Just back from the frozen hamlet of Cloverdale in northern Sonoma County, where the Citrus Fairgrounds this past week played host to the 2023 San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition. The Chronicle is the nation’s largest wine competition, this year drawing some 5500...

Sacramento’s hospitality trade is to get a shot of adrenaline, personality and money next week when an anticipated 12,000 persons roll into town for the 29th Unified Grape & Wine Symposium. The nation’s largest wine conference, Unified will be staged mostly at the...

Brothers Tyler and Trevor Grace make wine at their family’s Lewis Grace Winery in the Apple Hill district just outside Placerville in El Dorado County. They harvest grapes from the same estate vineyard. They make wine side by side in the same cellar. They sometimes...

Two of the more intriguing and instructive wines I tasted during 2022 could serve as bookends for this year’s wine-competition circuit. The first was in January, at the San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition in Cloverdale, Sonoma County. There, my assignment was to...

Notes from Dan Berger’s International Wine Competition at Santa Rosa last week: Sonoma County winemaker Carol Shelton’s standing as one of California’s more reliable hands with Zinfandel was enhanced as her voluptuous, complex and spicy Wild Thing 2020 Mendocino...

Rather than make a wine and then fish for foods with which to pair it, why not style a wine to accompany a specific type of food? Chaim Gur-Arieh has done just that. His questing, inventive and original mind has created a series of wines carefully conceived to...