This quarter’s wine club collection is focused on Biodynamics, a farming and winemaking process drawn from the ideas of Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner in the 1920s. Biodynamic farming combines spiritual, mystical, and celestial methodologies to promote soil fertility, plant health, and biodiversity. It creates a holistic, resilient, and self-contained ecosystem that does not require the intervention […]
Do you ever look at the back of a bottle of wine? If the wine is imported, it’s there you’ll find the label bearing the importer’s name. Importers are the people in the trenches who establish relationships with the winemakers and painstakingly select each wine to bring into the US. Average wine consumers tend to […]
Natural wine has been getting a lot of press lately. CBS recently released this informative video about additives in wine, with cameos from winemaker Tony Coturri, the godfather of natural wine in California, and journalist Alice Fiering, the woman who literally wrote the book(s) on natural wine. Definitely worth a watch if you’re curious to […]
Happy New Year everyone! Coming hot off the heels of our very successful Califermentation event, I thought it would be a great time to get back to Winelandia’s roots and feature wines from California. I was lucky to meet so many talented and passionate people dedicated to natural winemaking and was inspired to do a […]
California’s natural winemakers tend to be an adventurous lot, and with good reason. They take great risks foregoing the pesticides and chemical manipulations that have become a benchmark of most of the large well known California wineries, but it’s a risk they think is worth taking in order to produce something that’s honest. Apparently so […]
Wine elicits dictatorial feelings of taste in some people, which helps to explain the manipulative scoring schemes that have done so much damage to individual taste over the past few decades in California. On the other end of the scale are the people for whom wine awakens something very different, a desire to share something […]
The Vinguard and Winelandia invite you to Califermentation: The second annual wine fair showcasing California’s best in natural winemaking. Saturday Nov. 12 – Sunday Nov. 13, 12- 4 pm Terroir Natural Wine Bar and Merchant 1116 Folsom Street (7th), San Francisco Unlike any other tasting before, Califermentation is featuring wines from California’s best producers dedicated […]
Fall is my favorite time of year. As the days get shorter and the nights get cooler, I find myself looking forward to the holidays much more than I did when I was young. I love cooking for friends and family, throwing dinner parties, and sharing my most prized wines. I’m no longer looking for […]
Ready for something new? Long before the French and Italians graced the world with elegant, polished wines made from modern grape varieties, people were making wine on the Balkan Peninsula from ancient, indigenous grape varieties in a climate well-suited to viticulture. Americans are finally starting to take notice of these wines and now’s your chance to […]
Like most of the Balkans, Slovenia has changed hands a fair number of times in its history. The area that makes up modern Slovenia has at one point or another belonged to the Romans, Magyars, Ottomans, Habsburgs and Yugoslavia, the latter of which began its official disintegration after the Slovenes declared independence in 1991 […]