With fall and the easing of the Covid-19 pandemic, students are back in school. I see and hear them during recess when I pass the school just down the street, a sight and sound both nostalgic and joyous. Occasionally, I retrieve a soccer ball or basketball and hurl it...

A few snapshots from three wine competitions, all drawing entries solely from vineyards and wineries of the Sierra Foothills American Viticultural Area, a long and thin belt of wildly varied topography, climate and soil stretching from California’s Yuba County in the...

For all you Californians moving to Texas and taking your buy-local consciousness with you: Yes, Texas has homegrown wine. Pinot Noir isn’t as big in Texas as peanuts and pecans, and cotton sits far higher than Cabernet Sauvignon on the list of the state’s more...

I’m a fan of wine competitions, for the most part. I have judged at hundreds over the years, and continue to be active on the competition circuit. Much of what I expect to write here will spring from what I find by sitting on a panel at a wine competition. The wines I...

This is my fiftieth year to write of wine, mostly California wine, and mostly wines from enclaves about the state capital, Sacramento, where my wife Martha and I have lived most of those 50 years. To mark that half century – and to give myself something to do during...