lgsjr – Page 9 – Power Tasting – The Wine Tasting Experience

Margerum Wines

Power Tasting reported on wine tasting in Santa Barbara several years ago; this edition is an update of sorts. At that time, we visited the Margerum tasting room, then at the El Paseo complex. The wines were enjoyable but the room was on a dark alley and it was dark and uninviting inside as well. Power Tasting’s policy is that we don’t print bad reviews; we believe that silence is the best way to deal with wineries that we couldn’t recommend. So we never said anything about Margerum at that time.

The entrance and one of the patios at Margerum Wines.

Margerum (https://www.margerumwines.com) has moved, somewhat surprisingly, to the Funk Zone. But their tasting room in Santa Barbara is anything but funky. (They also have a tasting room in Los Olivos that we haven’t visited.) From the elegant, soaring entrance to the broad, capacious room inside, the message is: “Margerum makes serious wine and should be taken seriously”. [Is the Funk Zone evolving? Time will tell.]

The interior of the tasting room at Margerum in Santa Barbara.

The overall ambiance is that of Spanish-accented lounge at a fancy resort. There is a wide bar, terraces in front and on the side, and a separate section above for groups and parties. Perhaps it would be more appropriate to call it a restaurant at resort, because Margerum also has a rather extensive menu. Many wineries will offer a cheese and charcuterie plate, as does Margerum, but this one also has a lengthy list of hors d’oeuvres, sandwiches, salads and pizzas, all prepared on the premises.

All of this would mean nothing if the wines were subpar. While Power Tasting doesn’t review wines as such, we can say that there were several that we enjoyed quite a bit. While Margerum does offer Pinot Noirs and several Sauvignon Blancs, their specialty is wines made from Rhône-style grapes. Our favorites were the Pinot Noir from the Sanford-Benedict vineyard, their Reserve Syrah and particularly their Mourvèdre. The Margerum Rosé is also quite Rhône-like.

Doug Margerum, the winery’s founder, is a Central Coast wine pioneer and continues to advocate for and consult to other vineyards in the area. He has started a second label, Barden, using his middle name for these wines. The intent, according to their web site is “an exploration of cold climate grapes grown in and around the Santa Rita Hills AVA”. We didn’t enjoy them as much as the Margerum-labeled wines. We visited the new tasting room on a weekday and so can’t speak to the weekend when the Funk Zone fills with partiers. We were told by our sever that weekends get quite crowded. We don’t understand why the decision was made to relocate to an area better known for high times than fine wines. We prefer to taste wine in an environment that to some degree replicates the atmosphere of a dinner party in our home: a happy buzz of conversation but not the clang of a wild night of drinking. We can only advise that wine lovers visit Margerum and do so on the days of the week that best fit their temperaments.

Santa Barbara

For wine lovers, Santa Barbara is paradise. So many tasting rooms in such a concentrated space! We address the wine tasting aspect of the city elsewhere in this edition, but even if you are not planning to go wine tasting there – or even if you are – the city of Santa Barbara has a great deal to offer the visitor besides wine.

A Santa Barbara street scene. The tower in the background is a movie theater!

For one thing, it is a particularly beautiful city. Much of the architecture harkens back to Santa Barbara’s colonial past, as a part of Mexico. Scrubbed white walls and tiled roofs are evident throughout the city. In another direction, there are also many beautiful Victorian buildings. Power Tasting doesn’t recommend hotels, but our favorite one, the Upham, is a jewel, erected in 1871, still maintaining its original form and is worth a look.

Even, perhaps especially, when you get off the main commercial streets and into the nearby residential areas, your eyes are still delighted. The homes themselves may or may not have architectural interest, but the gardens in front of them are wonderful to see. The Santa Barbarans love their gardens and fill the fronts of their houses with palms, cacti, succulents and a wide variety of flowering plants and shrubs. Take a walk around just to enjoy these sights.

For a city with fewer than 90,000 residents, Santa Barbara is a remarkably cultured city. On State Street, the main drag, there are several grand old movie palaces from a bygone era, still showing the latest films. Moreover, there are several legitimate theaters providing live performances. The most notable cultural magnets are its museums. There’s a history museum, one for natural history and the gem is the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. It doesn’t have a huge collection – you can see it all in less than a day – but what there is is fine. The highlight, to our eyes, is the museum’s collection of Impressionists.

The Old Mission Santa Barbara.

