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Winemaking at the Heart of a 2000 Year Old City: Tasting the Wines of Alsace's Hugel
When I visited venerable Alsatian wine icon Hugel on a media jaunt, they were nearly a year removed from the family tragedy of Etienne Hugel’s untimely death, and their CEO had left the company the week prior to my visit. When I mentioned to 13th-generation family member Marc-André Hugel that many of the faces in their most recent welcome video could no longer be found with the company, he quipped “You remember [the tv show] Dallas? It’s just like that here.”
Alsace Grand Cru Wines That Won't Break the Bank: Domaines Schlumberger
It could be said that Domaines Schlumberger‘s Thomas Schlumberger doesn’t fully understand the negative connotations of the word “cheap” in the English language. I write that because, as he told me the above quote during a media visit to the Guebwiller property that has been in his family for about 200 years, he phrased it in a tone that was at once proud and matter-of-fact.
Ancient Vines and Energetic Wines at Spain's Mas de l’Abundancia
Jesús del Rio Mateu, proprietor of the Masroig-area Mas de l’Abundància – doesn’t just have an enviable name; he’s also got an enviably amazing vineyard view, enviably old vines, and sits enviably close to one of Spain’s critical-darling DOs, Priorat.
Spain's Acustic Cellar Hits Serious High Notes With Its Old Vine Wines
Albert Jané knows how to work a wine media crowd. If you want to quickly win over such a group of wine geeks and influencers, you would have had access to a minor clinic in such powers of persuasion had you tagged along during my recent media tour visit to Jané’s Acústic Cellar, in the Montsant town of Marçà.
FIghting the Good Fight for Romagna Wines at Italy's Castelluccio
“Romagna had to fight a lot – and still has to fight a lot.”. So mentioned Alessandro Fiore – who, along with brother Claudio, oversee wine production of Castelluccio, one of their family’s three winery operations – recognizes the oddly ironic state of Romagna wine.
Wine Production Is All in the Family at Italy's Tenuta Casali
What gives one the impetus to isolate yeasts, experiment with, say, cumbersome large barriques, and pursue crafting world-class Sangiovese in a region best known for forgettable bulk wines? Probably having a sense of regional winemaking infused in your blood.
The Unsung Fine Wine of Spain's "Red House" (Tasting at Cellar Masroig in Montsant)
In the lower-ish (we’re still talking about 400-or-so meters of elevation) valley of Spain’s sunny Montsant region sits a small town (ok, village) of El Masroig. El Masroig is quaint enough to be named (in Catalan, of course) “red country house” (most likely from the red clay soils that dominate this area of Priorat country), and small enough to sport a population of about 500 people, the vast majority of whose families live off of the farming of grapevines and olive trees.
Sustainability Rules the Day at Spain's Vinyes Domènech Winery
If you visit Montsant’s Vinyes Domènech, located in the southern portion of the winemaking district that nearly encircles Spain’s famous Priorat area like a talon, be forewarned that owner Joan Ignasi Domènech is likely totalk about… fertilizer.
Why the Hillsides of Italy's Collio Are Producing Some of the Best White Wines for Summer
When you’re talking about Italy’s Collio region, you’re talking about hills. And I mean, meta-levels of hills. That point was emphasized more than a few (dozen) times during my recent Zoom+samples tasting organized by the Consorzio Tutela Vini Collio, during which wine writer Matteo Bellotto gave us the lay of the land (more or less literally) with respect to this standout hilltop white wine region between the Julian Alps and the Adriatic Sea. Here are the key takeaways:
Fighting the "Viticulture of Death" with Sustainable Farming at Tuscany's Avignonesi
Virginie Saverys is fighting against what she calls the “viticulture of death.”. Born in Ghent, Belgium, Saverys graduated in law from the University of Paris, and moved to Tuscany in 2007. After taking the helm at Avignonesi two years later, she was, as she told me during a recent Zoom tasting of her wines, “a bit horrified” at seeing staff having to wear “hazmat suits” to farm the vineyards. Vineyards that, to her, “looked more like a lunar landscape” than a vibrant slice of Tuscan winemaking country.
The Vines are Like Puzzle Pieces at Italy's Fattoria Zerbina
Fattoria Zerbina’s Cristina GeminianiJoe Roberts. When Fattoria Zerbina matriarch Cristina Geminiani talks about her Faenza area vineyards in Italy’s stunning (and perpetually underrated) Romagna wine region, she gives the distinct impressions that a) she knows what she is doing, and, b) she isn’t prepared to suffer any fools willingly about it.
