The year I spent my first holiday single after thirty years, a houseful of near strangers in Sonoma County taught me what Friendsgiving means. Here is where the word came from, and the bottle that has been on the table every year since
Between now and New Year’s, a good share of the people at a tasting room counter didn’t pick the winery. The quiet one at the edge of the group usually decides when everyone leaves.
At a steakhouse bar in Northern Nevada, the only wine training the bartenders ever got came from a distributor rep with a bag of bottles. Then one of them heard two sentences about the fog.
A couple came down off Mt. Rose, bought two bottles of Barbera at a Reno tasting room, and left without anyone learning their names. New Commerce7 data shows how little time a winery gets after a first visit, and why the follow-up email depends on what happened at the counter.
Matt Espiro Jaeger makes Fuil Wines in Camarillo from Santa Barbara County fruit, and this harvest he worked seventy-seven days almost entirely alone. He answers the same twenty questions as every winemaker in the series, from Dusty Nabor to the 2022 Pinot he lost to vinegar.
I caught my first bass on a frog off Uncle Wendell’s dock. What I’d pour with bass, brook trout, white perch, salmon and pickerel, and eight Maine recipes to go with them.
Marija Mrgudić was eleven when her father died and she went into the family cellar on Pelješac to help her mother make the wine. She still keeps his notebooks beside her own, and she planted a Zinfandel vineyard above the sea at Viganj to bring the grape home to Dalmatia.
Montse Reece grew up in Tarragona in a family that made and repaired barrels for local wineries, worked seven harvests beside John Pedroncelli, and since 2015 has been the third winemaker in Pedroncelli Winery’s history.
Dražan Krolo grew up on the bay where Zinfandel’s Croatian roots were found, then carried the grape inland to Strmendolac. His answers to the twenty questions, translated from Croatian.
This harvest, Matt Parish programmed a set of AI bots to do the arithmetic of crush. Then he checked every number by hand, because anything added to a wine stays in it.