• General Wine Stuff

    RE:FIND Distillery is up to even MORE fun and delicious things

    RE:FIND Distillery is still the best little distillery on the Central Coast. I am somewhat biased about this, but trust me.  You need to try these spirits. I stopped in for a visit last week to see what they’ve been up to since I featured them last year–because the Villicanas (owners Alex and Monica), with their mutual boundless energy, are always up to something fun and interesting. Was I disappointed?  HAHAHAHAHA no.  Don’t be ridiculous.  They’re still making the same top-quality artisanal spirits (and they do MAKE these spirits from scratch, which is a distinction most craft spirit producers cannot claim).  But, ever focused on education as much as the…

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  • General Wine Stuff

    Quick update: Rangeland’s new tasting room is open!

    You may recall my profile of Rangeland wines in Paso Robles last summer–beautifully crafted estate wines in a gorgeous west Paso setting. The only catch was that you had to make an appointment to taste their wines–maybe you’re shy about that, or maybe it’s just a difficult thing to schedule on a weekend of wine tasting–but that is not the case anymore. Their new tasting room opened a couple of weeks ago in Templeton (in the greater Paso Robles area), and you can now walk in any time Thursday through Saturday and belly up to the tasting bar. They’re sharing space with Nature’s Touch, a locally owned natural grocer, at…

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  • General Wine Stuff

    A celebration of Lodi’s old vine Zinfandels

    If you have ever uttered the words “I don’t like Zinfandel,” I humbly suggest you are most likely wrong about that. Sure, taste in wines is a hugely subjective thing, but when most people say “I don’t like Zinfandel,” what they almost always mean–whether they realize it or not–is that they don’t like the popular-10-years-ago super jammy, extracted, oaked-to-death, high-ABV fruit monsters that (unfortunately) came to be considered the California style of Zinfandel.  While there’s some truth to that, it’s really not representative of what’s currently going on in the state with this variety, and certainly not representative of what’s going on with zins in Lodi. While Lodi is pretty…

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