East Coast Wining...

In November, the fabulous Eve Bushman invited a few of us to her home to taste wines from Maryland. Did you know there are over 400 wines being made in Maryland? Susan Southard, publisher of Welcome to Maryland Wine Country magazine, was in SoCal to visit family, and decided to mix business with pleasure by bringing along some wines for some California writers to taste. Eve hosted winemaker Shawn Shai Halahmy, Debra Bizek, Mary Bradway, winemaker and writer Russ Briley, and yours truly.
It turned out to be a very interesting evening which made me research the Maryland wine community. Thanks, Eve and Susan!

Wining and wining and wining...

It's been a crazy couple of months. Lots of projects at the day job getting in the way of the Goddess' wine plans, but we still managed to get to a few places. We'll start with the most recent and fill things in as we go.

My dear friend, Rico Mandel of Miz en Place, invited me to cover the opening of a new wine bar in Malibu, Malibu Beach Wines. MBW is the brainchild of Jim Palmer, proprietor, grower and winemaker of Malibu Vineyards wines. It's a lovely space, right on Pacific Coast Highway, where you can taste and purchase boutique wines grown in the proposed Malibu AVA and Central Coast. When I say 'boutique' I mean small production, lovingly-tended and passionately-made. The winemakers and wines being spotlighted for this opening event were Jim Palmer and Malibu Vineyards, Carol Hoyt of Hoyt Family Vineyards and Shawn Shai Halahmy of Shai Cellars.

Wining and whiling away the time...

Time goes by so fast. Fortunately, we're doing a lot of wine tasting while it's going by!

Shai @Santa Barbara

6/25 - Santa Barbara Wine Festival at the Natural History Museum - At the very last minute, Shawn Shai Halahmy pinged me to ask if we could help him pour his wines in Santa Barbara. We said 'Sure!' and headed North. We weren't familiar with this particular festival, but it was huge! More than 70 wineries - most of whom I knew - lots of fun food, a gorgeous setting, and a really enthusiastic crowd. Shawn was pouring his 2008 Shai Cellars Adome, plus doing a sneak preview of his just-bottled 2009 Adome and 2009 Grenache. With all the great wines being shown, a significant number of guests came back to us to tell us how much they like Shai! What's not to like? Oh, and the photo of Shai is courtesy of Bob Dickey, a great photog and wine lover in Santa Barbara. No relation to JD.  Just a fortunate name.

So much wining...so little time to write!

I was trying to figure out why I haven't written in the last month, and I realized it's because JD and I have been running all over the place tasting wines, eating great food, and just generally having a good time, except for the broken nose. But that's another story. 
 
Here's what's been going on in the last month or so. And it doesn't include various dinners with friends and meetings about the upcoming LA WineFest!

3/14 - The Flask Studio City - Fog Crest from Sebastopol (wines were OK, nothing to write home about)/Shai Cellars from Santa Ynez (Of course, a personal favorite. And winemaker Shawn Halahmy was donating part of the proceeds of any of his sales to help Japan.)