Last April Fool's day, I received what seemed to be a nicely written, yet rather surprisingly nifty wine event invite in my inbox asking if I'd like to meet with Laurent Sauvage, winemaker for the leading family of wines from the
Languedoc in the South of
France,
Robert Skalli Wines. We were to meet with Laurent at
CAV, the outstanding wine bar and restaurant along Market in the
Opera District of San Francisco (and part-owned by none other than
Doug Cook (
Twitter), founder of
Able Grape).
In the year of their 20th anniversary,
St. Supéry Vineyards & Winery (
Twitter) hosted the 2nd Wine Bloggers Forum (WBF) at their beautiful Estate in
Rutherford,
Napa Valley,
California on Saturday, 04/04/09. The event continued the spirit of intimate and collaborative blogger and industry interaction that was first started as an offshoot of the
WBC that debuted last year. The
first WBF was at
Hahn Family Estates in their
Napa business offices and perfectly organized by the incomparable
Lisa de Bruin (
Twitter). This latest edition was organized by Lesley Keffer Russell (
Twitter), VP of Marketing and Sales at
St. Supéry.
The kind folks at Icon Estates have been worried about all of us out here in US wine-drinker land. They realized back in March that tax time is hard on all of us wine grunts, particularly this year when everyone is still reeling from watching their life savings (and future wine purchasing potential) shrivel by -40% and see a world filled with recession and job loss. They realized that everyone's day or night (or both!) can be brightened by wine, however and put together a great list of wines to have while stumbling through filling out your requisite tax forms: Tax Time Wines! Susan and co. at Icon kindly shot out some wine samples for various bloggers to try including the prolific 1WineDude (Twitter, Twitter2), Luscious Lush Thea (Twitter, Twitter2) and yours truly (Twitter), among others.
The second and last day of our latest Pops & Son Wine Trip series took a dramatic turn, ie, Pops was no longer involved, unfortunately! That cold that was was starting to come over him in the
morning of the first day and then really kicked in
during the afternoon? Well, it hit big time and he woke up this day feeling terrible...no wine for Pops! Poor guy ended up in bed all day...so our plans changed!
The afternoon of our first day on the 5th Pops & Son Wine Trip continued the vinous adventure that we had
started in the morning at
Kirkland Ranch and
William Hill. As we traveled up
Silverado Trail on the Western side of the Valley, we mused about which winery to next visit, as we had plenty of time before our 2:30 appointment with the highlight of the day,
Terra Valentine on
Spring Mountain. We passed numerous wineries along the way, including many
Stags Leap favorites such as
Regusci,
Darioush and
Clos du Val. As we approached the
Oakville appellation, Pops asked if I’d ever visited the large contemporary building that housed
Miner Family Vineyards. I had not done so and just that easily, we had picked our next winery!
