Winehaven tent, organized and hosted by Vintage Berkeley, included food vendors like Hog Island Oyster Co., Namu and Andalu, and therefore was was base camp for the foodie and wine-o set in between music sets.

We signed ourselves up for a "barrel tasting" on Sunday, in between Bettye LaVette and Matt & Kim, which consisted of a half hour sitting inside an enormous wooden barrel and tasting wines along with one of the winemakers in attendance. Our winery choice, Preston of Dry Creek, turned out to be one of the better choices we made all weekend.

We're taking a break from the regular cocktail column today to highlight one of our favorite wineries in the Greater Bay Area, Cline Cellars. Situated at the south end of Hwy 121, just past the Infineon Raceway, it's a mere hour's drive from SF. Given that their tasting room stays open until 6 p.m., it makes for a convenient last stop on any Sonoma wine-tasting trip, and one that will likely make you a devoted fan.

They specialize in Zinfandels -- many of you might be familiar with the $8 California Zin available at Safeway and Trader Joe's -- but they also feature a number of awesome Rhône-style whites, reds and blends. For summer, we highly recommend their Mourvedre Rosé, which is dry enough not to feel like the grape juice that many rosés lean toward. Also their Viognier is fruity and mineral-y without too much Chardonnay-like oakiness, and the Marsanne-Rousanne blend is a unique and herbal white on the drier end of the spectrum. On the red end, when it's in stock, the Cashmere is a fantastic red blend for the price ($21, $16 for members), and even better and richer is the Heritage Zinfandel -- both of which are only available on site or online.

In an effort to drive people away from the Presidio, rendering it completely inaccessible to anything that resembles interesting, the Presidio Trust nixed plans last month for Foggy Bridge Winery. Because neighbors complained that the winery might prove too popular. No, we're not kidding. “When it came right down to it, there were just too many concerns about traffic and parking with that location in Crissy Field,” Joyce Stavert, general manager of the winery project, told the Press Democrat. Yesterday, however, ideas emerged about what the misguided trust would prefer to see pop up at the Crissy Field spot instead of the "8,000-case working winery" inside the former airplane hangar near Golden Gate Bridge. "[S]omething with more of an educational component, like a flight museum," Stavert revealed. (See, Crissy Field used to be a landing strip, so putting up an entire museum denoting that old-timey factoid of little to no interest would be a surefire bet. Also, for reals, that is an awful idea.) [via Eater]