Plus Upcoming Wine Events

It took me ages to choose a bottle of Syrah for one of Ma Maison’s Brown Bag dinners. The choices from our local wineries are many. Finally, I plumped for a bottle of Savannah-Chanelle 2006 Monterey County—Coast View Vineyard ($21). I have visited Savannah-Chanelle dozens of times and have always been impressed with their wines. They do a splendid job of turning out excellent varietals—in large part thanks to their winemaker Tony Craig. Also, as a judge for the Santa Cruz Mountains Winegrowers commercial wine competition last year, I know that this particular wine won a well-deserved silver medal with 86 points.

Plus Upcoming Wine Events

A couple of friends from Barcelona invited me and my husband and some other people over for paella. They are here for a few weeks and promised they would cook this delicious Spanish dish for me a few times during their stay. Since they were preparing two different kinds of paella—a typical shellfish one and another of chicken and sausage—I knew I would be safe taking a bottle of Zayante Vineyard Zinfandel for us to share. Zayante’s beautiful wines are all estate grown and bottled—and reasonably priced as well. This particular Zin is a mere $13.99 at New Leaf.

Plus Upcoming Wine Events
Although I had a huge dose of jet lag, having been back home from a month in Europe for a matter of hours, I hightailed it out to Roudon-Smith Winery on a cold and rainy Saturday in December. After all, it was their annual holiday event of wine and chocolate tasting, and—chocoholic that I am—I did not want to miss out on some delicious chocolaty samplings with some of my favorite wines.

My husband was already at the winery when I arrived—going straight there from a meeting—and standing under the redwoods to save me a parking space. Roudon-Smith is in a bucolic setting a couple of miles down Bean Creek Road in Scotts Valley. It’s owned and operated by Annette and David Hunt and their partner Al Drewke. All of them were there to greet us and chat about wine— and the inclement weather.

This song came to mind when I bought a bottle of Quinta Cruz Verdelho. The Verdelho grape, like the famous Madeira, both come from Portugal. Verdelho has been cultivated since about the 1400s in a region of Portugal that makes dry wine—and is also one of the grapes used in the making of Madeira.

It takes somebody like Jeff Emery, a master winemaker better known with his other label – Santa Cruz Mountain Vineyard—to want to make something really different. He most certainly likes the challenge of steering away from the usual – preferring to make a wine that’s a step or two from the mainstream—and he started the Quinta Cruz label with this goal in mind.

Searching for a bottle of local wine in Deer Park Wine & Spirits in Aptos, I came across a raspberry wine made by Chaucer’s Cellars ($13 for 500 ml.). Chaucer’s dessert-style fruit wines are absolutely delicious because they’re all made from 100 percent pure fruit without any artificial flavorings. As the holidays are coming up, this is just the kind of wine to crack open after dinner to enjoy with dessert—or even if friends come over and you just want to offer something different. It’s a sweet wine, of course, so it can actually be served instead of dessert. Chaucer’s suggests serving it with soda, champagne or over the rocks, with ice cream or cheesecake or in a cobbler. Personally, I like to pour a little glass of it and enjoy it as you would a liqueur.

Twin brothers Peter and Paul Bargetto own and operate Soquel Vineyards with their partner Jon Morgan. Although the Bargetto brothers are related to the Bargettos of Bargetto Winery fame in Soquel, they are a separate entity when it comes to their winery. But winemaking most definitely runs in the family – with a little bit of Pinot Noir and Zinfandel coursing through the Bargetto family’s veins. Peter and Paul’s grandfather actually started Bargetto Winery in 1933, so winemaking is very much a family tradition.