Zaca Mesa Winery just celebrated its 50th anniversary. That’s quite an achievement in this relatively young wine region. The land was purchased in 1973 by John Cushman and five of his friends. It was only the third winery in Santa Barbary County and served as the training ground for many winemakers who then went on…
When we first heard of Folded Hills, we were excited that we were going to try a new winery. Folded Hills was definitely new to us, although Eve’s Wine 101’s own Eve Bushman wrote about a tasting of their wines that she attended in early 2020: www.evewine101.com/2020/02/28/discovering-folded-hills-winery-plus-winemaker-angela-osborne/ The winery itself is also fairly new. The…
With annual production of about 50,000 cases, Stolpman Vineyards might seem like a large winery compared to many of the others in Santa Barbara County, but the reality is that it is fairly small relative to the big corporate producers. Still, we were wondering why this winery that produces a wide variety of excellent wines…
With the refrain of 1970s Peter Allen song “Everything Old Is New Again” seemingly ringing in our ears, we were looking forward to visiting some of our old favorites in Santa Barbara County from the 1980s and 1990s while also exploring some new-to-us wineries. It turned out that our first stop was a little bit…
The Tam O’Shanter in Los Feliz has been one of our select go-to restaurants for a long time, even more so after the pandemic closures. While we can’t say we’ve been going since they opened over 100 years ago, we’ve been dining there much of the last twenty. At this Scottish-themed restaurant, service is consistently…
Driving on the Sonoma Highway just north of Kenwood, it would be virtually impossible to miss seeing St. Anne’s Crossing Winery, even if you weren’t looking for it. After all, how many other wineries have a 28-foot tall bear standing guard over their tasting room? The Bear is a sculpture created by Sonoma County artist…
We were first introduced to the group of Wilson Artisan Wineries in 2015 when we visited Antoine Favero at Mazzocco Sonoma. We’ve been back a few times to Mazzocco and have also visited a few other wineries in the group: Wilson, Soda Rock and Jaxon Keys. Antoine makes the wines at Jaxon Keys and Soda…
We recently had a bottle of the 2016 Comstock Rockpile Petite Sirah along with a few other wines. Petite Sirah is well known for often being dark, brooding, and taking a long time to come around to peak drinkability. This was just the opposite. It was bright, lively and downright elegant. It was the wine…
PASO ROBLES, CA (PRWEB) – America’s Best Wine Festival[1], The Garagiste Festival: Northern Exposure, returns to Sonoma for the fifth time on April 29th, offering rare and first-look access to the best, hard-to-find wines from over 40 micro-production, commercial wineries. Held at the Sonoma Veterans Memorial Hall, walking distance from Sonoma’s historic downtown plaza, the festival…
As mentioned in our previous article, one of the benefits of staying at the Briar Cottage is that it made it that much easier to get to our scheduled visit with Mazzocco Sonoma winemaker, Antoine Favero. All it took was a short stroll over to the Mazzocco tasting room. We were a little early, so…