Making homemade wines from raisins or other fruits instead of winegrapes can be just as satisfying as making a fine table red or a crisp white. Aged well, they can be a validation of sorts.

Have you ever walked in the kind of fog where you cannot see your own outstretched hand one moment, only for the breeze to shift in the next, leaving you standing in the blinding sun? This is winemaking — a shifting series of revelations clouded by conundra. As I enter my third Crush, a vineyard double entendre for [...]

This is the year I graduate to becoming a middling winemaker. Making your own wine isn’t terribly difficult; inmates do it with grape juice and a piece of stale bread. Making wine you’d want to put into a bottle and store in your house for several years is another level — a level I reached [...]

Chez Pim has announced this year’s raffle winners for Menu for Hope, a benefit run by the food blogging multiverse to benefit a worthy cause, in this case children in the South African kingdom of Lesotho. I was both a raffle-r and an raffl-ee this time, and I must say I am pleased with the result [...]

Last weekend Holly and I ventured up to El Dorado County to collect a batch of Mourvedre from Sumu Kaw Vineyards; it was nearly a year to the day we’d gone to the same town to gather Sangiovese grapes. Sumu Kaw. Odd name, this, but it apparently means something like “Place of the Sugar Pine” [...]