Red Wine Among the Horses: Tasting at Italy's Drei Donà
While Giovanna Drei Donà “hates” technical questions about wine, she is fond of horses; maybe more fond of horses than her children Ida Vittoria and Enrico, the fourth generation who have helped to run the winemaking operations at the picturesque Drei Donà estate now owned by her husband Count Claudio Drei Donà (who focused on its thirty hectares of land and its ‘La Palazza’ farmhouse, constructed around a fifteenth century watchtower, as a passion project after retiring from law in the 1990s).
A Forever Cult Wine? Tasting Sonoma's Immortal Estate Red
Sometimes, the wine business is a very, very small place. Also, I am about to talk about jellyfish. You’ve been warned…. While in San Francisco for the SF International Wine Competition, I caught up with wine marketing maven Tim Martin. Tim claimed that I was the first person to write about his Napa Valley project, Tusk. “We’ve got a ten year waiting list on Tusk now,” Tim mentioned, which I suppose is much more a tribute to that brand’s cult status, and the prowess of winemaker Philippe Melka than it is to my influence.
Celebrating 50 Years of Oregon's Sokol Blosser Winery
Thanksgiving dinner at the Sokol Blosser household must be a blast. That’s the sense that I got, anyway, when I attended the virtual live tasting of wines celebrating their golden anniversary as a family run wine outfit. Leading us through the event were founders Susan Sokol Blosser and Bill Blosser and their second generation, Alison Sokol Blosser and brother Alex Sokol Blosser.
How Williams Selyem's Sonoma Wines Win Over the Haters
There was so much that I didn’t want to like about Sonoma’s storied Williams Selyem:. The too-cool-for-school exclusivity of their mailing list. The imposing fortress-like facade of their “barrel-evoking” tasting room and its “wall of bottles.”
Sonoma's 2019 Vintage Through the Glass: Tasting Domaine Carneros Pinot Noirs
I recently attended by 40th (no, that is not a typo!) virtual wine tasting/gathering in less than half as many months. And it was a very good one, too, and well worth the additional eye strain I am suffering lately from staring at computer screens during Zoom sessions. This one focused on a 2019 lineup of Pinot Noir releases from Sonoma’s Domaine Carneros, hosted by winemaker TJ Evans (now in his 25th vintage, having worked with Mondavi, Wente, and La Crema, as well as doing stints in New Zealand, Dry Creek, and Chile before returning to the U.S. in 2008 and taking the job at Domaine Carneros), and CEO Remi Cohen (a well respected industry veteran who recently took over for the venerable Eileen Crane).
Wines Deliciously Out of Time at Piedmont's Scarpa Winery
Ever since my recent jaunt to Italy’s Monferrato winegrowing region, I have had the memory of the wines of Scarpa dancing around in my head, almost like a song "earworm" that you can't quite get rid of until you hear it again.
Tuscan Royalty: Tasting with Tenuta Col d’Orcia's Count Francesco Marone Cinzano
Count Francesco Marone CinzanoTenuta Col d’Orcia. Count Francesco Marone Cinzano didn’t want to live in Tuscany. When his father moved the family to ‘the hill overlooking the Orcia River’ (Col d’Orcia), it was ‘quite remote, the middle of nowhere.” Not exactly the place to appeal to a young guy, even if the aesthetic beauty of the place was beyond question. Today, it’s a different story: Cinzano is now inextricably tied to his family’s winemaking estate, among a UNESCO World Heritage site in Tuscany. “I started feeling a duty of protecting this very special environment,” he explained during a Zoom tasting of three of Tenuta Col d’Orcia’s latest releases. “A duty to protect this treasure that I inherited and would leave for future generations. We farm biodiversity; we farm protection of the environment.”
Exploring Piedmont's Diversity in the Wines of Roero
If Italy’s northwestern region of Piedmont is known for one thing, it’s being known for many things. So many wine regions overlap in Piedmont that it’s not uncommon for the skills being used to produce, say, Barolo also being employed to produce Barbera, Moscato, or – in today’s case – Roero. I recently hopped on a samples tasting with several Roero producers, organized by the Consorzio Tutela Roero, to take part in a bit of a deep dive of both Roero Arneis and the tragically less well known Roero DOCGred category (crafted from Nebbiolo).
1WineDude
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a.k.a. Joe Roberts. Dad, wine-writer-guy, wine critic, wine competition judge, author, bassist, free-thinker, & occasional hiney-shaker. Opening up highly-pressurized cans of whoop-a** on the wine industry since 2007. Joe is a Certified Specialist of Wine, and the author of Wine Taster’s Guide: Drink and Learn with 30 Wine Tastings.
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