Bill and I are back. Pardon our absence as family needs took a higher priority for both of us lately. On this podcast we offer up a quick summary of what we have been doing during our hiatus. While we may have been busy handling family affairs we still found time to have an adult beverage every now and then. We’ll share some of those discoveries on this show. Also I continue to post regularly on Twitter eerr X. Having never participated in a “Dry January” I have found myself consuming less alcoh...
Mar 05, 2024•Ep. 76
As we head into springtime this year more wine and food events are returning to the our calendars. On this podcast Bill and I discuss our recent experiences at the Gambero Rosso and Slow Wine events both held in San Francisco. The Gambero Rosso was held at Fort Mason in the Marina District. The Slow Wine event was held at City View at Metreon in the Financial District. The Gambero Rosso publishes a guide that rates Italian wines using independent experts who blind taste submitted samples. The Sl...
May 28, 2023
Bill and I recorded this podcast the morning of the Super Bowl so good eats and adult beverages were front and center of our discussion. We go on a jag about the lack of places to find good bread in Sonoma County and come up with a pretty good impromptu list of great places to eat in Sonoma County. So if you have any plans to come to wine county there are lots of good tips in this podcast. Thanks to everyone for listening. Cheers! Our wine recommendation this week is the 2019 Poggio Scalette Chi...
Feb 26, 2023•Season 2023Ep. 74
Esther Mobley of the San Francisco Chronicle reports on the sale of the Robert Sinskey Vineyard Winery, tasting room and vineyards. However billionaires Stewart and Lynda Resnick elected to not purchase the brand. For the moment the Sinskeys plan to lease back the facility and continue business as usual. Press Democrat writer Sarah Doyle pens a piece on how Sonoma County winemakers are “ passing the torch ” and making plans to extend their family legacies. Ingredient labeling for wine starts thi...
Jan 02, 2023•Ep. 73
With Christmas around the corner we put together a list of some of our favorite wines for the holidays. The Federal Reserve’s aggressive interest rate hikes hasn’t slowed the uptick in wine prices. It can be fairly easy to blow up your wine budget with just one or two bottles of splurge purchases. Most of the wines on our list can all be had for under $35. Searching for one wine that pleases everybody is a fools errand. It’s invariably better to select a variety of wines, open them all at once a...
Dec 05, 2022
A recent article by Colman Andrews titled Paradise Lost: The Flame Out of Napa Valley’s Iconic Wine Country raised a number of eyebrows in Northern California. The article’s main themes being that the Valley’s growth has lessened its charm and that corporatization has made visits to Napa Wineries too expensive for most people. I just recently attended the 18th annual Wine & Spirits Top 100 tasting at the City View at Metreon in San Francisco. This was the first public wine tasting I have att...
Oct 31, 2022
Do you prefer your wines younger or do you have a taste for aged wines? I’m firmly in both camps having developed a palate for both. As bottled red wines age they give up some of their youthful freshness, the tannins soften and the wines begin to display secondary aromas. On this podcast Bill and I offer our thoughts on aged wine, particularly California Pinot Noir. We also talk about how our palates have changed over the years. Bill suggests it just may be our lifestyle that is leading our chan...
Oct 07, 2022
Bill and I get together for a new podcast after an extended absence. On this podcast you can find out where we’ve been, what’s new in wine country and what we’ve been drinking and eating. It’s summertime so we find ourselves drinking less red wine and more rosé and white wines. Our wine recommendation for this week is the Mönchhof Ürzig Würzgarten Riesling Kabinett. The Mönchhof is said to be one of the oldest wine estates in the West German Mosel Valley dating back to 1177. This fruity off dry ...
Jul 10, 2022
Consolidation in the U. S. wine industry continues at an unabated pace. Most of the mergers and acquisitions are followed weeks later by layoffs and closures of production facilities. Sebastiani , Coppola and Chateau Ste. Michelle are some of the most recent buyouts. Right now is one of the best times to be looking for a job in the California wine industry. A quick look on winejobs.com will yield hundred of job offers. Terri and I finally ventured out and went wine tasting for the first time sin...
Aug 04, 2021
A late frost in Europe is wreaking havoc on prized vineyards in France and Italy . Several consecutive nights of frost are causing lots of worry for farmers. In the coming weeks farmers will be accessing the damage, but early estimates pin losses in some areas at 50 to 90 percent of normal. Bill and I talk about wine aerators and decanters in reference to Alder Yarrow’s recent rant on Wine Aerators: $336.9 Million Worth of Bullsh*t. Societé Jacques Bollinger (SJB) has just purchase Ponzi Vineyar...
