I'm just going to say what no one seems willing to admit. 2011 is going to go down as one of the greatest vintages for Oregon wine in history. A brief history, true, but the point is the same. And apparently controversial.I think I can finally say this with a straight face because I have most of my 2011 wines so

How about an update on how Vincent Wine Company wine sales are going? Not sure if anyone's too interested, but I once asked and some readers suggested yes, they wanted to hear about it here and there. And after all the detail of making wine in my garage and then transitioning to commercial production, vineyard visits, bottl

I tweeted earlier today about an interesting experience last night.I went over to the home of one of my growers to deliver some wine and a check toward grapes purchased last fall - it's not unusual to be paying for grapes from one harvest for many months forward (though I really want to finish things out for 201

A

Sherry is all the rage these days with wine hipsters. It's a funny thing though - so much Sherry is essentially industrially made wine with huge bodegas cranking out oceans of wine, much of it only decent. Hardly the set up you'd think the hipster crowd would gravitate towards.In the US, most Sherry that you can

There are many stories about how I came to make wine. Sometimes I'm not sure which ones are real and which are fiction, not in a lie sense but perhaps wishful thinking. The epiphany bottle. The childhood memory scent of a barrel cellar. The book of tasting notes I've kept all this time. They all happened but maybe they were

Just a quick note tonight to remember my

Some of you may remember that, in addition to making wine as

It's become fashionable in wine geek circles to bash the tas

With the San

A week ago, friends were visiting from San Diego and we all went to dinner at St. Jack, a lovely French restaurant in SE Portland. What a meal. To start, pours of a Cremant du Bourgogne of some portion Aligote. Delicious, thirst quenching but more interesting than that. Salad Lyonaisse for me, full of tangy and smoky bacon.

After my last post about the dearth of serious Italian white wine, I of course thought of other examples I'd neglected. Take Soave for example. The best of this region near Verona may not be landmark wine like Mosel Riesling or White Burgundy. They are however worth noting. So there you are.This past weekend, we

The obvious

I will admit it. Amid all the hype over Oregon's 2012 vintage, I've been more than a little nervous about the wines I made this past fall. Let me explain.In 2012, we had yet another cold, wet spring, which gets the growing season off to a slow start that very likely turns into a late, possibly rainy harvest. In

I grew up by the b

It's been a while since Thanksgiving, but the wines we enjoyed have stayed in my mind. Thanksgiving is such a food and people centered holiday. I'm on record saying that I don't think Thanksgiving is great for your most special wines. Save those for their own days. If any day is simply about delicious wine, and perhaps a fe

I'm a night owl. It's surely from my mother. These days she retires early but in her prime she would be up well past my father's old 9:30ish bedtime. It's the same with me and this harvest it all sort of hit me at once how much I want and need the night.For little kids, the night is essentially off limits. It's

If you're in Portland this weekend, come taste my new Vincent Wine Company wines at the SE Wine Collective.All four of us in the facility - Vincent, Division, Helioterra and Bow and Arrow - are pouring and selling our newest wines. We're calling it Urban Thanksgiving.Come taste, enjoy yourself and b

November's here and with it the end of the grape harvest. This year we brought in more than nine tons of mostly Pinot Noir grapes from five different vineyards. Now all the juice from that fruit is fermented into wine and safely in barrel, where it will age over the coming year.Never mind the two barrels of Char

We're three weeks into harvest and it feels like summer in August. I don't mean it's warm, no, autumn is clearly here. It's just that some things are incredibly good. Some things are getting a bit old. And some things are sweeter as the season's days slowly start drawing to a close. Just like that August feeling, when you'r

I admit it. I wrote off the SF Giants in my last post. Now they've done the unthinkable and beaten the Reds three games in a row to take their series. According to Giantdynamics, harvest continues.Sure enough, all my Pinot Noir is in the winery. I had thought the last of it would come in Wednesday, the day I sup

It's October again and harvest is on. Already I have half my Pinot Noir in the winery, with the rest coming Monday and Wednesday. But more on that later. First I need to look back a bit, in wine and baseball.I wrote earlier this year about October 7, 2001, when I first made my own wine. I suppose this could be t

After my new wine release event at the new SE Wine Collective the other day, a great friend from out of town and I went to Sauvage for incredibly good food and interesting wine, meeting up with his sister for a while. We managed to end up in the back with Jesse, where he's busy making his well regarded Fausse Piste wines fr

It's been a long year since the last grape harvest, incredibly challenging but as far as wine goes, everything I might have hoped it would be if you spoke with me a year ago. At the time I was still selling my first vintage of Oregon Pinot Noir, from 2009, and I continued to sell that wine for more than a year from original

Sunday's no day of rest around here, especially mid-September when the weather is still warm (almost hot) and the grapes in the northern Willamette Valley are nearing harvest. Instead of a lazy day watching football on the couch (that was tonight, and the dominant SF 49ers were worth every moment), I went with a winemaker f

Late summer returns and I find myself at once in a familiar and changing situation. First, the change, all great, great news.My winery, Vincent Wine Company, has moved from our home of the past three years to the Southeast Wine Collective, at SE Division and 35th Place in Portland behind the restaurant Cibo. Thi

Our friend Tim (Teeem!) from Seattle is in town for a bike mechanic cer

Ok, finally a moment to recount the Wine Bloggers Conference 2012 that happened in Portland last weekend. I went into the event a bit skeptical about how professional the experience would be. Is it self-hatred? I'm a blogger, yet I feared that other bloggers might not be serious enough, whatever that really means. I guess I

I've been wine blogging since 2005 but never really got into the whole blogging thing. You know, monetizing the site with ads and link exchanges and all that. Or going into the whole free wine solicitation thing. I've gotten a few sample bottles and books, but nothing much, and that's not what I'm really into doing.