Archive for January 29th, 2010

2009 Harvest Report!

January 29, 2010

For those of you who may be interested (for example, those of you considering joining the Monte Bello Collector Program with the 2009 vintage!), the 2009 Harvest Report is now available for your reading pleasure!

It was certainly quite a growing season. Beginning with the transition from a very long and cold winter,

to a cool spring,

and moving through a fairly mild summer,

into a harvest  especially notable for the debut of a new grape sorting system at Monte Bello,

it’s been a thoroughly riveting cycle, and now that we’ve made it through, I’m very happy to say it looks like all signs are pointing to 2009 being a great vintage!

If you would like to read the Harvest Report, you can find it here.

Enjoy!

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Posted in Lytton, Monte Bello, Vineyards and Oenology, Winemaking | 1 Comment »

ZAP Map! -or- Tips On What To Taste At Zap!

January 29, 2010

Greetings all!

As the West Coast-based Zin-Obsessed amongst you will already know, this weekend is ZAP weekend.

For this who don’t recognize the acronym, ZAP stands for Zinfandel Producers & Advocates, and every year they put on a Zinfandel Festival, which is truly one of the most oenophillically decadent endeavors one can engage in, should one be zin-curious … this weekend’s event is the 19th Annual, and as usual, there are quite literally hundreds of producers who will be on hand pouring samples of their wares.

This can make for a pretty daunting day (or set of days!), if you don’t know where to go or what to look for. Fortunately, a great many of the attendees are also writers, who pretty rapidly turn their immediate thoughts and perspectives into blogs and other on-line resources, and these can accordingly be great guides for the uninitiated and otherwise lost attendees.

An excellent first destination would be The Gray Market Report. This is the blog of freelance writer W. Blake Gray, and he’s already put up a post with a list of his favorites at ZAP so far; this is as good a place to start as any, and because his list lists Ridge, well, all the better!

You can find his ZAP post here.

So, if you go, enjoy yourselves, but drink responsibly (use a spittoon!), and send me your tasting notes and photographs!

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Posted in Events & Photographs, Varietals & Blends, Viticultural Salmagundi, Wine Blogs, Wine Tales, Zinfandel | 1 Comment »

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