Innholdsfortegnelse for November 15, 2023 i Wine Spectator

Visit WineSpectator.com/111523 to find links to all of the following resources FREE RESOURCES FOR ALL WINESPECTATOR.COM READERS TOP 100 WINES OF THE YEAR On Nov. 6, we begin unveiling the Top 10 Wines of 2023—complete with videos, tasting notes and more—culminating with the Wine of the Year on Nov. 10 and the complete Top 100 list on Nov. 13. Don’t miss the year’s most exciting wines! FOLLOW WINE SPECTATOR ON THREADS Join the conversation to discover new wines, get etiquette advice, share tips and more. Download the app and follow us @Wine_Spectator. WHAT AM I TASTING? Test your tasting skills in our mystery wine game. Every two weeks, we post a tasting note with clues from the color, aromas, flavors and structure. Then, you guess the variety, region, appellation and…

E.&J. Gallo is dramatically increasing its footprint in luxury California wine. America’s largest wine producer is buying Napa-based Rombauer Vineyards. The deal includes the Rombauer brand, three winery facilities, two tasting rooms and more than 700 acres of sustainably farmed vineyards in Carneros, Atlas Peak, St. Helena, Calistoga, Sonoma Valley and the Sierra Foothills. Neither party disclosed a purchase price. Founded by military and commercial airline pilot Koerner Rombauer and his wife, Joan, in 1980, and now owned by his heirs, Rombauer produces roughly 350,000 cases of wine a year. And while the winery is best known for its Chardonnay, it also produces outstanding Sauvignon Blanc, Cabernet Sauvignon and Zinfandel, and recently branched out into Pinot Noir. “The Rombauer brand and family have built a reputation around quality and integrity,”…

Making great wine is hard. Making Brunello Cucinelli wine can be even harder. Over his 40-plus-year career, a rags-to-riches story set in Central Italy’s Umbria region, Cucinelli built a reputation in the fashion world as the “king of cashmere” and created a brand of luxury sportswear worn by the rich, famous and stylish. Now, Cucinelli strives for quality and recognition in agricultural projects in Umbria. Cucinelli recently gave this interview ro Wine Spectator. Cucinelli—a longtime student of philosophy, aesthetics and “humanistic capitalism”—is a vocal advocate for Umbria and the countryside around the medieval hilltop burg of Solomeo. He has moved to transformed the landscape by buying hundreds of acres of warehouse land to return to nature and agriculture. As sidelines, he cultivates wheat and makes olive oil. Twelve years ago,…

More than 2,000 wine lovers gathered near Seattle on as sunny weekend to raise a toast Washington state’s wine industry and raise money for several good causes: The 36th annual Auction of Washington Wines (AWW) pulled in more than $4 million for children’s medical care and winemaking research from Aug. 10–12. That total was nearly identical to last year’s event. The weather during the live auction gala matched the festive mood of the participants, who gathered in the gardens of Chateau St. Michelle winery to enjoy delicious food, wine and music. The three-day event included a winemaker picnic and barrel auction, the gala dinner auction and a special celebration dinner called TOAST! to honor Washington wine leaders. Attendees also had a chance to participate in online bidding for special lots…

FOR Golden State producers of Cabernet Sauvignon, the 2020 vintage was like a fork in the road, leading to one of two divergent outcomes. The stakes couldn’t have been higher, considering that Cabernet is California’s most prominent wine category, dominated by big-name estates in Napa Valley and commanding the highest prices. The extreme heat of the growing season, followed by harvesttime wildfires, forced vintners to make some of the toughest choices of their careers. On one side are a range of leading producers, including Corison, Dalla Valle, Dominus, Favia, Paul Hobbs, Memento Mori, Salvestrin, Spottswoode and Vine Hill Ranch, that decided to make wines from the 2020 vintage, all with outstanding results. Other prominent names, such as Mayacamas, Harlan Estate and Opus One, also produced 2020s, though their bottlings have…

Iremember well when we put Charlie Wagner and his son, Chuck, on the Feb. 15, 1987, cover of Wine Spectator—36 years ago. In those days, California wine had only a few well-known names, like Robert Mondavi. The Wagners, and their Caymus Vineyards, were relatively unknown. They were brought to my attention by my good friend and former Wine Spectator senior editor James Laube. Once I tasted their Napa Cabernet, it was clear Caymus was something special. In those days, I spent a lot of time in California. Wine Spectator had an office in San Francisco and I would frequently drive to Napa and Sonoma to visit wineries. One of my happiest trips was when I took my family to visit Caymus on a sunny day in 1993. My wife, Hazel,…

“Let’s start at the beginning. It’s 1971, 1972. You’re 19 years old. And your dad comes along and says, ‘I want to start a winery, but only if you want to be involved.’” Since its first vintage in 1972, Caymus Vineyards has become one of the most important and successful Napa Cabernet houses, with a track record for exceptional wines. The flagship Caymus Cabernet Sauvignon Napa Valley Special Selection was named Wine Spectator’s Wine of the Year twice, in both 1989 and 1994, with the 1984 and 1990 vintage bottlings, respectively. Chuck Wagner, who co-founded the winery with his parents, has continued to move forward. Under his guidance, the Wagner Family of Wines has grown from 250 cases to producing now more than a million cases annually across multiple brands…

