We had the immense pleasure of doing a talk and tasting at one of our local businesses – Webster’s Fine Stationers, in Altadena, CA, the other night. If you were there, you know what a great time we had.
But more to the point, we also got to taste some great wines, courtesy of Webster’s Liquors (they and the Fine Stationers make up the family-owned Webster’s Village, on North Lake Avenue in Altadena). The other part of the venture was to look at what wines go well with BBQ foods.
The Maddalena 2008 Sauvignon Blanc, from San Antonio Winery in Los Angeles, is a perfect example of what former Wall Street Journal wine columnists John Brecher and Dorothy Gaither used to call a summer gulper – the sort of wine that you pour while making dinner to quench your thirst after a long, hard slog in the salt mines.
The color was very, very light, practically clear. The nose was the weird part. Some folks in the wine trade call it gooseberry, some call it cat box (although, trust us, it does
Last weekend, while at a dinner with colleagues, we came up against a common dilemma for a lot of folks. Namely, when they taste wine, all they taste is wine. They don’t smell or taste all the berries, fruit, tannins, whatever, that wine writers love to wax eloquent over (including us, sometimes).First up, Anne is one of those folks, and while she chooses to be impressed by Michael’s ability, she certainly understands why others feel intimidated or even that they’re not “wine” people.
Balderdash, we say. You can still enjoy wine even if you can’t pull out essence of
Okay, so it took us a few days to recover, find the interviews and generally think about things, but here it is.
This is the third year for the Grand Tasting by the winemaker members of Tempranillo Advocates, Producers and Amigos Society. So this is actually a rather small gathering, as these things go. There were 40 wineries represented, many by the winemakers and owners, themselves, all spread out through the Herbst Pavilion at the Fort Mason Conference Center in San Francisco on Saturday, June 5.
Forty-two wineries, almost 1200 attendees, amazing wines, and paella in one of the biggest-assed pans you’ll ever want to see – like four feet in diameter big.
This was the Grand Tasting for the Tempranillo Advocates, Producers and Amigos Society, held over this past weekend – and we were there!
Which means our next post will not be up until Wednesday, at the soonest. We need to recover.
But what fun. It was a great weekend catching up with a couple of our fave producers and friends from Twisted Oak and Coral Mustang, tasting some fabulous wines and waiting
We had been wanting to drop in on the San Antonio Winery for years, and just about a year ago, we joined some of our wine-making buddies on a special tour of the place and fell in love.
San Antonio Winery is one of those little treasures in Los Angeles that reminds us this place actually had a history before oil and Hollywood. While the winery, itself, was founded in 1917, it was one of hundreds in the area, most of which failed during the 1920s and Prohibition. San Antonio hung on
