by Mike Dunne | Dec 28, 2022 | Blog
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...
by Mike Dunne | Dec 22, 2022 | Blog
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...
by Mike Dunne | Dec 20, 2022 | Blog
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...
by Mike Dunne | Nov 30, 2022 | Blog
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...
by Mike Dunne | Nov 26, 2022 | Blog
The Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo International Wine Competition – Rodeo Uncorked! in cowboy shorthand – has two up-front goals: To showcase Texas wine and to showcase wines from the rest of the world, which is almost as big as Texas itself. Actually,...
by Mike Dunne | Nov 9, 2022 | Blog
Rodeo Uncorked!, the international wine competition of the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo, gets under way Friday. This will be the 20th roundup. I haven’t kept track of how many times I have judged at Houston, but show organizers say this is my 18th rodeo.A...