Beaumes de Venise and its neighbors – Lafare, La Roque-Alric, and Suzette – are Southern Rhône winemaking villages, a part of the Beaumes de Venise AOP (Appellation d'Origine Protégée). Here the landscape is shaped by the vineyards, which are grown in terraces stitched into the slopes and valleys of the
Utter the word “Tuscany,” and your mind will likely conjure up images of rolling hills, sunny skies, and the dueling monocultures of olive groves and grapevines. And your mind would be right, because most of Tuscany looks exactly like stepping into a painting, photograph, or landscape shot from Under the
I spent most of my recent trip to Bologna learning about Lambrusco and Pignoletto: sparkling red and sparkling white. Good timing for the Holidays, right? Especially at prices under $20. Sparkling Red Wine Last month a group of sparkling wine producers in Italy held a pizza party. This might not
November can be quite agreeable in the Veneto countryside – if the temperature remains mild. A few weeks ago I was visiting a winery in the Treviso province, in Nervesa della Battaglia which is a village known for the bloody battle fought here in the First World War between the Italian
Imagine if I could tell grapegrowers a way to produce more wine from the same vineyard that is also actually better. Happy Thanksgiving winegrowers, I'm here for you! There's another culprit to add to the list of reasons wines are unintentionally getting higher in alcohol: crop-thinning. This revelation comes from
Another gorgeous wine from Shafer. The color is deep and dark. Rich fruits explode on the nose, blueberries and blackberries, and a touch of black pepper. On the palate, blackberry, elderberry, dark chocolate and a hint of espresso lead, with highlights of raspberry singing out on the mid-palate. Tannins offer a
With the loss of Stanislao “Stanko” Radikon on September 11th 2016, the wine world lost one of its most dynamic pioneers. The news was announced to the world with a poignant message from his son Saša, on social media: “Tonight I missed a friend and collaborator. But most of all,
It isn’t difficult to imagine that a visitor to a Napa Valley tasting room in the late 1970s would see a much different world than exists today. There would no traffic jams along Highway 29, and no crowds queuing up waiting for winery doors to open. Walk inside, and the