August 30, 2010
I’ve been a fan of the good value found in third label wines of Wild Horse Winery & Vineyards for some time now. Their baseline Wild Horse line of wines are always a good bet for high QPR every vintage, particularly the widely available Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. I had yet to ever try their two high end labels however, so when I was invited to have dinner with their Director of Winemaking and taste through their top wines at the tasty Local Kitchen in San Francisco, I jumped on BART and headed over.
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August 16, 2010
I’m debuting a new series of guest articles on Vinopanion today, starting with this fine wine accessory intro article by Zsa Zsa Bacaling of Grotto Cellars. These free guest posts will provide a bit of a fresh voice every now and then for you devoted readers who, like my family, get tired of hearing me blather on and on about my vino obsession. This first article by Zsa Zsa delivers some great advice for the newbie wine fanatic, something that I have somewhat neglected over the ~3 years of my Vinopanion writings. Cheers!
Let the right accessories add to your wine appreciation experience
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July 29, 2010
I am extremely excited to announce the launch of a new and exciting way for me to communicate, in a very deliciously simple way, the best wines that I come across, each and every week. The brand, spankin’ new WKBadges, spectacularly designed by Mofunsun Enterprises, LLC, are 5 simple notices that tell you a wine is worth the lightening of your wallet. The concept really is quite simple: do they sport a WKBadge? Then they deserve your money. BLEDOW!
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June 27, 2010
While struggling to recover from Le Wine Buff in Bordeaux last week, I’m already here in Walla Walla, WA for the third annual 2010 North American Wine Bloggers’ Conference, whew! I’m going to be trying to blog a completely different this year, different from WBC08 and WBC09…I’m going to be continuously adding to this post throughout the entire, nutsovino weekend! …we’ll see how it all turns out. 
Let’s get diving into the fun, as I’m happily surrounded by my many, MANY talented vinopanions. Follow along yourself by tracking the #WBC10 hashtag on Twitter and keep track of our busy busy agenda here at the Marcus Whitman. Cheers!
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June 24, 2010
Finally. It’s quite similar to that feeling of gloriously painful anticipation that you once experienced before every birthday as a child…I was finally going to Bordeaux as part of Le Wine Buff program for Enjoy Bordeaux! I have been a ‘Buff since late last year when the pilot program first kicked off. The Bordeaux Wine Council (CIVB) sponsored the trip and we’ve been working for and with them and CreativeFeed to help educate the public on the thousands of affordable, high quality and downright tasty Bordeaux wines that are imported to the US. These wines are the majority from Bordeaux and don’t cost the same amount as the many techno gadgets I brought along with me on the trip. So there I was…in Bordeaux and yet I had never even been to Europe!
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June 22, 2010
One of the most exciting wine events of the year is back in the Bay Area this week. The 6th Annual Pinot Days San Francisco festival celebrates the fickle grape all this week, culminating in the awesome Grand Festival Public Tasting Sunday 06/27/10 inside the Festival Pavilion at Fort Mason. Last year we were treated to an enormous amount of fantastic Pinot, with so much great wine there to be had, I was actually a bit sad after we left, when I realized that we had only tasted 1/5 of the offerings that day!
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June 10, 2010
One of the best parts of being Le Wine Buff for Enjoy Bordeaux is that I get to try a lot of very wonderful, high QPR wines from Bordeaux. Indeed, all five of the Buffs have been very busy filming short tasting videos of each of Today’s Bordeaux: The Top 100 Affordable Bordeaux for 2010. Later this year we will have 100 Days of Bordeaux and debut a new tasty and affordable wine from Bordeaux each day, all hand-picked by none other than the Bordeaux Wine Council, itself.
During Memorial Day Weekend here in the States, I was able to taste and film 8 of these wines all in one gigantic HD-driven swoop. Clearly however, this created a major conundrum…what to do with the leftover wine?? Hmm, holiday weekend, sun and no work…DUDE we should BBQ!! And thus driven by vino need, The Lady and I set about inviting friends over and purchasing copious amounts of food with which to eat with our many bottles of opened Bordeaux.
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May 31, 2010
I’m very fortunate in that I get the opportunity to go to a large number of high quality wine events. The vast majority of the time, I know what to expect for each event, not that it affects my ability to completely enjoy myself, mind you! But every once in a while, a wine event sneaks onto my calendar that provides a whole lot more than expected, upon arrival. The inaugural Napa Valley Tweetup (Twitter), organized by Gabriel Carrejo (Twitter) and Bonfire Interactive…was one of these events.
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May 25, 2010
Following a dizzying string of new partnerships between WineLog, myself and other fine and fun wine partners, we are now part of a very cool and useful iPhone app that has been newly relaunched. Hello Vino takes the hard part out of picking a wine while on the go to whole ‘nother level. Choose a pairing based on the food on the menu in front of you, choose the food for the glass you just ordered at the wine bar or just search for a distinct wine style or producer…all taken care of very quickly. It’s also all dialed in to your favorite social networks (their on Twitter themselves) so that you can brag to educate all of your friends about your synergistic food and wine choice. If you pairing is a match made in digestive heaven, you can even buy the wine straight from your iPhone.
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May 21, 2010
This afternoon, deep within the bowels of biotech in my secret hidden laboratory, I will Skype in and delight the fine listeners of Wine Biz Radio in the Sonoma Valley with tales about wine exploits with my fellow Vinopanions! From 4-5pm PST, you can catch “this episode…” on KVSY-FM 91.3. Herein, we chat about the harrowing exploits of the Napa River Terroir Project, Le Wine Buff’s, Bordeaux and it’s attack by surprisingly lazy wine writing, Brixr and their Tiny Bottles and of course, WineLog (Twitter, Twitter2)!
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