Two other historical cultural attractions stand out. The Presidio is today more of a district than a single attraction. It consists of many of the buildings that the Spanish erected to govern and protect the city in colonial times. (Not coincidentally, the military was there to conquer the Chumash people, who just happened to be living there at the time.) The buildings are well-maintained and many are open for public viewing. Happily, the Presidio is only a few blocks from the tasting rooms.

While the soldiers were occupying Chumash land, Franciscan monks were opening a mission to convert them. What started as a modest farmstead grew over time into a cloister and a church. The Old Mission Santa Barbara is open today for occasional masses and every day for self-directed tours. It includes the gardens, the church, a museum and the cemetery. The latter, originally intended for burial of the monks, has over the years outsiders become the resting place for other, some not even Catholic.

Add to all the above the beaches, resorts, fine dining and oh, yes, wine and you can see that Santa Barbara is an excellent place to visit. One note about the weather. December through March are months with particularly fine weather, warm for those of us facing real winter. But starting late April and onward through June, the weather turns cool and overcast. The locals say, “May grey, June gloom”. Bring a sweater if you go in those months.

Brussels

Brussels, the capital of Belgium, is a handsome city with many interesting things to do there. But to be honest, it’s not a wine city. Oh, for sure, there are excellent wine lists at some restaurants. But there aren’t many Belgian wineries scattered around the country, so if you’re going to do that much driving, maybe you want to travel for around three hours and go to Champagne in France. Or, maybe vice versa, you could tag Brussels on to a Champagne visit.

The Grand-Place or Grote Markt. Photo courtesy of MakeMyTrip.

The best place to start a trip in Brussels is the Grand-Place, which is also known as the Grote Markt. [The Belgians have a great language divide. The Walloons speak French; the Flemish speak their own language, which is close to Dutch. You’ll see signs everywhere in both languages.] The Grand-Place has a lot of history, going back to the 11^th century. In 1695, Louis XIV’s troops destroyed it, so the good burghers of Brussels vowed to reconstruct it even better than it was. They did it in about five years and so it remains today.

The Big Market (for that’s what it means in Flemish) is surrounded by opulent guild halls, the Hôtel de Ville (Town Hall) and lots of places to eat and drink. The Belgian make great beer, and they serve it by the liter. There are few things more pleasant on a warm summer afternoon, than enjoying a beer amongst the architecture, watching some Belgians and even more tourists going about their lives. A word of warning: The Belgians like some of their beers with fruit flavors (Kriek is lemon; Frambozen is raspberry; and Cerise is cherry.) Most Americans find these fruity beers to be awful, but some of us do like them on a hot day. Think of them as Kool-Aid with a kick.)

A few blocks away is the city’s symbol, the Mannekin Pis. It’s a small statue of a little boy, well, pissing. You ought to see it but you’ll find it a bit disappointing if you were expecting a Belgian version of the Statue of Liberty. Some enterprising Bruxellois erected another statue, of a little girl, the Manneka Pis. (You figure it out.) It’s in a 19^th century covered shopping arcade, several of which are near the Grand-Place. They’re worth seeing just for the architecture and the window shopping.

The Ilôt Sacré. Photo courtesy of The Brussels Times.

Also just off the Grand-Place is l’Ilôt Sacré, or Sacred Island. It is neither an island nor sacred, but it is packed with seafood restaurants, with remarkable displays of shellfish and the finned fish. The restaurateurs take special pleasure in displaying a monkfish, arguably the sea’s ugliest creature, with a grapefruit in its mouth. Ugh! But the seafood is fresh and well prepared, so try a meal there. With wine.

Other sights worth taking in, also in the center of town, are the Grand and Petit Sablons, a neighborhood full of boutiques and excellent restaurants. There’s a fence surrounding the Petit Sablon, and each post is topped with a statue of a tradesman. There are 48 of them and it’s fun figuring out how many you can identify.

There are two well-known art museums, one for older (ancien) art and another for the modern. The old art includes the world’s best collection of Breughels and the modern one has the same for Magritte. Finally, this is where the world-famous singer, Jacques Brel, was from. Of course there’s a square named for him and if you are or were a fan of Jacques Brel, just to be there makes you feel close to him.

Caveau de Chassagne

Burgundy is one of Wine Country’s greatest and best known sectors. And the best Burgundy wines come from the Côte d’Or. On the southern tip of this vinicultural (and cultural) wonderland are the paired villages of Chassagne-Montrachet and Puligny-Montrachet. Puligny is more famous, probably because of its white wines, which some connoisseurs believe are the world’s finest. We at Power Tasting are merely wine lovers and make no pretense of connoisseurship, so we offer no opinion.

