What do you get when you mix in the drive and passion of a former Walt Disney movie industry executive and a phenomenal vineyard in Napa Valley? You get magical wines from Frank Family Vineyards.
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With the departure of cherry blossoms and the arrival of pollen and tourists, my thoughts turn to one of my favorite cuisines; sushi.
I know that you can eat sushi any time of year, but somehow, the warming springtime weather just seems to make the ama-ebi (sweet shrimp) taste just a tad sweeter and the spicy tuna rolls just a little bit zestier.
Last
week I waxed poetic about some of the amazing wine values coming out of Spain. And while I still believe that Spanish wine represents some of the best quality-to-price ratios on the international wine market, there is a group of Spanish winemakers who are quietly raising the bar on quality and preparing to market their wares on the world stage.
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Nothing
sends wine shivers down my spine faster than someone who thinks that the definition of Spanish Wine is Sangria! Ugh! It’s like fingernails on a chalkboard. But if you’re looking for delicious wines for a very good price, then right now, the best place to find them is Spain.
Easter Sunday is usually a day that begins with an egg hunt for the kids and ends with a wine hunt for the adults. Searching for the right wine to serve with Easter dinner can make you as crazy as forgetting where you hid the last Easter egg – until the smell reminds you a week or so later.
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T
he Chimney Rock estate began to take shape in 1980, when Hack and Stella Wilson brought their love of wine and South African winery architecture to the Napa Valley. They purchased a 180 acre parcel – which included a golf course – situated on the east side of the Silverado Trail.
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There is a distinct warming in the air. Leaves are beginning to sprout and over-enthusiastic daffodils are peeking out their petals to take Mother Nature’s temperature. But in our household, there is a different portent that heralds the arrival upcoming arrival of the vernal equinox; wine samples. A lot of wine samples.
Davis Bynum first flirted with winemaking at home in Berkeley when he was a young reporter working at the San Francisco Chronicle. It was 1951 and he purchased a small amount of petite sirah from Robert Mondavi. Things became a bit more serious in 1965 when he transformed a warehouse in Albany into a small winery, where he made wine using knowledge gained from the extensive library at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1973, Bynum found an 84-acre piece of land that eventually became Davis Bynum Winery.
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When you see or hear the word Mondavi, most wine consumers think of Robert Mondavi, the legendary wine visionary whose death at the age of 94 heralded the end of a remarkable era in the California wine industry. But the Mondavi name reached far deeper into the fabric of Napa Valley than the aforementioned luminary, thanks to his brother Peter Mondavi, Sr. who passed away last Saturday at his home in St. Helena, on the property of his Charles Krug Winery. He was 101.
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Looking for a wine with a storied history, delicious to drink and inexpensive to try? Well, consider trying something from the east… as in Eastern Europe.
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