Recently, I had the opportunity to try several wines from two Sonoma County wineries located in Healdsburg, California. Dry Creek Vineyard and Simi Winery are both worth checking out. They produce good quality wines across the board. For those of us that drink wine virtually every day, it is not economical (nor necessary) to spend […]

Carpenter Creek Winery, located in Mount Vernon, Washington, was founded in 2001 by owner/winemaker Jeff Hammer and his wife Tara. They opened their tasting room in 2003 and did an extensive remodel in 2006. Their remodeled tasting room is very nice and quaintly situated off the road among fir and cedar trees. Currently, Carpenter Creek […]

The inaugural Sip of Snoqualmie, benefitting Encompass, was held last Saturday at the Snoqualmie Casino in Snoqualmie, Washington (about 26 miles east of Seattle). Encompass is a non-profit organization whose mission is to nurture children, enrich families, and inspire community in the Snoqualmie Valley. Thirty-two Washington wineries were on hand pouring their wines during this […]

Our last day in South African wine country was a last minute add-on trip to the Durbanville district, an area very close to Cape Town. The area was beautiful, but the overall quality of the wines was not great. And, unfortunately, the few excellent wines that we did find are not available in the United […]

Stellenbosch is by far the most prominent wine region in South Africa, so I wanted to go back and visit several of the wineries on my list that I had to skip when I was ill on our first visit to Stellenbosch several weeks ago. Our first stop was at de Trafford Winery. It was […]

On our next South African wine adventure, we headed out to Franschhoek to visit wineries that we were unable to visit earlier in our trip when I was ill. Franschhoek, a village settled more than 300 years ago by the French Huguenots, is a picturesque town full of art and antique shops and galleries, coffee […]

When we awakened for this day in the winelands and opened our drapes to the deck, smoke from the mountains was quite thick. The view was just a haze. We later learned that here had been six fires which we thought was significant until we learned that there were 95 fires one day the previous […]

We started our second day in Stellenbosch at Rustenberg Wines, a huge estate equivalent to 3,000 acres, owned by the Barlow Family. It is obvious that there is money here other than wine because only a small portion of the farm is devoted to winemaking; although, they do produce about 120,000 cases of wine a […]

On our first day in Stellenbosch, our first wine farm stop was at Hartenberg Wine Estate established in 1692. The tasting room hostess was nice, but she was juggling our tasting with a phone call about a doctor’s appointment. We tasted four wines at Hartenberg, and while all of them were decent wines, none of […]

On our first day in the Cape Winelands, we were making good time to our morning appointment until we discovered that our exit in Paarl was closed due to road construction. Because we had never been to this area it took us about thirty minutes to circle around and get us back on track to […]