• General Wine Stuff

    Hidden in plain site: the treasure that is Lodi’s (endangered) ancient vines.

    As Lodi gradually builds awareness of its place in California wine culture, and therefore as a wine travel destination, it is simultaneously losing, bit by bit, one of the most important resources that make it a wine country treasure: its ancient-vine vineyards, many well over 100 years old. Kevin Phillips, Vice President of Operations at Michael David Winery, a large family-owned winery in Lodi, estimates that Lodi lost approximately ten percent of its old-vine plantings this year alone. Let that sink in. If you drove through the backroads of Lodi in the weeks following this year’s harvest, you would have seen vineyards at every turn piled up with torn-out, gnarly…

  • General Wine Stuff

    You say garrigue, I say chaparral: why California wines deserve a native descriptor.

    Old habits die hard, and there is safety in the familiar.  In the wine world’s accepted collection of wine descriptors, garrigue and garrigue herbs are often used to describe a particular herbacious quality in certain wines, particularly from the south of France–but what is garrigue?  And are we really using the term correctly in describing California wines?  Are we again standing in the shadow of French wine terminology, missing an opportunity to assert our own New World attributes? Scientifically speaking, garrigue describes a Mediterranean scrub ecosystem in areas with calcareous (or limestone) soils, particularly in France’s Rhone and Bordeaux regions.  Think wild thyme, lavender, juniper, rosemary.  Now, that term works…

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