Photo courtesy of the Caveau de Chassagne.

Chassagne, on the other side of the road, has both excellent whites and reds. You can visit some châteaux, but there aren’t that many (and not the greatest ones) that are visitor friendly. So if you want to taste the wines of the two AOCs, we recommend the Caveau de Chassagne (http://caveaudechassagne.com/). In some ways, it’s like a cooperative, in that you can sample wines from a variety of local producers. But it’s more of a regional showcase, with tastings and sales of wine.

To confuse things, the tasting room is also known as the Caveau Municipal, which is emblazoned on the exterior of a somewhat plain, sandy-covered building. That was the name of the place when it opened in 1986 and they haven’t bothered changing the sign. The interior is rather dark, perhaps because the walls are bedecked with wine bottles. There are a few tables and a display case with the wines you can sample. There are servers, whom they call guides, who are of varying degrees of friendliness to those who don’t speak French, and are quite knowledgeable about the local wines. All that said, it’s worth going.

Some of the Grand Crus available. Photo courtesy of the Caveau de Chassagne.

Although the tasting room is located in Chassagne, Puligny’s are served as well. What makes it distinctive is the range of quality of the wines they serve. A few words about Burgundian wine naming rules is called for here. If the label says only Burgundy, then the grapes can come from anywhere in the province. If it has a village name, such as Chassagne-Montrachet, on the label then it’s from some of that village’s designated vineyards. If it says Burgundy Villages as well as a village name, then it’s from its better vineyards. Premier Cru is even better (and somewhat affordable) and Grand Cru is the top, in both quality and price. And all these levels are available to sip and compare at the Caveau de Chassagne.

Almost all the wine in Burgundy comes from two grapes, Chardonnay for the whites and Pinot Noir for the reds. The reasons have much to do with history as well as terroir, but certainly the local vignerons have perfected the elevation of these grapes. (Yes, there is also Passetoutgrains, which aren’t worth drinking, and Bourgogne Aligoté, which is used in making kir.) Since all of the wines you are going to taste at the Caveau de Chassagne are from the same two appellations and the same two grapes, comparison tasting really can show you how different micro-terroirs, winemakers and quality levels determine what goes into your glass.

Oh, about Montrachet. For one thing, it can be pronounced MAWN-rashay or MONT-rashay. The so-called Mount Rachet is a not very large hill between the two villages. We suppose a mountain is in the eye of the viewer.

Solo Tasting

Tasting wine all by yourself isn’t that much fun. There’s no one to exult with when you discover an unknown gem. Or sneer at a loser. Or just keep you company. And wine tasting alone at home leads to all kinds of problems. Still, there are times when you’re traveling alone and you’re in a place where vineyards are nearby. In some cases, you may be in a place where you are already familiar with the wines, so passing up a tasting trip may be easy to accept. But if you are in a distant, previously unvisited location you may feel that you simply must take advantage of the occasion. So if you may be considering a solo wine tasting adventure, here are some things to consider.

Photo courtesy of Waiheke Island Tours

Try not to go alone. On a business trip, there may be a client who would go with you. Or a fellow conventioneer. Or a relative you’ve been meaning to call anyway. If you are organizing a meeting, you might add on a wine tasting day, for team-building purposes. Before you leave home, give some thought to who you might meet. Only when you’ve exhausted all the other possibilities should you think of the logistics of tasting by yourself.
Take a tour. We don’t often recommend wine tasting tours. In general, they go to the wineries that are convenient, that allow large groups or are highly commercial. Rarely will you encounter the top vineyards in the area you’re visiting. But they know where they’re going and they do the driving. If you have no particular knowledge of the region and its wines, everything you taste will be new to you anyway. Tour companies rarely advertise where they stop, but if they do feature small groups (not a 50-passenger bus) and knowledgeable guides, they’re more likely to provide better quality.
Take a taxi. You can ask a driver how much he would charge for an extended ride. You probably want to have a map and choose a few wineries in advance, so the driver can know where you want to go. In general, ask for a half-day price. Even if you plan on being out for a day, it’s best to plan for a shorter trip and ask for more time than the reverse. Either way, it can be expensive. But getting behind the wheel yourself in an area unknown to you, with alcohol to be added, may not be any bargain. You really don’t want to deal with foreign police or worse, be involved in an accident.
Limit your consumption. It’s best not to drink too much, no matter who’s driving. Don’t embarrass yourself in front of a cabbie or a tour guide. And if you decide to drive, prudence is a necessity. So sip sparingly; don’t gulp. Use the pour buckets. Only ask to try wines you are more likely to enjoy rather than everything on the list.
Talk to the people you encounter. It’s always more fun to share an experience, even if you’re sharing it with strangers. Engage with the person serving you. In most places, the servers speak at least some English, as is likely the case with the other passengers on the bus. And if you want to get to where you want to go, make certain you can talk with the taxi driver.

