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At Zinfandel Tasting, 2007 Shines but 2008 Is a Mixed Bag - 07 McNab Ridge Zinfandel
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People are quick to write off the annual Zinfandel Advocates & Producers (ZAP) tasting in San Francisco as a big boisterous party, not a serious tasting. Well, hello? Don't they get it? That's what it is designed to be, and if it weren't, the regulars would riot. The folks who like Zinfandel really like it. They're nuts about this stuff. They are looking to get down and sticky with it.
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ShopEatDrink |
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DRINK - Mendocino Wine
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The Mendocino Crab & Wine festival is a great event in that you're eating local Dungeness crab and drinking local Mendocino County wines with it. I tasted many of them as a component of the wine competition for the Crab & Wine Days event. The same five judges in the crab cake cook-off sipped and spit 48 wine entries. Our mission: choose the wine best paired with pure crab meat.
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'Outside the box' - Tim Thornhill of Parducci, Mendocino Wine Co. is not your average winery owner
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Ever since he was a boy, Tim Thornhill has looked for ways to do what others have told him can't be done. Case in point: A partner in Mendocino Wine Co. in Ukiah, Thornhill recently built his own wetlands to recycle the winery's wastewater, pulling from his years of experience as an arborist and horticulturist whoe gained fame for his ability to move gigantic heritage trees that would otherwise have been gone forever.
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| Ask a Winemaker |
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Charlie Barra on his estate, organics, and Mendocino
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Sixty four vintages ago, the now eighty-two year old Charlie Barra skipped out on his high school classes to pick grapes. Today, he and his family own and operate Barra of Mendocino and Girasole Vineyards, farming two hundred acres of grapes organically and making a line up of well priced, well made wines.
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PITTSBURGH
TRIBUNE-REVIEW |
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Winemakers growing 'on the edge' accept risks, rewards
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Winemakers know that growing grapes "on the edge" can create terrific opportunities for making memorable wines. But ripening grapes on the razor's edge of perfection also caries potentially devastating risks.
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Pick Your Pinot in Mendocino County
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Anderson Valley is Pinot Noir country, and you'll find intimate mom-and-pop wineries along Highway 128. Stop in at Boonville's Foursight Wines' new tasting room, which opened last March, to sample the wines of the fourth generation of the Charles family. Down the road, find another new tasting room opened in August at Londer Vineyards along the Navarro River.
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Foursight Winery
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When you pull up to Foursight Wine's tasting room in Mendocino County's Anderson Valley, don't be surprised if you're greeted by Ozzie. he's the official winery dog and has been known to welcome guests as soon as they pull into the parking lot. Once inside, you're bound to meet a member of the Charles family, Foursight's owners.
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Meyer Family Cellars offers warm reception
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The minute we drove up to Meyer Family Cellars in the Yorkville Highlands (Mendocino County) we kicked ourselves for not packing a picnic lunch. The gardens were brimming with flowers and the wooden tables beckoned under pergolas draped in vines. The place was picture-perfect. But we wouldn't have expected anything less from the family that founded Napa Valley's iconic Silver Oak.
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A California Syrah with Steak
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The Bonterra Syrah 2006, made from certified organic grapes (actually, two-thirds of the grapes were certified biodynamic), was the priciest at $17. But it's a solid, well-made wine, with good depth to its blackberry and black plum fruit, supple texture and a peppery finish that picked up hints of oak spice from 18 months of barrel aging.
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One Barrel: Getting the grapes
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The SunHawk vineyard, planted started in 2006, is enjoying its first real harvest. Kevin Kelley notes a theory that a vineyard's first crop tends to be excellent - and an excellent barometer of its potential - which stands to reason when you consider that the process of growing fruit is essentially one of vine reproduction.
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Parducci's Sustainability Journey Brings Esteemed Environmental Award
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Parducci Wine Cellars of Ukiah recieved the 2009 Governor's Environmental and Economic Leadership Award (GEELA) --California's highest environmental honor -- at a reception following the Governor's Global Climate Summit 2, Sept. 30, in Los Angeles.
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Anderson Valley Pinot Noir
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Anderson Valley was once a quiet, rustic haven, shut to outsiders but for long, winding low road and a vertiginous, winding high road. In the 1800s, the local Bontling dialect was invoked to confound outsiders. A century later, the valley's foggy, redwood-lined slpoes became a magnet for lovers of a subtler style of Pinot Noir.
