California Wines & Wineries

Answering a Common Question

Posted on October 12, 2021

Several readers have asked do I only drink wines from California.  The answer is absolutely no, as I drink wines from many states and variety of countries and locations within those country. Then why do I generally only write about California wines?  Do I prefer California wines over other countries?

So to answer the question I have to go back 9-10 years ago when I started writing about wines and wineries.  I was working on my writing skills (which I am not formally trained) so a friend mentioned the easiest way to begin writing about something I knew. That left the door open to about three subjects: high technology (my career), golf and wine. While having spent over 30 years in high technology memory, microprocessors, ASIC’s (application specific integrated circuits), executive management, etc., writing about this would garner about 100 readers. Writing about golf is trying to define “fine art” or “classical art” – lots of words describing movements and era’s, but it comes down to individual taste as to either you enjoy it or not (nor was I trained in this discipline). So this left wine as the default candidate.

While I have been enjoying wine since going to school in Switzerland and experiencing many villages and ordering 1 deciliter blanc or 1 deciliter rouge at the age of 20. Every village had their vines going on the hillsides and it was a local drink. Now I don’t remember in the local village pub having any wine list or recommending a particular wine, it was what was grown by the village winemaker as this was in the countryside not a metropolitan area.

Wine, when returning to USA and then 21, I took a liking to as something as “an intermediate step”. Beer was blah (little or no microbreweries then) and hard liquor was something I wanted to abstain as I had seen the divesting effective on many people close to me. So wine, which was relatively up and coming in Napa Valley (mid-1970’s) and I enjoyed the ambiance and people involved in the business. Robert Mondavi sold me the first case of wine I ever purchased a 1974 George de Latour Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon. I still have one bottle of it in cellar to remember that day in 1978.

So back to the question of only drinking California wine. I started a Blog and website called California Wines and Wineries as I figured I would not run out of material with so many wineries here in California. So it makes sense that I try to write about wines from the various AVA’s  and sub-AVA’s here in California from Temecula, Santa Barbera, San Benito, Central Coast, Santa Cruz, Livermore Valley, Sierra Foothills, Napa Valley, Sonoma Valley, etc.

But even with covering such a diversity of wines, people, varietals, terroirs, AVA’s, etc., within the state of California, I do still drink wines from other regions and countries. As the anonymous quote goes “Adventure may hurt you, but monotony will kill you”. I have tasted wines from over 45 countries while on business travels and personally was only hurt slightly hurt by tasting wines in India, Brazil and China. I have done wine tasting in the France, Japan, Frankfurt, Brazil, China, Taiwan, wine tours of Italy, Switzerland (as an adult), Mexico, Canada, etc.  And have tasted wines from around 40 states within the USA.

Today I still write about once or twice a month on my website about a wine from Spain, Portugal, Italy, etc., just for my own education and enjoyment. I’m I partial to California wines, yes, but I am not exclusively nor biased for or against other areas. In fact I go to more educational sessions on foreign wines than domestic wines for my own self education.

So to those who think I only taste or drink California wines, here are a few pictures of wines which I have enjoyed which are not California wines but generally not written about.

The few pictures below (and I have lots more) should answer the question, that I do drink other than California wines!!

Sláinte,

Michael

https://californiawinesandwineries.com