Here we are at yet another one of those BevMo 5¢ Sales, buy one bottle at the regular price and get the second bottle for a measly 5 cents. We did a little digging into the sale to see if the wines are a good bargain.

First off, you need to be in the BevMo’s “Club Bev” to take advantage of any BevMo sale. If you don’t belong you can enroll when you make your purchase, and magically the computer will recalculate your bill with the sale prices.

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It seems like a lot of California wineries these days are jumping on the Spanish Albariño bandwagon. Why? Because this wine is tasty, crisp, and refreshing. It is a wonderful diversion from the popular varietals of Sauvignon Blanc and Chardonnay. It screams for seafood. At the Tapas Grand Tasting we were delighted to find a good number of the wineries pouring samples of Albariño wine.

We love everything about Albariño wine and we drink it often. When we were in Spain in 2007 we visited the tiny town of Cambados. The town is the center of the Rias Baixas wine region where the Albariño grape is almost exclusively grown. We happened to be in Cambados at harvest time. What a treat! There are many very small Albariño vineyards, farmed by homeowners, surrounding Cambados. They passionately farm their vineyards with many using no poisons or fertilizers. We watched at the Martin Códax co-op winery as these farmers proudly brought in their grapes to be part of the co-op bounty.

An Albariño cluster characteristically has two branches, small & large

Tapas stands for Tempranillo Advocates, Producers, and Amigos Society. Some 50 wineries poured Tempranillo and other Spanish and Portuguese varietals at Fort Mason’s Herbst Pavilion this past Saturday, June 5th. It was a pleasant but somewhat eerie atmosphere in the Herbst Pavilion, with wineries spread out along the perimeter walls. We are used to four times as many wineries and a ton of trade and media representatives packed like sardines at Fort Mason tasting events. At the Tapas we had plenty of elbow room and, best of all, many opportunities to talk to the winemakers and winery owners.

We spent four weeks in Spain in 2007 and explored the Toro, Ribera del Duero, and Riojo wine regions where Tempranillo is king. Ever since that visit, we have been constantly on the lookout for great-tasting Tempranillo wines. The Tapas tasting is the perfect opportunity for wine lovers like us to discover Tempranillo and other Spanish varietals. Read the rest of this entry »

The Vintage Wine Tasters met this past Wednesday at our bimonthly meeting to blind taste and judge six Petite Sirah wines in the budget category of around $20 or less. In case you are new to following the Vintage Wine Tasters, we are a group of nine hobbiest wine drinkers who love discovering terrific wine bargains and values. We drink a lot of wines and have been doing so for a very long time, hence the name of our group, Vintage. Our host Bruce did a terrific job searching out Petite Sirah wines in this price category. It seems to be that the majority of Petite Sirah wines are above $30 mark in price, so the task of finding quality Petite Sirah was a little more intensive than the norm. The host always has the assignment of searching out wines and tasting a broad selection until arriving upon the top six for the wine tasting. Read the rest of this entry »

Our mantra is to search for wine, food and other delights. With this in mind we head down to the Mission District of San Francisco on a Saturday night to take in a somewhat unknown, but quite good, Latin Jazz Band called Primavera. We’d heard them play before in the East Bay and really enjoyed their music.

Both San Francisco natives, we visit the City often, but were a little reluctant to go to the Mission District because of the bad press it sometimes get. We were joined by two adventurous friends and were please to find Savannah Jazz to be a safe and pleasant venue, on Mission between 25th and 26th streets. Parking was not a problem at 7:30 on a Saturday night. There’s a $5 cover charge when groups are playing and the food was decent and reasonably priced. The drinks were good but the wine list was very limited and out of date with vintages no longer available. If you are a wine lover like us, it’s best that you bring in your own bottle of wine. The corkage fee is $15. The restaurant and lounge are very cozy and set up nicely so all patrons have a great view of the performing group.

Primavera has a very nice Latin sound, and we think they’ll gain in popularity. They were joined on this night by a wonderful vocalist, Ana Nitmar from Guatemala, and she definitely added spice to the selections she sang with the band. The three sets the band played at the Savannah Jazz Club were digitally recorded. We are hoping that soon a CD will be available so we can hear Primavera’s great Latin sounds on our iPods.

