Red Wine

Drink 2013: Small Batch is the Second Coming of Local Wine

Stock Up on These Three Wallet-Friendly Wines From Costco

There are fine wines. And then there are the ones to bust out on a near-daily basis: the end of the day. Today SFoodie strolls the aisles of Costco, where it's make room on that flatbed cart for drinkable and beyond decent wines from red to bubbly. Here are three of our favorite picks that are suita ... More >>

Good For the Wallet, Good for the Glass: Talking Holiday Wines With Bi-Rite's Trac Le

There are fine wines. And then there are the ones to bust out on a near-daily basis: end of the day. Your widescreen TV is glowing. Maybe your friends are headed over. Or you decided to cozy up with that furry pet of yours... all relevant cases for a glass or two of decent and not overpriced wine. T ... More >>

Joie de Vine

Wine of the Week: Balance at the High-Alcohol Edge

Once, on a trip to Napa as a budding wine journalist, I asked a winemaker who had proudly poured me his newest creatio, what the alcohol level was. His snide-scoffing response was effectively that I didn't know what I was asking and was just going with the flow of anti-high-alcohol nay-sayers. Shake ... More >>

George Estates RRV Pinot: A $40 Pinot Worth Searching For

We're always on the lookout for great wines at the $40 and under price point, and Pinot Noir, with its continued popularity and finicky farming, is often hard to find at the caliber we want that economically. So it's all the more sad when we find one and then learn it's sold out for direct order. S ... More >>

BBQ & Wine: Pairings for Your Holiday Grilling

A mid-week 4th of July timing either means you'll have a lot of mid-week BBQ days, or almost none at all. So we'll suggest some wines from our recent tastings to cover you from a quick prep on the light side to a heavy-weight overnight marinade big meat bonanza. Light Pick - For a light BBQ leanin ... More >>

Gary Farrell's New Wines: Pinot Noir and Chardonnay from Russian River

Early high-end wine efforts in Napa focused on Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnay while Sonoma experimented with Chardonnay and Zinfandel. Around 1970 a few visionaries planted Pinot Noir in Russian River's cooler regions. Gary Farrell was one of them. Many assumed great pinot noir couldn't be produ ... More >>

Wine of the Week: Talking Deals and Delights With A16's Shelley Lindgren

Wednesdays are "Butcher Days" at A16, so SFoodie sat down with Wine Director/Owner Shelley Lindgren as cleavers smashed, saws swished, and the butchers worked through one-and-a-half pigs. We, meanwhile, worked through a dozen wines -- and our list of questions for sommeliers -- to help you find A16 ... More >>

Sommelier Q & A with Urban Tavern's Steve Kleinfeld

Steve Kleinfeld C.S., General Manager of Urban Tavern, has built a wine list focused on wines with a sustainable focus to serve his mix of local and hotel guests. We have five questions for Sommeliers, and we hit him with them -- and then we can't resist dishing a bit below about his answers. Stev ... More >>

Top Sommelier Tips with Gabriele Originario of La Mar

Sommeliers spend all day with wine, and are a great resource for new finds. They're the "friend on the inside" that can help you suss out the best values on their wine lists. With that in mind, we've come up with a short suite of questions that we're posing to some of our favorite area sommeliers to ... More >>

Beer & Spirits Chocolates: Taste Testing Sweets with a Kick

​We recently reviewed Coco Delice's beer and booze-infused truffles, and now two more of our favorite chocolate artisans have turned up with beer and spirits in their sweets. Vice Chocolates' 2012 Lush collection features a beer, a whiskey, and two wine-based truffles. Socola, meanwhile, has add ... More >>

Wine of the Week: La Sirena's Moscato Azul and Syrah Santa Ynez

​ Heidi Barrett's family has been making wine in Napa long before the valley became a world-renowned wine destination. Barrett is one of Napa's rock-star winemakers, best known for bringing in perfect scores from some critics for her work at Screaming Eagle. If you don't care about Napa, or rock ... More >>

In Pursuit of Balance: Celebrate the California Wines That Get Amount of Alcohol Right

​At most gathering of wine-folk, talk eventually turns to the topic of high-alcohol wines. Personally, I'm not too opinionated on the matter just so long as the alcohol is in balance as an element of the wine. But that balance is harder to achieve as the alcohol content climbs higher. If a fr ... More >>

Wine of the Week: Imbibe Federalist Dueling Pistols in Honor of Aaron Burr

There's a new wine sheriff in Zin town, and its name is Dueling Pistols. Corny, I know, but the label alone could have you looking for a gun fight. Dueling Pistols is a new wine, first vintage, from a new project, The Federalist, which itself is only in its second vintage. The Federalist is Terla ... More >>

Wine of the Week: Shake Ridge Red

​In Champagne, most big-name "houses" buy their grapes from multiple growers and blend them to achieve consistency -- Veuve is Veuve whenever you drink it. But if you talk to Somms in the city, you'll most likely find that they favor grower-producers, those wine makers who grow their grapes. Latel ... More >>