Apr 30, 2021•53 hr 23 min•Season 3Ep. 67
Imported wine prices could be headed lower? Ursula Von der Leyen President of the European Commission and President Biden have agreed to suspend all tariffs with regard to the Airbus-Boeing dispute for four months. President Von der Leyen, the first woman elected to head the European Commission is responsible for setting the Commission’s policy agenda and is just 15 months into a five year term that started in December of 2019. She’s quickly gaining allies in the food and agriculture sectors of ...
Mar 29, 2021
Constellation Brands executives must be elated to finally complete their sale of over 32 wine brands and five wineries to E. J. Gallo Winery. The $810 million deal was less than half of the $1.7 billion initially proposed in April of 2019, as the Federal Trade Commission insisted Constellations exclude their sparkling wine, brandy, dessert wine and concentrate business lines as a condition of approval. Constellation sheds all their $11 and under products in a bid to go upscale and Gallo picks up...
Jan 14, 2021
Delivery startup Go Puff has just announced its acquisition of alcohol beverage retailer BevMo. While Bevmo already has an online presence and delivery service Go Puff’s network , which delivers convenience store items will make it even more opportune for people to channel their inner couch potato. Convicted wine counterfeiter Rudy Kurniawan has finished serving his federal prison sentence and is now in the custody of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) . Where he will end up is a...
Nov 16, 2020•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 64
The year 2020 represents our fifth straight year of devastating wildfires in Northern California Wine Country. Weeks removed from full containment of the LNU Complex Fire which burned 363,220 acres the Glass Fire started on September 27, 2020. The ignition point of the Glass Fire was in the hills northeast of St. Helena, east of Silverado Trail Road a bucolic two lane road that runs parallel to Highway 29. The Glass Fire (named after Glass Mountain Road) footprint was roughly one fifth the size ...
Nov 02, 2020
Lately there hasn’t been much to celebrate about and as a result Champagne growers are facing challenges due to the pandemic and collapsing sales. So far the French government has not offered any actionable help. Can growers and winemakers work together to hold prices steady? Franzia is selling a backpack that holds an entire box of wine. As it turns out their apparel site has a bunch of other swag you can purchase as well. If wildfires and air quality indexes in the very unhealthy to hazardous ...
Sep 20, 2020
The latest entrant into the celebrity wine business is Snoop Dogg . Bill has pledged to pick up a bottle and give it a review. Stay tuned. Jeff Siegel the Wine Curmudgeon thinks Bordeaux costs too much for the average person to buy. What do you think? Is the Bordeaux wine business in trouble? In Washington state some winemakers are thinking of skipping the 2020 harvest; there are too many grapes and not enough demand. Anna King gives an update on grape grower and vintner concerns in the northwes...
Sep 05, 2020
We have a new wine bar in Sebastopol. Region wine bar will specialize in pouring small production wines using self-serve wine machines. Cameron Diaz and Katherine Power have entered the celebrity wine business . Their wine brand Avaline , is entering a crowded market place. Years of consolidation by alcohol producers and wholesalers, uncertainty due to an ongoing trade war and now a pandemic makes one consider their market timing. However the ladies may be filling a void by marketing their produ...
Aug 14, 2020
After three plus months of shelter in place mandates with a significant portion of the hospitality and restaurant business in California throttled to an idle, wineries, brew pubs and distillers have been given the green light to host patrons again. The old tasting room model has been discarded in favor of new sanitation and social distancing protocols. Are you ready to go visit tasting rooms ? If so you’ll probably need to make a reservation. California winemaker Bill Foley has just purchased Fe...
Jul 07, 2020•Ep. 59
Bill and I have been on a brief hiatus. Let’s just say we have been adjusting to a new way of living our lives during the coronavirus pandemic. Walking into a wine retailer or visiting a winery tasting room has not been an option for us so in this podcast we spend some time talking about how and where we are buying our adult beverages. We both are certainly consuming more alcohol since the start of pandemic. Have your drinking habits changed? Are you purchasing more products on line? If you own ...