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Phillips Hill has art on the wall, in the glass
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In the small Mendocino County town of Philo, there's a Craftsman bungalow next to the post office. From the outside it just looks like a charming little cottage, maybe a second home for someone from the city. But inside is a whole other story - one of a painter who became disenchanted with New York's art scene and decided to come out West and eventually make Pinot Noir.
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4 wine country contenders
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Anderson Valley, California - twisting from Cloverale, California, to the Pacific Ocean, a 16-mile portion of Highway 128 passes through the organic apple orchards, olive groves, and redwood forests of Anderson valley. Some of the more than 20 vineyards along the way supply pinot noir grapes for famous wineries in Napa and Sonoma, but you can taste similar vintages at the farm-style Anderson wineries - minus the popped-collar crowds.
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Interview with Bonterra Vineyards Assisant Winemaker Jeff Cichocki
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Located in Mendocino County beneath the clear azure skies, Bonterra has been producing and distributing its wines made from organic grapes since 1993. While the Bonterra brand was thought of in 1987, Bonterra's focus was on creating a delicious palate pleasing, Mother Earth firendly wine that could also be offered at an affordable price.
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Breggo Cellars' tasting room turns on the charm
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Locals who still remember the days when everyone spoke Boontling may not agree, but Breggo seems to blend into the old-time Anderson Valley landscape well despite being quite new to it. In 2005, Douglas Stewart founded Breggo on a 202-acre former sheep farm, naming it after the word "sheep" in Boonville's native dialect.
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A highlands fling: Yorkville appellation celebrates small-production vintages
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Yorkville is another one of Mendocino's well-kept secrets, noted Glenn McGourty, winegrowing advisor in Mendocino County for the UC Davis cooperative extension program. "There are pockets of brilliance out here, with so many microclimates. There are not a lot of places where Bordeaux varietals and pinot overlap, but you can do that here."
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Gewurztraminer's passionate California devotees
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Gewurztraminer occupies a special niche in California. Its fans are enthusiastically loyal. It's often as expensive as some other top whites - in the $16 to $27 range - which makes selling it to the uninitiated a daunting effort. The Teutonic name leads to an erroneous suspicion that the wine is always sweet.
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Rose' is Slipping, But Not Among Sparklers
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Pink fizz is shining from nearly all corners far and near. After years, Scharffenberger has reintroduced its Brut Rose' from Mendocino - perhaps its best wine of late. Its Anderson Valley neighbor, Roederer Estate, is equally serious about rose'.
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Mendocino's Potter Valley Makes Great Grapes
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Potter Valley first became visible in 1980 when winemaker Dennis Patton made a dry Riesling under his Hidden Cellars label from fruit grown by pioneer grape grower Skip Lovin. "One day I got a call from Bo Barrett at Chateau Montelena," says Patton, "and he asked where I got the fruit. I told him it was Skip's, so he started making his Riesling from that vineyard."
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Patti Fetzer, child of a wine dynasty, charts her own path
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With her pressed blue jeans, boots and done-up hair, it'd be easy to peg Patti Fetzer as the tough yet reticent heroine of a country song. And maybe if the second-generation grape grower were from the Tennessee Mountains instead of Mendocino's Redwood Valley, she would be.
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Different Shades Of Green |
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Once upon a time the American pork industry created the slogan, "the other white meat," to capitalize on the popularity of health food and to attract eaters who were shunning red meat. Now the wineries in Northern California's Mendocino county are promoting their area as "America's greenest wine region."
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Californias Green Wine Country |
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In Mendocino--a Northern California county known for its dramatic hills, logging and a certain illegal recreational crop--vineyards are now so prevalent that even the hippies and the cowboys have become wine snobs.
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Mendocino Pinot Noir |
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Mendocino County has the potential to make some of California's most distinct expressions of Pinot Noir. Most Pinot can be found in the remote Anderson Valley, where cool nights and plenty of coastal fog influence have long provided a haven for Pinot amid the northern redwoods. A stable, steady 2006 growing season certainly provided an opportunity for the region to shine.
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Is Mendocino the New Napa? |
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St. Helena winemaker George Vierra says wine snobs will find it "unfathomable" that climate changes may be transforming Mendocino County into a higher-quality grape-growing region than neighboring Sonoma County..
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