An Unexpected Tasting

This little wine tasting adventure occurred many years ago, but still seems like a fresh memory. We were travelling with some other people in Tuscany and had found an 18^th century palace that was available to rent. There were only three of us, taking two rooms and we had the palazzo to ourselves. It came with some lovely gardens and meals outdoors under a canopy.

There came a day on the trip when everyone had had enough of taking in the sights. A lazy afternoon in the garden, with the sound of buzzing bees under the shade trees sounded just the perfect. So after lunch, two of us indulged in a siesta. But the other soon grew antsy and wanted to do something. A little wine tasting at a vineyard we had passed the day before sounded very inviting.

San Gimignano in the distance, with vineyards all around it. Photo courtesy of Artsy Traveler.

We had driven to nearby San Gimignano, the towered village between Florence and Siena. We had passed a sign for a Bolla vineyard and made a mental note to return. [This all happened long enough ago that San Gimignano was still a worthwhile tourist destination. It hadn’t been discovered yet. Today it is a medieval village that is overrun with tourists arriving by the busload and is better passed by than visited.]

So the fellow who wasn’t interested in a nap took the car keys and set out to see if he could find that sign again. He did, but on arrival saw that the place was not a winery but rather for a family owned vineyard that the well-known Bolla corporation had hired to make a specific wine. He drove in and found endless fields of grapes and in the middle of them all, a farmhouse. There was no one to be seen in the vineyards or outside the house, so he wandered about a while, noticing that the vines were bearing fruit, all of which was white grapes.

Wanting a taste of the wine that he knew must be made there, he figured his only chance was to knock on the farmhouse door. It was opened by a woman who seemed rather confused as to why a stranger had appeared at her doorstep. As she spoke no English and our friend little to no Italian, an explanation was not readily forthcoming. But he had learned the work degustazione, roughly translatable as “tasting”. Still seeming puzzled the woman, using a few Italian words and more hand signs, asked, “You want some wine?” The fellow said, “Si, si”, so the woman led him into the kitchen. There he found a few vineyard workers sitting at a table just finishing up lunch, looking at him rather quizzically.

She opened her refrigerator and took out an opened bottle of the Bolla wine made from their grapes, from a previous vintage. Realizing he had intruded, the visitor drank up and figured he had to buy a bottle. She reopened the fridge, took out an unopened bottle and handed it to him. He took 10,000 lire (this was before the Euro) from his wallet, gave it to the woman and beat a hasty, somewhat embarrassed retreat.

Imagine how you would feel if some total stranger came to your door and haltingly requested a glass of wine. You too might give it to him, just because you were so shocked that anyone would be so gauche and impertinent to even ask for it.

Sebastopol

One of the most attractive wine tasting features of Sonoma County is that different sections of it specialize in certain grapes. For instance, Alexander Valley is known for Cabernet Sauvignon, Dry Creek for Zinfandel and Russian River for Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. As you drive further west in the Russian River area, you encounter subsections, such as the wineries on River Road, the heart of Russian River AVA, and Chalk Hill, on the other side of Route 101. Perhaps the most remote section is Green Valley, quite rustic, with quite a few wineries to visit. Among the best known are Dutton-Goldfield, Hartford Court, Kosta Brown, Merry Edwards and Iron Horse.

Downtown Sebastopol. Photo courtesy of Visit California.

The “seat” of Green Valley is the small town of Sebastopol (population around 8,000). No one is quite sure how the town got to be named after a Ukrainian city in the Crimea. There used to be several California towns of that name. One became Yountville; this Sebastopol was originally named Pinegrove.

Founded when prospectors came to Northern California for the Gold Rush of ’49, Sebastopol soon became the market town for apple and plum orchard keepers. The region is still known for one apple in particular, the Gravenstein, which is becoming rarer and rarer, even in California’s stores. Beginning in the 1970’s, vineyards began to replace orchards, and today that transformation is nearly complete.

