“Sad day for our vines,” wrote Robert Mondavi, Jr. on his Facebook on Monday of this week. “Our Organic Atlas Peak vineyard had 95 percent burn through. Why? We don’t use herbicides, we mow. So the 4″ of stubble burned through everything. Some areas burned end posts and drip lines. A few spots had no …
Image via the Matthiasson Facebook. They posted the photo yesterday afternoon local time in Napa. It seems like yesterday that Steve and Jill Matthiasson, grape growers and winemakers at Matthiasson in Napa, were sending out an e-blast informing subscribers that they were donating 100 percent of the sales of a library release to Texas hurricane …
Images via Vino Girl’s Instagram (Napa). The stories of devastation and loss are as gut-wrenching as they are heartbreaking. “The ferocious fires in the Wine Country and beyond,” wrote the editors of the San Francisco Chronicle yesterday, “destroyed new territory on multiple fronts Wednesday, threatening communities untouched by the previous onslaught — including the cities …
The editors of the Slow Wine Guide would like to express their heartfelt solidarity with the victims and displaced in the Napa, Sonoma, and Mendocino fires. Elaine Brown, California contributor to JancisRobinson.com and senior editor for the Slow Wine Guide to the Wines of California, posted this dispatch yesterday morning on the Slow Wine blog …
Elaine Brown, senior editor for Slow Wine California, resides in Sonoma. She filed this story at 9:30 a.m. PST. The North Coast of California was hit last night by a rash of wildfires. Most of the fires were sparked by gusting winds taking down trees hitting above-ground power lines. Fires spread quickly with one of …
The Slow Wine’s new project launched a week ago: The Slow Wine Guide to the Wines of California, soon to be available online and in print. Today, we are going to begin sharing the prizes that our editors have awarded to Golden State wineries in the 2018 edition of the guide. We’ll start with the …
The new Slow Wine Guide to the Wines of California was both a challenge and a gamble. The Slow Wine project was born eight years ago when Slow Food, the international foodways movement, decided to publish its own guide and break away from the Gambero Rosso and its Vini d’Italia (Wines of Italy), which the …
Above: The western edge of the Santa Ynez American Viticultural Area. The Pacific coast lies just a stone’s throw away. Perceptions of gastronomy’s cultural value have changed radically since the Slow Food international movement was founded in the late 1980s in Piedmont, Italy as a champion of traditional foodways threatened by Italy’s growing appetite for …
Above: The mouth of the Russian River in Jenner, California on the Pacific coast. SNAIL The SNAIL PRIZE is awarded to wineries whose values (high quality wines, originality, respect for the land and environment) align with the Slow Food movement. Quality-price ratio is another factor that our editors consider. BOTTLE The BOTTLE PRIZE is awarded …
When our editorial team first got together on a Skype chat to discuss the parameters for inclusion in the guide, the biggest question we faced was whether or not organic farming practices or certified organic going to a baseline criterion. In Slow Wine’s guide to Italian wines, organic farming isn’t a requirement for inclusion. There …