The Lorca Winery is out of business and sold what remained of their wine inventory, 600 cases of 2003 Gary’s Vineyard Pinot Noir, to Trader Joe’s. This wine is currently being sold at Trader Joe’s for $14.95 about half the suggested retail price. Get it while you can because this wine is delicious and will fly off the shelves. 600 cases does not go far when there are over 150 Trader Joe’s stores in California. Read the rest of this entry »

It has been several weeks since we have been to the Napa Valley; perhaps the longest stretch in recent memory. We are in the middle of a kitchen remodel and our wine travels are on hold until the project is completed. We are hoping that will be in two weeks. In the meantime, while staying put, we have been tweaking our Wine Country Trip Planning tool and we hope you will use it the next time you plan to visit the wine country in the Napa Valley, Carneros, or other popular wine country regions in California.

What is neat about the Trip Planning tool is you can select wineries by region and then drill down and find wineries by features. For example, on your next excursion to the Napa Valley, you would like to visit Napa Valley wineries that have a picnic facility, are family-owned, and farm organically. With the Trip Planning tool you can select these features and others to generate a list of wineries tailored to your fancy. A vacation getaway is always better when you have a well-planned idea of where you want to go and what you want to see.

Once you have made your selections the next step is to input your starting and ending destination and the Trip Planning tool will provide a printable map and directions for your use.

Our list of wineries in the database includes most of the wineries that are open to the public with regular tasting room hours and ones that are open by appointment only. If we have missed your favorite winery, let us know and we will add the winery to our database. The same goes if you are a winery and you find yourself not listed. Just email us the pertinent information to plug into our database and we are set to go.

Since we are still tweaking the Trip Planning tool tell us what you think and how we can make it even better.

Amazon Closer to Selling Wine
When New Vine Logistics closed its doors a couple of weeks back many were predicting that Amazon would either drop or have a long delay in launching their plan to sell wine online. Amazon had contracted New Vine Logistics to handle the sales. New Vine Logistics is back and word has it that several key wine industry people (not me, however) have been invited to a sneak preview of the Amazon wine website. For Napa Valley wineries this just might be the help they need to clear building inventory. This is good for the consumer as well, more chances to find the ultimate wine bargain. Wine.woot is cool but Amazon will be fierce competition. My source for this information is from “Tech Flash“.

Events for the Wine Traveler
It is heating up in the Napa Valley with events and happenings scheduled for the summer wine traveler. One of the main attractions is next Saturday evening, June 20th, 6 pm to 10 pm. called the Solarbartion. This event is taking place at the new, chic, and very “green” hotel, the Bardessono in Yountville. Ten solar-powered Napa Valley wineries will be represented. This event features wine tasting, food, and live entertainment. Tickets are $50. Read the rest of this entry »

As a frequent traveler to wine country, a hunter of wine values and bargains, a wine blogger, and a member of Twitter, I recommend to all Napa Valley wineries, you should Tweet. Don’t just take my advice, read the cover story in this week’s Time Magazine on Twitter and read in the current issue of Business Week, Jack and Suzy Welch’s article on “Why We Tweet.” I joined Twitter in March and my only regret is that I did not start sooner. The payoff is big in many ways.

I checked to see how many Napa Valley Wineries are currently on Twitter. In the “Find People” link on Twitter, I put in the keyword “Winery” and sorted through about 200 wineries and found exactly 20 Napa Valley wineries and 2 in Carneros registered on Twitter. Amazingly, only a handful of these wineries are using Twitter frequently and one small Napa Valley winery, Casa Nuestra, is on the cutting edge. Casa Nuestra at the moment has 560 “Followers” and the winery has made over three hundred Tweets. A Follower is one who decides to follow someone on Twitter and receive any Tweets they send out. A tweet is 140 characters of information. Read the rest of this entry »

Can you Negotiate Wine Prices These Days?
A friend of mine returned from a recent trip to the wine country and told me that he had bargained for a case of wine. He started out by saying He’d take six bottles of a wine when he knew he really wanted a case. Then he added quickly “will you give me a case for whatever…?” The person agreed and all were happy. Next time you hit a Napa Valley Winery or any winery for that matter, think about giving bargaining a try. It just might work. These are hard times out there for the wine industry and inventories are stacking up. Did you see the story on the Read the rest of this entry »