The town of Sebastopol was transformed as well. Apple farming doesn’t generate the same kind of revenue as does winemaking, so Sebastopol was until fairly recently a dusty, slow-moving village. And apples don’t attract tourists like wine does, so soon tourists arrived in Green Valley for tastings. (They were more a trickle than a flood; still today Sebastopol is not as heavily visited as Sonoma town or Healdsburg.) Visitors to Wine Country everywhere want to live and eat well, so along with tasting rooms came restaurants, inns, art galleries and just a little bit of traffic along Sebastopol’s Main Street.

Today, as we see it, Sebastopol is a strange mixture of sleepy Healdsburg, circa 1995, and St. Helena today. All three towns are able to maintain the feel of a rural village, but with all the amenities of a town that has been discovered. Healdsburg was transformed by the wine trade and is now a destination itself. St. Helena has become rather ritzy. If the demand for Green Vally Pinot Noirs and Chardonnays expands the way that it has done in the rest of the Russian River area, Sebastopol may become more of a mecca. But it hasn’t happened yet.

Photo courtesy of The Barlow.

One of the signs that Sebastopol is seeking more visitors is The Barlow. It’s a twelve-acre market, on the site of the Barlow family’s apple sauce factory, similar in style and function to the Oxbow Market in Napa town. Kosta Brown has a tasting room there, as do brewers of both beer and cider (apples do survive in the region), plus restaurants, boutiques and specialty food shops. For our part, we prefer the less touristy ambiance of the restaurants and shops on Main Street and the side streets nearby. We recommend that you come and visit soon, before the 21st century catches up to Sebastopol.

Choosing Where to Go

Sometimes your destination for wine tasting is chosen for you. If you have a business trip to San Francisco, you may want to add on a day or two of visiting wineries. You’re most likely to decide to go to Napa Valley or Sonoma County, if only because they are the closest. Similarly, if you are just looking for a pleasant day in the country – with wine of course – you’ll drive to the winemaking area nearest your home. So, for example, we New Yorkers head out to Long Island’s North Fork.

But sometimes, your objective is to take a wine tasting trip, without a particular destination in mind. How do you select the region of Wine Country to visit?

Tuscany in September.

Is wine tasting the only objective? If it is, then you want to go to an area that has many vineyards open to the public, where the quality is well known and accommodations are easy to find. Once again, NapaNoma suggests itself, but so does Bordeaux or Tuscany or the Rioja. That’s different than a Paris vacation with a day out in Champagne or the Loire Valley. If everyone in your party loves wine, the first option makes some sense. But if you have teetotalers or teenagers with you, maybe you should only inflict wine on them for a day.

Would you prefer a new experience or would you like to re-visit favorite places? We can never get too much of wineries in some of our favorite valleys, Napa and the Southern Rhône. We go back as often as we can, given available time and budget. But California’s Central Coast or the Northern Rhône, where we have not travelled to as frequently, also have their allure. And we’ve not yet tasted wine in Switzerland’s Dôle or Austria’s Burgenland. Maybe this upcoming trip is when someday becomes now.

Carneros, on the Napa County side.

What kind of wine would you like to try for several days in a row? We appreciate a cold glass of Gewürztraminer on a hot summer day, but we’re not up for a week of it. So while we have tasted wines in Alsace, it was only briefly. At the other extreme, maybe the 16% alcoholic wines of Paso Robles are too much for you this time around. Ah, yes, Pinot Noir would be perfect! Now you only have to choose among Burgundy, Carneros, Los Olivos and Santa Barbara, to name a few possibilities.

When do you want to go? Power Tasting has long recommended that you avoid the most popular destinations on weekends. But some of the best wineries in certain regions are only open Thursdays through Sundays. For instance, we have experienced this in Paso Robles and the Santa Rita Hills. Time of year also matters. If all you’re interested in is the wines, then there’s no problem making a trip in the depths of winter. Many California wineries release their wines in February, so that might attract you. But if you want to see the vines with dense coverage, you need to go in the summer. And if you want to see the harvest, you have to be in Wine Country between August and October. (Unless you want to go to the southern hemisphere, when February through April is the right time for you.)

Passalacqua Winery

We’ve often been told that in California, Cabernet Sauvignon is king. That’s true, except where it’s Chardonnay or Pinot Noir. For some reason, the grapes originally from France are the most widely grown in California. Why aren’t there more Italian grapes planted there? Well, Zinfandel is descended from Italian Primitivo and there is certainly enough of that grape in California. And at Passalacqua Winery (https://passalacquawinery.com/) you will find quite a lot of Zin. You’ll find a fair number of Italy-inspired wines as well.

