Month: May 2017

About Oregon’s Willamette Valley AVA

The Willamette Valley AVA sits inside the Willamette Valley in Oregon. It spans from the Columbia River in the north to the southern tip of Eugene and from the Oregon coast on the west to the Cascade Mountains in the east. It is the largest, and most popular, of Oregon’s AVAs: it’s 5,200 square miles (150 miles long and about 60 miles wide) and contains over 200 of Oregon’s 700+ wineries. Willamette contains six sub-AVAs: Chehalem Mountains, Dundee Hills, Eola-Amity Hills, McMinnville, Ribbon Ridge and Yamhill-Carlton.

Courtesy of WineryDogs.com

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Oregon Wine Week

I’m traveling north with my wine reviews this week, leaving my home state of California to explore the terrain of Oregon. The history of Oregon wine isn’t unlike our own. The first plantings can be traced back to the pioneer days of the 1840s during the settlement of the “Oregon Territory.” The first official Oregon winery was Valley View, built and run by by Peter Britt in the late 1850s in Jacksonville — a Gold Rush town highly populated with settlers from both American and abroad.

Courtesy of JacksonvilleOregon.com

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Book Review: Cork Dork by Bianca Bosker

I believe I heard about this book through the Twitter-sphere. As a self-proclaimed wine-nerd, the title obviously caught my attention. Any chance to nerd-out on wine, and I’ll be there in a second. Well Bianca Bosker takes that a step further. Actually she takes it a whole marathon worth of steps further, quitting her steady journalism career to train full time for the country’s oldest sommelier competition. Crazy? Seemingly so. But the way Bianca goes about it — her pure dedication to asking the broad question “what’s the big deal with wine” and then focusing in on every minute detail — makes the journey so much more plausible, realistic, and the goal attainable. I encourage you to take this journey with her…

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Day Owl 2016 Rosé of Barbera

This epic package arrived at my door. A beautifully emblazoned box holding this radiant rosé. Oh yeah — and two pairs of sunglasses. “Gimmicky?” my partner in wine crime asked, skeptical that the contents of the wine bottle would be no better than the white zin that, in our house, is just called “pink.” “No,” I assured him, “I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.”

Spoiler alert: He was.

Meet Mona. She is a monkey.

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Julietta Winery 2015 Chenin Blanc

Julietta Winery was a cute little surprise during my last adventure into the tiny Clarksburg AVA of Yolo County. The little shack of a venue seems a mirage amongst the vast fields of farmland. Indeed, outside of the Sugar Mill — which boasts several wineries sharing one crush pad — there seems to be a distinct lack of stand-alone wineries. But, as with most boutique experiences, that just means when you walk in, you’re greeted by Julie and her husband and treated like part of the Clarksburg community — even if you are just passing through.

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