Winos of the World Unite at Pinot Noir Summit

No, but it may rain wine at the Pinot Noir Summit.​What: 10th Pinot Noir Summit Where: Hilton Financial District When: Saturday, Feb. 25, 1:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. Cost: $130 for an all day ticket, $85 for the Grand Awards Tasting and Ceremony. The rundown: Hang out with wine lovers and ABC ... More >>

Wine of the Week: Waterstone Merlot and Cabernet

Sometimes you have to go a long way to find a local wine. For this week's wine(s), we turned to Canada. Actually, Canada came to us in the form of our friend Dups, and his iPhone image of a Waterstone Cabernet. He asked if we knew it. We didn't . He liked it, we tried it, and now here we are. Wa ... More >>

What's White Burgundy like? Find Out for Less with Gary Farrell

The View From Gary Farrell​According to William "Rusty" Gaffney, M.D., aka The Prince of Pinot, "Some consider Gary Farrell the father of Russian River Valley Pinot Noir." While Gary himself has long ago left the vineyard, the fog-shrouded winery he built with Bill Hambrecht is still producing pr ... More >>

Primus' Les Claypool Will Serve You Wine Out of a Railroad Caboose

Dear Primus fans, haven't you always wanted to grab a drink with Head Freak Les Claypool? Yes, of course you have. And now, thanks to Mr. Claypool's new hobby, that's tantalizingly easy to do. According to a report in Sunday's Chronicle, the top-hatted Primus bassman himself is known to occasionall ... More >>

Wine of the Week: Champagne-Quality Bubbles from Norcal

​One of our standbys for high-quality, locally-sourced, reasonably-priced bubbles is Schramsberg.  Schramsberg stands out, with a few others, as a producer that doesn't merely mimic the method of Champagne (Methode Champenoise), but actually approach or equal the quality of houses from spark ... More >>

ZAP: New Location and a New Food and Wine Pairing Event

​ We go to a lot of wine tastings: trade, consumer, best-of, pre-auction, single-appellation super-regional. They can be a great way to train the palate, but over time they're tiring to foot and tongue. So, we've resolved to focus only on the ones that have shined over time, the ones where your ... More >>

Wine of the Week: Mercury Rising Bordeaux-Style Tastes Pricier Than it Costs

"Exceptional value-per-dollar ratio" is how Cinnabar, or at least their publicist, promotes their wines. Based on our tasting of their 2008 California Mercury Rising "Bordeaux-style" wine, we see substance in the statement. ​ We taste wines blind-ish. We don't brown bag and mix them up to confus ... More >>

The Year in Music Booze: Six Artist's Beverages That Made 2011 One Long Hangover

Rock 'n' roll culture died in 2011. It's got nothing to do with your opinion of Bon Iver, but everything to do with Rolling Stone. The former leading voice of modern music upheld its immaculate reputation this year... by starting an official wine club. It's filled with bottles branded with imagery f ... More >>

This Thursday: Arlequin's Beaujolais Bash!

​What: Beaujolais Bash! Where: Arlequin Wine Merchants When: Thurs., November 17, 6-8 p.m. Cost: $25 The rundown: If there's one wine to love, it's Beaujolais, and that's not just because it's the most fun to say. This week, you have the rare and exciting opportunity to taste bottlings fr ... More >>

Quivira Makes Jam, Not Just Jammy Wines

​Wines are often described as "jammy," but how often can you buy jam and wine from the same producer? Dry Creek Valley producer Quivira will sell you both, and some honey from the estate as well, with the help of some goats, bees, and manure-filled bull horns. The goats mow the lawn, the bee ... More >>

Piccino Wine List Seeks Balance, Naturally

White wine made from Pinot Noir​When I first looked over Piccino's leftist-wine-geek wine list, I assumed it was compiled by a follower of the natural wine movement. Only seven of the 42 wines on the list are from California, and most are from winemakers associated with natural wine: Lioco, ... More >>

Santa Julia Torrontes: Like Drinking Fresh Flowers

​Argentina is working hard on marketing Malbec as its signature grape, but I prefer Torrontes. For one thing, unlike Malbec, which was imported from France, Torrontes may actually be indigenous to Argentina. People used to believe it was the same as a grape of the same name in Spain's Galicia ... More >>

The Less You Spend, the More Interesting Fifth Floor's Wines Are

Amy Goldberger in the Fifth Floor wine room​There might be no better sign of where San Francisco's fine dining scene is in 2011 than the wine list at Fifth Floor. It's a pricey hotel restaurant, reviewed today by our restaurant critic Jonathan Kauffman. Yet the list is currently managed by wi ... More >>

