Wining at year's end...

JD & the Goddess

Hard to believe it's the last week of 2012. The Goddess of Wine and JD have gone to lots of wine tasting events, lots of dinners, lots of gatherings, lots of wineries. There has been good wine and bad wine - some astonishing in both directions - and a lot of drinkable, but ordinary wine. We've made new friends, said goodbye to some old friends, made discoveries both personal and professional.

Miscellaneous wining...ZAP & Family Winemakers & some random thoughts...

In January, JD and I went north for ZAP - the Zinfandel Advocates & Producers 4-day event. Well, we didn't go for four days, we went for the Grand Tasting. It was immense - over 200 wineries all pouring Zinfandel from all over the world.

Some wineries, like Ian Blackburn's Beekeeper Cellars, poured one wine; others poured anywhere from 3 to 9 wines - all Zins! We were grateful to have been included as media, so that we were able to enter the tasting at 10 a.m., and we still tasted only a fraction of the wines by the time we left at 3:30 p.m. There were writers who reported within 24 - 48 hours that they had tasted hundreds of wines. By my reckoning, we tasted the fruits of around 40 wineries, so maybe we tasted 80 - 100 wines.

It was fascinating to taste the regional differences among all those Zins. I discovered that if I'm going to just sip a Zin, I want Zin from Paso Robles or Lodi, but if I'm going to pair it with food, I want a Zin from Dry Creek. I also realized - well, I knew this already - that I would rather taste fewer wines and have a bit more quality time with the winemakers to get the inside story about their passion and process.

Wining by proxy...staff writer Marya Glur fills us in on the Union des Grand Crus...

Sometimes the Goddess doesn't get to attend wine events. Sob! Luckily, she has a band of merry and hearty wineaux who provide eyewitness accounts for her. Today, a special post by Staff Writer, Marya Glur, about an extraordinary annual event. Read on, and thanks, Marya!

Union des Grand Crus de Bordeaux
January 21, 2012
Fairmont Hotel, Santa Monica, CA
By Marya J. Glur


The first time I attended the Union de Grand Crus des Bordeaux wine tasting a few years ago in an event space at Hollywood and Highland, I thought it was the single MOST important educational experience of my career as a wine aficionado. With over 100 château representatives, many of them winemakers and/or château owners, pouring over 150 Bordeaux wines, the event planners placed all the producers from each AOC area together making this event the perfect chance to taste through 5-10 wines from each viticultural area to really understand what makes Pauillac wine a Pauillac and how that's different from a Saint-Julien -- areas on the map that are directly adjacent. For that tasting, the Goddess and her merry band of wineaux decided the best strategy was to go for the most expensive, most prestigious wines of Bordeaux first while our palates were fresh. So, while everyone else was starting at the beginning by tasting through the whites, we headed directly to Margaux. The beauty of this strategy was that we were alone with the Margaux producers and then, Pauillac and Saint-Julien for an hour before anyone really caught up to us. We got to leisurely chat with each chateau representative about their wines before, during, and after each tasting. It was truly brilliant.