Highlights from a recent surge of commercial wine competitions: California State Fair Sauvignon Blanc is one of the few bright spots in the American wine market, with sales and plantings up compared with all other grapes and wines not named Cabernet Sauvignon or...

A quick jaunt to Calaveras County the other day paid off with introductions to several mighty-fine wines: The day began with the fifth-annual International Cabernet Franc Wine Competition inside the sprawling Golf Club at Copper Valley, a gated settlement just outside...

A fresh and lively discussion is under way on the California wine scene. It centers on Napa Valley, specifically on what its most prominent style of wine – Cabernet Sauvignon – represents: Place or personality? Karen MacNeil, one of the state’s more prolific,...

  Four glasses of white wine were before me. I only was told that they were Chardonnay, one from each of four brands of Bogle Family Wine Collection, including their latest, Element[al]. I was asked to pick the Element[al], the first brand of wines in the country...

      Ron Mansfield, who nearly 50 years ago saw on Apple Hill the potential for crops other than apples, died Sunday after a long siege with Parkinson’s Disease. He was 76. In 1980, he and his wife Carolyn founded Goldbud Farms in what is known as both...

  Again, and again, the phrase popped up at the recent Unified Wine & Grape Symposium in Sacramento: “Wine in moderation.” Never within my earshot, however, did anyone say what that means, or if “wine in moderation” were to materialize what it would mean for...