Fresh Eats: Deciphering the Wine List at Bar Tartine

Bar Tartine Wine List: If It's Porn, It's European Porn

Alex Fox​This week we ran our first wine list review to accompany Jonathan Kauffman's restaurant review in the print edition of SF Weekly. Jonathan likes to offer people a little extra flavor on the web, so I decided to do that too by dropping by Bar Tartine on a Friday morning to taste wine w ... More >>

Dogpatch WineWorks Replaces Crushpad

​Since Crushpad left San Francisco last year for Wine Country, folks wanting to make their own wine in town have had to go it alone -- which, in most cases, meant not making wine. And ripe smells in the Dogpatch neighborhood unfortunately haven't been coming from fermenting grapes. But now, t ... More >>

Robert Mondavi Woodbridge 2009 California Zinfandel

​This writer made a simple dinner last night of brown rice, freshly pulled chard and kale from the garden, a handful of off-season wild porcini from -- oops, almost gave away my patch! -- and several steaks of a hand-harvested lingcod, which we lathered with coconut oil and sesame seeds and br ... More >>

Surveying Stout Beer Jelly and Biodynamic Wine at Taste of Mendocino

Sean TimberlakeBlack Dog Farm's jams and preserves range from the mundane to the quirky.​Monday's Taste of Mendocino event brought some of the best nibbles and sips from the county to Fort Mason to sample. Under the expansive roof of the Festival Pavilion, long rows of booths offered up tempti ... More >>

A Field Guide to Sustainable and Delicious Dry Farmed Wines

Whole lotta irrigation goin' on in Napa.​Irrigation is plainly a function of the modern world. Though the ancient Romans built spectacular gravity-driven aqueducts, drip irrigation for agriculture was not invented until the late 1960s in Israel, and only in the 1970s did water-bearing pipes a ... More >>

Concannon Winery 2009 Central Coast Pinot Noir

The "R" at the end of "noir" is not silent. The letter is meant to produce a distinct sound, and, in effect, "pinot noir" rhymes with "film noir." But in the upper echelons of wine drinking society, some say "pinot nu-aaah." Have you noticed? One must guess they think they're quite cultured when pro ... More >>

Glen Ellen 2009 Old Vine Zinfandel Proprietor's Reserve

dr_XeNo/FlickrAt last year's ZAP Festival, plenty of old-vine Zin, not enough scandal.​In January, we attended the largest single-variety wine tasting in America: the ZAP Festival at Fort Mason. We sauntered through the pavilions, glass in hand, point-blank asking winemakers how old their "old ... More >>

Drink 2011: Sake to Me

Tasting Petite Sirah, California's Little Big Wine

Alastair BlandTasting panelists Noah P. and Eleni K. strike a pose with the Petite empties.​It was born in 1880, and four years later came to California. But for another 80, almost nobody knew it. Petite Sirah is one of California's historical vines and among the earliest varieties introduced ... More >>

Good Eats and Zinfandel Pairing Brings the "Z" Back to Herbst

dr_XeNo/FlickrFifty eateries, fifty wineries, paired up in the buddy system at Herbst Pavilion.​Like bells to Pavlov's dogs, the sight of a capital "Z" this time of year starts us thinking of (if not quite drooling over) red wines native to the Golden State, punctuated by notes of pepper and r ... More >>

Kaiken 2009 Malbec Mendoza

​Tuesday night we went to Boulevard and blew the rent. After two Woodford Reserve Manhattans, the sommelier John helped us pick out an astounding Barolo from Piedmont that set us back $165. Good thing the foie gras was amazing and the northern halibut was as close to the empyrean as one gets w ... More >>

Vietti Dinner at Ristobar Tonight

​Get a rare opportunity tonight at Ristobar to meet with Luca Currado, winemaker at Vietti winery in the small medieval village of Castiglione Falletto, the heart of Piedmont's famous Langhe wine region. Six of his organically produced wines will be available by the glass, along with a special ... More >>

Ready to Splurge? The Romililly 2008 Pinot Noir is a Gem

Neeta Lind/FlickrA $43 wine should deliver brilliance, and Romililly Pinot Noir does. This is the 2006.​I certainly appreciate a good deal on wine, and try to expose as many bargains as I can. But as a wine lover, sometimes you just want the comfort of a treasured favorite, whether or not you ... More >>

JAQK Cellars: Boutique Wine and Food Pairings in Jackson Square

Lou BustamanteSmall bites designed to pair with JAQK's varietals.​The area around Jackson Square Park is heaven for designers of everything from clothes to furniture. Now the neighborhood can add wine to its list of boutique offerings. Hidden in an unassuming building is JAQK Cellars ― the n ... More >>

The McClaskey Touch

Julia

Wine

Barrel Fever

Side Dish

Sno-Drift, Hall of Fame and Cain Vineyard and Winery

Side Dish

Forward to the Past; Beneath the Palms; Five and Dime; Smoke 'Em If Ya Got 'Em; Rim Shot

Side Dish

Open and Shut, The Theater of Life, Pop Tops and Pull Tabs, Zinful

The French Connection