THE majority of California’s top Cabernet Sauvignons are often enjoyed in the first decade of their life. With their typically copious fruit married to structures that are more polished and fine-grained than their red Bordeaux cousins, these wines are understandably hard to resist in their early days. But producers and experienced consumers know that the best of the Golden State’s Cabernets, dominated by bottlings from Napa Valley, merit a decade of cellaring before consuming, at which point they shed their youthful exuberant fruit and begin to reveal more nuance, showcasing Napa’s range of distinctive terroirs, from valley floor to mountainside. Earlier this year, I conducted my first retrospective tasting of an individual vintage of California Cabernet since I began covering the category five years ago. The timing couldn’t be better,…

A few months ago, English actress and activist Emma Watson and her brother, Alex, launched a gin brand, Renais, made with grapes from their family’s French wine estate. Wait, you didn’t know about the Watson family’s Burgundy domaine, where the Harry Potter and Little Women star spent summers tending Pinot Noir and Chardonnay vines? “I was clearly a Burgundian soul who had the misfortune to be born in England,” said Chris Watson, father of Emma and Alex and founder of Domaine Watson in Chablis. The idea of Domaine Watson took root after Chris moved to Paris to work as a lawyer in the 1980s. “I made friends who all had little vineyards they had inherited, and they introduced me to winemaking,” he told Wine Spectator. “We had so much fun…

In the aftermath of the devastating wildfires in Maui, members of the hospitality community on the island and beyond have stepped in to provide relief. Local restaurants and nonprofits from both Hawaii and farther away are working to ensure the people of Maui are fed and taken care of at a time of grief and recovery. “This is the basest form of what we do: providing nourishment to people in need,” said Brendan O’Leary, a manager at Merriman’s Kapalua, which began cooking meals for the displaced within days. “It’s the most meaningful work most of us have ever done.” The wildfires broke out on Aug. 8, rapidly spreading through western coastal towns and up-country farming communities like Kula. In only an hour, the flames devastated the historic town of Lahaina.…

Portugal’s finest cheeses are closer than you might think. About half of them come from the Azores, the volcanic archipelago located roughly 900 miles west of Lisbon. Reflecting the country’s varied terrain and microclimates, Portuguese cheeses are made from cow, sheep and goat milk. They’re a lively bunch that ranges from mild and inviting to funky and pungent. Among Portugal’s most popular and delicious types are the torta-style, traditionally made from sheep milk coagulated with cardoon thistle rennet, which qualifies them as vegetarian and typically lends bittersweet notes. They’re similar to their cousins from the adjacent Estremadura in Spain, and are labeled amanteigado, the literal translation of which is “buttery.” (Another widely applied Portuguese term worth noting is curado, for “cured,” i.e., aged or ripened.) Amanteigado also indicates creamy and…

Nestled between two mountain ranges, just east and south of Napa Valley, lies the welcoming farming region of Suisun Valley. This 8-mile by 3-mile swath of land was named an American Viticultural Area in 1982 (just one year after Napa’s AVA status). It’s the sort of place where the growers and winemakers are the ones pouring in the tasting rooms, and without the high prices of some of their more well-known neighbors. There are only a dozen brick-and-mortar wineries in the region, all of them family-owned. There’s a reason Suisun has remained relatively anonymous: Its grapes were primarily sold to wineries in Napa and Sonoma for blending and bottling, without the name “Suisun” on the label. And on the label or not, the name has had its own challenges. “I…

Portugal lies at the westernmost edge of the European continent. Occupying a corner of the Iberian Peninsula on the Atlantic coast, this diverse country offers a range of beautiful panoramas and a rich cultural heritage, including its significant role in the larger world of wine, both for its fortified Ports and its cork closures. Yet it is only recently that fans of dry wines—along with international travelers—have begun to embrace this flourishing country. Over the past decade, Portugal has proclaimed itself in a major way, with tourism skyrocketing and the overall quality of its table wines rising at an extraordinary rate, given the fact that the country’s production of non-fortified bottlings didn’t really take off until the 1990s. Twenty years ago, only 11% of the 87 table wines from Portugal…

A Los Angeles–area wineshop has fallen victim to a wine-thirsty thief. On June 29, security cameras at Venice’s Lincoln Fine Wines captured footage of a dark-clad figure with a mask, hood and baseball cap parking an unlicensed pickup truck before embarking on a Mission Impossible–inspired burglary in which the bandit cut a hole in the ceiling of the Venice wineshop, descended into the store’s temperature-controlled cellar and looted more than $600,000 worth of inventory before tripping an alarm and disappearing into the night. According to store manager Nick Martinelle, Lincoln Fine Wines owner Nazmul Haque had been collecting the now-pilfered wines—many of which he considers irreplaceable—for over a decade. “We are absolutely devastated by this heinous theft,” said Martinelle, noting that in an effort to try and nab the crooks,…