If you’ve been reading this series from the beginning about our latest visit to the Dry Creek Valley (and if you haven’t, why not?), you may recall that we added one more winery to our itinerary. When we were visiting with winemaker Antoine Favero at Mazzocco Sonoma, he graciously suggested that we pay a visit…
Have you heard of Saini Vineyards? We have to admit that we hadn’t until last spring when we were planning our self-made tour of historic vineyards in Sonoma County. Unfortunately, our schedule filled up quickly but we were determined to make it happen on our next visit to the area, and we did! Two of…
You may have seen Pedroncelli wines in wine stores. Those are tasty wines but they don’t begin to tell the whole story. Those wines you see in stores might be considered their workhorse wines, allowing this fairly small family-owned historic winery property to produce about 50,000 cases per year. Much of the grapes are purchased…
We spent Thanksgiving week wine tasting in Napa again this year, also adding in some time in Healdsburg in Sonoma County. It had been over ten years since I was in Sonoma, as Napa is my husband’s preference, but that has actually changed with this long-overdue visit for more than one reason. For one, the…
Ken and Diane Wilson began acquiring land and planting vines in Sonoma County’s Dry Creek Valley in the 1980s. They started making wine when they bought the historic Fredson Winery in 1993 with its century-old tin barn. It is now known as Wilson Winery of Dry Creek. The redwood vats were replaced by modern tanks…
After tasting some delicious white wines, we were ready for what the Dry Valley AVA is best known for – Zinfandel! Tasting room manager Eddie presented these tastes in a side-by-side format. We started with the 2023 Briar Zinfandel and the 2023 Sullivan Zinfandel, also from the Dry Creek Valley. The Briar has 9% Petite…
When we first began going to the Dry Creek Valley about a decade ago, the very first winery in the area we visited was Mazzocco Sonoma and its winemaker Antoine Favero was the first winemaker we met in the region. The only problem with this being our first stop is that the bar was now…
It’s been no secret that we’ve been fans and mailing list members of Turley Wine Cellars for a very long time. They are definitely one of the wineries that have put Zinfandel on the map, along with their masterful versions of Petite Syrah (don’t blame me for the spelling!) and a few others. We always…
You may recall that a couple of days before our visit to Ridge Lytton Springs, Joel Peterson of Once & Future Wines had opened a bottle for us of the Ravenswood Belloni Zinfandel from 1993. Much to our surprise, Shauna shared barrel samples with us of the 2024 Belloni Zinfandel. Quite the coincidence! Even in…
For the final stop of our self-made Historic Vineyards tour, we took another of Historic Vineyard Society’s Emily Rasmussen’s suggestions and went to the Ridge Vineyards Lytton Springs property in the Dry Creek Valley, a visit that was long overdue. In an earlier article in this series, we mentioned the three Rs of Zinfandel –…