Why Write About California Wine Tasting Experiences?

Essays Exploring The Abundance & Variety of California Wines

Why devote time and resources to writing about California wine tasting experiences? What is it so important about wine for us to dedicate energy writing about winery tasting experiences in California sampling rooms?

We write about wine because:

1-There are plenty of great wine creators throughout the entire state. We think ‘they’ (the reviewers anointing 100-point wines in magazines) should hop off the Napa bandwagon and jump on the California regional vino train. Places like Monterey, Lodi, Livermore, Amador County, Gold Country, Paso Robles, Santa Barbara, Foxen Canyon, Edna Valley and Temecula await your visit. There are more regions, but you get the point.

2-Wine is Not Ostentatious (WINO). It’s part of everyday life. When you hold a glass of wine in your hands, it’s not all about terroir (the land) or the region, or the weather, or malolactic fermentation or new oak versus neutral oak barrels. It’s all about your experience with wine, what you taste and what you enjoy. All those technical details are important to wine makers. You care about the taste. Savor it without all the hoopla.

‘As we always say, you have to kiss a lot of ugly winery frogs before you find your beautiful Prince or Princess of wine. You have much searching ahead of you.’

3-We are not trained Sommeliers. We don’t wish to be wine snobs. We are not going to tell you about berries on the nose and hints of pepper & chocolate on the back of your sip. You experience these tastes differently than we do. You’ll never read these words in this publication……This Is the Best Wine in The World & You Should Buy This Bottle. Geez, we can’t believe we wrote those words. It’s your palate, your taste. Hopefully we can guide you to wines that sing for you.

4-There’s something in the area of 10,000 varieties of wine grape. We’d like to explore those different varietals and share them with you. Because drinking wine is not just about Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and the Chardonnay you find in restaurants or retail stores. It’s also about Zinfandel, Touriga Nacional, Carignon, Pinot Noir, Sauvignon Blanc, Viognier, Piquepoul, Mourvedre and Sangiovese. You can taste these wines throughout California. Oh, and then you can blend them together for even more tasty treats.

5-These pages contain personally curated lists of California wineries offering up tasty and hopefully less expensive wine (or as the industry labels it, more ‘approachable’.) We eschew ostentatiousness. We explore wineries creating 600 cases of wine in the same pages we document wineries creating 8 million cases of wine. If the wine is good, we’ll try it.

6-We’re inspired by the ideas and writings of John Brecher & Dorthy Gaiter who enjoy great economical value priced wine but also appreciate more premium wines. They wrote 12 years worth of weekly wine columns in The Wall Street Journal classifying wines in six categories: “Yech”, “OK”, “Good”, “Very Good”, “Delicious” to “Delicious!” Keep it simple.

That’s why we rank wines based in five layers:

– -✰ What’s next on your list

-✰ Not liking it too much

✰ We’ll drink this wine, especially if it’s hosted

✰+This wine has our attention and we may buy it

✰++We’re hooked and we’ll buy this wine.

7-Everybody wants to keep money in their pocket where the cash belongs. What justifies a $200 bottle of wine? Is that wine really tastier than a $110 bottle? Is it that much better than a $45 bottle of wine? How much better is the price to value ratio on a $25 wine compared to a $150 wine? An inexpensive bottle of wine can be a beautiful thing to find and we’re always ready to report good taste & value in these pages.

We’ll conclude with this thought: There are many distinct and tasty wines in the state of California. Winemakers here create interesting and delicious wine. They don’t all reside in Napa county.

Go forth to sip, savor, spit and sample in these California areas. As we always say, you have to kiss a lot of ugly winery frogs before you find your beautiful Prince or Princess of wine. You have much searching ahead of you.

The journey looking for your magical ‘prince’ or ‘princess’ wine starts in these essays.

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Some notes on our wine ranking system.

Bill & Erin Hodge write about California Wine, the estates & winemakers producing them and educational information about Vino. Living in California Wine Country provides a front row seat to the places you want to visit the most here in the Golden State.

– -✰  means -What’s next on your list of wines
-✰  means -Not liking it too much
✰ means  -We’ll drink this wine, especially if it’s hosted!
✰+ means -You’ve got our attention and we might buy this wine.
✰+ + means -We’re hooked and we’re going to buy this wine.
When you see -✰/✰+  with a slash, it means we disagree.