May 30, 2020
Here in Sonoma County California we are under a Governor Gavin Newsom mandated shelter in place directive aimed at slowing the spread of the novel coronavirus. What does that mean? Check out this link to get the details. Cancelled events, business losses and layoffs are starting to impact the wine business as Bill Swindell points out in an article for the Press Democrat. There is nothing worse for a food and wine lover than to experience a partial or complete lose of their sense of smell. Shawn ...
Mar 29, 2020
Covid Corona Blues
Mar 17, 2020
It’s that time of the year again. Food and wine events are coming to our area in rapid fire sequence. Winemakers from abroad have a small window of time to meet prospective buyers, so instead of flying back and forth to the United States they cram in as many trade events as they can, usually in a one to two week window. Consequently we’ve been pretty busy tasting a ton of wine from Europe. On Tuesday, February, 18th we were afforded the opportunity to meet and interview Giancarlo Gariglio, edito...
Mar 02, 2020
Wine industry experts are calling for grape growers to reduce the number of vineyards in production because of declining wine sales. We have already noticed some vineyards being ripped out and allowed to go fallow (at least for now) here in Sonoma County. Unfortunately for growers the oversupply of grapes is not a regional problem, but a statewide one. Sarah Klearman asks a number of industry leaders what type of short and long term solutions should be put in place to deal with California’s wine...
Feb 23, 2020
It’s been rather calm and quite in Northern California of late. Mother nature is giving us a break from natural disasters and has turned her hell raising ways onto the continent of Australia. For months now Australia has been suffering with continuing wildfires which have to date destroyed over 10 million hectares. Phoebe French provides a list of events and organizations you can make donations to for helping those most in need. While Rebecca Hopkins an expat of Australia pens a fine piece on ot...
Jan 29, 2020
It’s been a tough couple of weeks for Californians. Bill and I can add evacuee to our resumes as residents of Sebastopol and many other areas of Sonoma County were evacuated due to the Kincade wildfire . Firefighters made their stand at the edge of the foothills as the fires moved downhill towards the densely populated town of Windsor . Many lessons have been learned since the Tubbs fire in the fall of 2017 and in the end the town was saved. Restaurateurs in Sonoma County are struggling with bus...
Nov 24, 2019
Sonoma County wine world recently lost another former winery owner. Chris Smith of the Press Democrat pens an obituary about Robert Rue , who was farming old Zinfandel/ field blend vineyards as a side hustle before the term was popular. We’ve suspected that litigation of this sort was on the horizon and now we have two sizable California vintners suing several insurance companies. The vintners claim that the insurers have failed to reimburse them for smoke taint damages as a result of the wildfi...
Nov 03, 2019
Dorthy Vasser has been growing wine grapes in Redwood Valley for 53 years. Dorthy and her husband John started grape growing in 1964. John passed away in 2008 and Dorthy continued to farm their 26 acre Mendocino ranch. Dorthy has decided to sell her land and Lewis Perdue goes into great detail as to how Constellation Brands may have had a hand in her decision to get out of farming. It’s a very sad story. If you’re interested in getting into grape farming in Northern California here’s the listing...
Oct 16, 2019
Wine journalist Jamie Goode recently posted a short blog about three of the world's largest wineries. Fred Swan felt that much of the criticism of the blog on social media was negative so he wrote a piece in defense of E.J. Gallo . Having visited several Gallo facilities in the past he offers some great insight into their operations. W. Blake Gray asks, "What's the point in fining a multi-billionaire winery owner when he ignores the rules"? Bill and I have a good discussion about Gray's premise,...
Sep 12, 2019
Bill and I start this weeks podcast talking about British Master of Wine Tim Atkin’s article Why You Shouldn’t Care Much About Wine. Exploring various topics Tim’s tongue-in-cheek writing style will bring a smile to your face. Jillian Kramer writes a post about What Happens To Your Body When You Quit Drinking. We have a good discussion about all the good things that happen when one abstains from alcohol. Even bartenders in the bay area are getting in the act via the Pin Project. Adding a little ...
Jul 19, 2019•Ep. 48
It’s summertime and Europeans have experienced some extreme temperatures. Highs which have eclipsed the torrid marks set by the heatwave of 2003, that killed thousands of people. A lot has been learned since 2003 and the European countries seem better equipped to handle the large high pressure weather systems that cover the continent during the summers. Marshall Shepherd writing for Forbes tries to make the connection between increasing extremes of weather and climate change. Washington Post col...
Jul 12, 2019
