Last Friday, we hosted one of our monthly wine tasting dinners. We blind tasted six Zinfandels, four from California and two from Washington State. It was another fun evening of good wines, excellent food, and wonderful friends. Among the six wines, two set themselves apart from the rest. The 2006 Seghesio Sonoma County Zinfandel and […]

Last month, I posted on Super Bargain Wines for Tough Times, which by our definition are wines with a price less than or equal to $10, of excellent quality (4-star quality or higher), and its price is less than or equal to one-half of wines of the same varietal and the same quality level (5 […]

This month’s wine tasting dinner featured red blends from Washington State. Once again, we were able to enjoy six wines throughout a four-course meal and spend quality time with wonderful friends. If you’ve ever thought about hosting your own wine tasting dinner, I highly encourage you to go ahead and do it. They are so […]

Fielding Hills Winery is a small, family-owned winery located in Wenatchee, Washington. Owner/winemaker Mike Wade and his wife Karen are longtime apple and cherry growers who have turned a middle portion of their orchard near Mattawa into a vineyard. Their Riverbend Vineyard, planted in 1998, is in the warm Wahluke Slope AVA. Strictly red wine […]

We enjoy trying new wines and treating ourselves to different things to keep our wine journey interesting. One of our recent double-blind private tastings featured wines that may be both new and different to you. While we have enjoyed red sparkling wines before, our experience with them is definitely limited. Yes, I said red sparkling […]

For those of you who have never been, Leavenworth, Washington, is a quaint and beautiful Bavarian Village nestled in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains in the heart of the state. No matter the season, it is a great get-away tourist destination. And in recent years, it has also become a destination for wine lovers […]

As gas prices climb higher and higher and your employer balks at that long-overdue pay raise, have you started looking for wines on sale at reasonable prices? Sure you have, but remember there is a big difference between a cheap wine and a bargain wine. A wine is only a bargain if it’s a good […]

We have had some exceptional Syrahs lately, and our tasting dinner last Friday evening continued the trend. This tasting featured six Pacific Northwest Syrahs, four from Washington State and two from Oregon. Both Oregon wineries represented, Watermill and Cayuse, are in the Walla Walla Valley AVA just a few miles from the Washington-Oregon state line. […]

We recently spent a long weekend in the Columbia Valley visiting a number of wineries, some we had visited years ago and others we had not previously visited. The Columbia Valley, established in 1984, is Washington State’s largest AVA (American Viticultural Area). Six other AVAs are located within the borders of the Columbia Valley AVA, […]

In a blind tasting of six excellent Washington State Syrahs, we tasted what we rated as a “Wow!” wine, the first Washington Syrah we’ve ever given a 5-star (out of 5) Quality Rating, the 2005 Fielding Hills Syrah. We had heard good things about Fielding Hills but had never tasted one of their wines until […]