The Winery Allégorie of Sierra Foothills of California

I’d like to say we took advantage of the lockdown and its related commotion to do a stock-take, explore new avenues, turn over intriguing stones, widen and deepen our drinking, taking careful notes as we went. Sadly, no. I won’t say we got stuck in a rut, but we did tend to stick with comfort wines – and “comfort”, in our case, means familiar. Regular readers of this quarterly column can probably guess the labels on the resulting empties. We have a wider range of comfort foods, I’m afraid, than ...

Prices have been rising on California fine wines, and especially Screaming Eagle, said Liv-ex this week. Its California 50 index, which tracks the price performance of Screaming Eagle, Harlan Estate, Dominus, Opus One and Ridge Monte Bello, has increased by around 32% in the last year. ‘High quality and heightened demand have led to rising prices,’ said Liv-ex, a global marketplace for the trade. Its figures provide more evidence of a strong 12 months for the fine wine market in general, and fol ...

San Luis Obispo Coast was awarded on 9 March, 2022 by the US Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau. The new AVA establishes a 97 kilometer-long strip along California that locals call SLO (slow) Coast, describing the Pacific Ocean’s influence on the area’s culture and lifestyle, terrain, and wines.  SLO Coast is located midway between two major California cities, San Francisco and Los Angeles, with Burgundy varieties making up a majority of San Luis Obispo Coast’s high-end wine pr ...