Sonoma Wine Country Blog

Jug Wine Sundays at Preston of Dry Creek

Jug wine isn’t what it used to be and I mean that in a good way. What’s on supermarket shelves may not have changed much since the days of Hearty Burgundy but here and there throughout Sonoma County, you can find outstanding wines in three-liter jugs.

Take Preston’s Guadagni.

Sold only at the winery on Sundays and limited to two jugs per customer, the bottle is filled and labeled on the spot, as you chat with the Prestons and nibble a few homemade olives.

Guadagni is a tribute to Lou and Susan Preston’s late neighbor, Jim Guadagni, known to locals as the Mayor of Dry Creek. Jim was Lou’s mentor and if you get him talking, he’ll share colorful stories, including one of the teenaged Jim guiding a walking plow behind a sweating horse, a jug of wine at either end of the field.

Jim grew zinfandel, carignane, malvoise and mataro. Today, malvoise is known as cinsault and mataro is called mourvedre but the blend that bears his name is as juicy, voluptuous and smooth as his family wine likely was.

Preston of Dry Creek, 9282 West Dry Creek Rd., Healdsburg. Open daily, 11 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. $5 tasting fee, refunded with wine purchase. Guadagni is $32 per 3-liter jug; it is sold only on Sundays; don’t even think about asking to buy it on another day.

– michele anna jordan www.micheleannajordan.com

It's Hot and I'm Thirsty

The temperature is soaring towards 100 degrees in Sonoma County - California Wine Country this week, and suddenly a glass of warm red wine isn’t very appealing. No, when it’s hot outside I prefer a cold wine--either a simple, clean white or even better, an icy dry rose.

I like to say that no one plans to make dry rose and holds aside grapes for that purpose (except Sola Rosa, a Sonoma County winery whose sole focus is dry rose). Rose in California is almost always the byproduct of “bleeding off” tanks.

Sonoma Wine Blending Seminars

There are a lot of wineries in Sonoma County competing for you time, attention and dollar. Every once in a while a winery comes up with a new angle on how to get you, the treasured consumer with credit card in pocket, in the door. For example, the food-wine pairing angle is thriving, with Lynmar Winery a more recent addition, and St. Francis, Mayo and Kendall-Jackson still enjoying great success with their elaborate paired tastings. While J Winery no longer offers their food-wine pairing to bar visitors, but it’s still available in the J Bubble Lounge.

Now a new visitor hook is popping up in Sonoma County tasting rooms, the blending seminar.

Joseph Phelps’s Freestone Vineyards Open in West Sonoma County

The long awaited Pinot Noir project of Napa Valley’s Joseph Phelps Vineyards is underway, with a brand new tasting room open in Freestone in West Sonoma County.

In 1999, Phelps planted 80 acres of Pinot Noir and 20 acres of Chardonnay on three separate sites above Freestone in the Sonoma Coast appellation.

Why are you telling me about Passport if it’s sold out?

Good question. While Passport to Dry Creek Valley is sold out this weekend, there’s still time to get in on the lottery for next year (or check out Craiglist for last-minute tickets for this year). And yours truly thinks Passport to Dry Creek Valley is the single best wine event weekend in Wine Country (unless you have $5k to blow on two tickets for Napa Valley Auction weekend).

For $110 per person, Passport holders get two days worth of wine, glorious wine, and food, glorious food. A significant portion of the ticket fees are kicked back to the wineries to put out a spread, and I do mean SPREAD. Chefs enlisted by the wineries comprise a virtual Who’s Who of Wine Country cuisine.

When Growers Turn Into Winemakers

Robert Young grew grapes for nearly 35 years before his family started to make their own wine under the Robert Young Estate Winery label in 1997.

Look around Sonoma County and you’ll find lots of examples of growers who start their own winery. Clay Mauritson’s family grew grapes for 130 years before he was the first to venture into winemaking in 1998 with Mauritson Wines in Dry Creek. Across the street, Tom and Tina Maple had been growing some of the finest old vine Zinfandel in Dry Creek Valley for more than 30 years before keeping a few tons of grapes for themselves in 2006.

And why not?

April in Carneros

This coming weekend (April 19-20) it’s “April in Carneros” time, a two-day event featuring food and wine at 20 Carneros wineries.

Carneros is unique among wine regions in these woods in that it straddles two counties, Napa and Sonoma. It’s also special in that both cool weather varietals like Chardonnay and Pinot Noir, as well as warm weather varietals like Merlot, can thrive here. Carneros has hot inland days but gets very cool and foggy in the evening from the Pacific Ocean by way of the San Pablo Bay.

In Northern Sonoma, Historic Asti Winery Reopens

The historic Asti Winery quietly reopened to the public last week, with Cellar No. 8 opening a tasting room in the facility that was once the second most popular destination in California after Disneyland.

Cellar No. 8 at Asti Winery is owned by Foster’s, the Australian beverage giant. The winery has continued as a working winery, with Foster’s wineries Cellar No. 8 and more recently Souverain making their wines on the property. Cellar No. 8 is named for an actual cellar at the winery where red wine barrels were aged in the late 1800s.

Musical Chairs Part 2, or if One is Good, Two is Better

If having one tasting room is good, having two must be better. So it seems as SonomaUncorked is seeing a lot of double these days all over Sonoma County.

For starters, Kokomo Wines opened their first tasting room, the Kokomo Lounge, in downtown Santa Rosa’s Railroad Square last summer. Although Kokomo has some outstanding wines, the lounge has been slow to catch on, mostly because of that old real estate adage: location, location, location. The lounge is located just around the corner from the main drag of Railroad Square, but you wouldn’t know it unless you happened to park in front of it.

Musical Chairs Part 1

Just when you think you know the lay of Sonoma County winery-land, a round of musical chairs gets it all mixed up again.

The former Belvedere Winery in the Russian River Valley will open soon as C. Donatiello Winery. Bill Hambrecht, owner of the winery formerly known as Belvedere, sold the Belvedere name to the same-named vodka company for an undisclosed sum (think 8 figures). Now he is teaming up with Chris Donatiello to start a new winery at the old location. Meanwhile, find Belvedere’s Sonoma County Chardonnay available at Bay Area Trader Joe’s for the fire sale price of $4.99 a ba-ba!

Spring is Here!

Here in Sonoma County spring is definitely in the air. The heavy rains of the first part of the year have yielded to sunshine and temperatures nearing 70 degrees every day, and those circumstances make the grapevines very happy. Over the last few weeks they have awakened, first pushing out sap like a sleepy cat having a morning stretch.