Members of the Passalacqua family have been making and selling wine in Dry Creek Valley since 1895. After operating in several locations around Sonoma County, Passalacqua settled at the western end of the Lambert Bridge Road. This was previously the location of Pezzi King, known for their Zinfandels, which Passalacqua still features. In fact, there are five of them, most sourced from nearby vineyards and one grown on their own land.

The winery building is a simple, wooden structure without pretense. A Napa Palace would feel out of place in Dry Creek Valley, and Passalacqua certainly has a sense of place, which they invite you to share. We recommend that visitors take their tasting out on Passalacqua’s terrace. Of course, it’s always pleasant to taste wine out of doors, but the experience at this winery is more than that. The views across the Dry Creek Valley are nothing less than spectacular. In case the vines didn’t provide enough scenery, fountains and some well-placed olive trees add just the right touch. You will find yourself sipping slowly, just to extend your time taking in all that beauty.

The Passalacquas’ Italian heritage comes through in several of the wines they make. Their aptly named Radici della Famiglia (Roots of the Family) is now in its fifteenth release, so they add Quindici (15) to the name of the wine in the current release. It’s meant to tase like a Super Tuscan, as it is made of Cabernet and Sangiovese. Italian it may be in style, but there’s no missing that it’s a California wine. Of course, they still bow to the king and make Cabernet Sauvignon as well. They also make a white Fiano, and almost no one else in America makes wine from this southern Italian grape. Interestingly, the majority of the Fiano grapes are pressed the old-fashioned way, by foot. Roots, indeed!

Quite a few of the wines that Passalacqua makes are available only to their club members, although just maybe an odd bottle or two will show up in the tasting room. And if you want to taste their wines, you’ll have to do so at the winery or join their club, because they don’t distribute commercially.

Napa Valley and Sonoma County have many wineries established by immigrants from Italy. Not many others pay tribute to their heritage in the wines they make. (David Coffaro, nearby, is another exception.) With regard to Passalacqua, we say come for the views; stay for the wine.

Changing Hands in Sonoma County

There is a sad, empty feeling that we get when a favorite bar, restaurant or shop changes hands and the new ownership changes it into something else. Our favorite local tavern was once the best place for an honest burger and a beer; now it tries to attract a hipper crowd. There’s a line of twenty-somethings waiting to get in to order designer beers and avocado toast. And an old-fashioned family grocery store that featured locally made products was bought by a French couple that made it an outlet for French imports. It went out of business. Ah, well.

The same thing happens to wineries and in-town tasting rooms. In a previous issue, we wrote about “lost wineries” that simply closed to visitors or were sold out. There are a number of others in Sonoma County that we remember fondly.

Francis Ford Coppola Winery. Photo courtesy of Tripsavvy.

Chateau Souverain has had a Sonoma County presence for more than 80 years. We weren’t around for its early days, when the legendary Mike Grgich (sadly, recently deceased) was given his first American job. But we did visit their second home in Alexander Valley. It was quiet, a bit out of the way and rustic in appearance. In 2006, the location was bought by Francis Ford Coppola who turned it into a swimming pool with wine (and Coppola tributes). Yes, Chateau Souverain can still be bought. They in turn took over an existing winery and are now not open for visitors there.

There is a tasting room on the northeast corner of the Healdsburg Town Square that is today the tasting room of Ernest Vineyards. It was previously the place to taste DeLoach wines, principally their Pinot Noirs as we remember it, when they were acquired by the Boisset family from France. It was more convenient to taste there than in the western part of the Russian River valley, where they still operate. Before that, the space was occupied by Gallo Sonoma, when the well-known mass producer made a foray into fine wines. There may have been some intermediary tenants there, but these are the ones we can recall.

Chateau St. Jean

It’s not all sad stories of demise. Sometimes new owners inject money to improve a vineyard’s wines without changing their overall style nor the experience of visiting. For example, Chateau St. Jean was long a favorite of ours in Sonoma Valley. Treasury Wine Cellars took it over and then in 2021 it was sold to Foley Family Wines. As far as we can tell, the quality of the wines has remained consistent. More important for Power Tasting, which is about the experience of wine tasting, the architecture, gardens, palm trees and statuary have all been preserved.

Elsewhere in this issue you can read about the former Pezzi King vineyards that have been replaced by Passalacqua Winery. In the old days, if you wanted to try a heavy, highly alcoholic Zinfandel, Pezzi King was the place for you. Thankfully, the wines are very different now.