When you have a name like Grapevine and you’re in the heart of an emerging wine region, living up to the expectations a name like that provides can be daunting. Combine Grapevine with GrapeFest, the largest wine festival in the Southwest, and you have the makings of a pretty great opportunity to taste what Texas winemakers have to offer.
In 1965 David Lett planted the first Pinot Noir vines in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. Fifty years later the region is home to more the 400 wineries producing some of the best of this varietal worldwide along with other cool climate wines such as Chardonnay, sparkling and Syrah. But while Pinot Noir is certainly what put Willamette Valley on the wine map, it is their experimentation with some surprising ones that makes visiting this area truly intriguing for wine lovers.
EFESTĒ (pronounced eff – ess – tee) is a true family winery: two generations of the Ferrelli family work in it and they learned the trade from a third. When you go to visit them at their Woodinville, Washington tasting room, as we recently did, the sense of family comes through loud and clear.
Grape varietals indigenous to the Rhone Valley have been grown elsewhere in the world for years. Notably, Spain has roughly ¾ of the acreage planted to Grenache that France does and Australia has about ¾ of the Syrah that France does. But the USA has been the late entrant to the game, and while it does not have nearly the amount of acres under vine of Rhone varietals, it has certainly become a force to be reckoned with for lovers of Rhone wines.
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Most of us wine enthusiasts have harboured, either secretly or not, the dream of some day owning a winery. Cristom Winery, in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, is the story of a man who actually pursued that dream and created one of the top wineries in the state.
Although we’re not vegan ourselves, we live in a bona fide vegan-friendly city and are used to having to cater to different food preferences when entertaining guests. Recently, a very dear friend brought to our attention that his wife was worried about having to give up wine when she found out many are not technically vegan. Surprised?
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