Here is Primavera’s schedule for coming performances: June 3, 7 pm. at the Panama Hotel in San Rafael, June 11, 7 pm. at the Cafe Lella in Berkeley, and June 24, 7pm. at the Park Avenue Bar & Grill in Oakland. Full disclosure: one reason we enjoy listening to this terrific group is that our son Jeff plays drums for Primavera.

We have been to the old Hopland Inn on four occasions beginning in 2003. There is something about this old Victorian mansion that keeps us going back for more. But after our last visit, we may not visit again.

First, a little history: The inn opened in 1890 and was called the Thatcher Inn, owned by William Wallace Thatcher. Originally, the hotel had 44 rooms with no indoor plumbing. Rumor has it that it was a brothel, so no need to stay long enough to need a bathroom. The hotel was sold several times and eventually remodeled into 22 rooms. A beautiful library with floor-to-ceiling bookcases and a lovely bar were added. In 2001 a group of businessmen associated with the local wineries purchased the inn and continued to make renovations. Read the rest of this entry »

My neighbor asked us where we were off to and I said “Hopland.” The dumbfounded look on her face said it all. She had never heard of the town of Hopland. I told her that we were going there to play Bocce, taste wine, and stay in an old hotel that once was a brothel and perhaps is haunted. The dumbfounded look deepened and she walked back into her house and said “Have a good time.” Yes, It was a little strange that we were off to Hopland when we could have just as easily been going to the Napa Valley, Healdsburg, or Sonoma. Read the rest of this entry »

We are in New Orleans, the Big Easy, our second trip to this famous eating and drinking city and the home of Jazz. We visited back in 1999 and now with Katrina well in the past we thought it time to visit again. Unfortunately as we make this second visit, looming large over this entire region is the BP massive oil leak of April 20th. No one knows how badly this man-made disaster will affect the region in the months and years to come.

We arrived on a Thursday evening in New Orleans just in time for dinner after what seemed like a forever flight from San Francisco via Dallas-Fort Worth airport. Our lodging destination in New Orleans is a condomium complex, La Saulet, located in the Lower Garden District. First stop on the way to La Saulet is dinner at a little Italian restaurant by the name of Eleven79. This is truly a neighborhood spot that is lively and very much authentic New Orleans, not a hint of touristy. You won’t find this gem in any of the guidebooks but if you are in the area, it is worth a try. The food and the prices are good but the atmosphere is what it’s all about here. We really enjoyed this cozy restaurant located at 1179 Annunciation. Read the rest of this entry »

We have a great five-minute video of how biodynamic farming is implemented at the vineyards of the Montemaggiore Winery near the town of Healdsburg. We interviewed winery owner Vince Ciolino as he walked us through his hillside vineyards in the Dry Creek Valley. Vince along with his wife Lise are the owners of this beautiful winery. Lise is the winemaker and Vince is the vineyard manager. The wines are Rhone style wines and the emphasis is on Syrah. The winery is open only by appointment, but don’t let that stop you from visiting. If you are looking for something very different from the standard tasting room fare, then you will find a visit to Montemaggiore an exciting diversion.

One of the coolest and most unusual biodynamic practices at Montemaggiore is the use of chickens. The winery has 15 chickens that live in a chicken coup on wheels. This little chicken habitat is an exact replica of the winery. Vince can move the chicken coup to various locations on his estate vineyards to do their work. The chickens leave the coup periodically to roam the vines in search of insects. They scratch the soil with their claws to find the bugs. That scratching helps mix in the natural compost that Vince has applied to the vines. The chickens eat tons of insects and that removes many an insect pest from the vines.

Watch the video to get an idea of what goes on at a biodynamic vineyard.
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These days I don’t mind opening a bottle of wine that has a screw top. Ten years ago that would have been a different story. Bottles that had screw tops then usually contained cheap, very sweet, and bad-tasting wines. Today more and more wineries are deciding that the screw top is the way to go on wines that are meant to be drunk within a year’s time. Why put a cork in the wine that has no aging potential, when estimates are that one in ten wines goes bad because of a defective cork? A screw top wine is not going to have that problem. Read the rest of this entry »