If you’ve never tasted Malbec, you are really missing out. Malbec’s ties go back to Bordeaux, France, where it was originally one of the five varieties used in red Bordeaux blends along with Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Cabernet Franc, and Petit Verdot. Today it is only used sparingly in Bordeaux but has really come into its […]

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 […]

Our host for the February edition of Wine Blogging Wednesday, the blogosphere’s monthly virtual wine tasting event, is David McDuff of McDuff’s Food and Wine Trail. David selected A Passion for Piedmont (a title he borrowed from wine writer Matt Kramer’s Piedmontese cookbook) as this month’s theme in which he asked us to pick any […]

Our next excursion on our South Africa trip was a day trip to the wine farms of the Constantia Valley, a suburb of Cape Town. These wine farms are some of the oldest and most historical in the world outside of Europe, several dating back over 300 years. The setting is beautiful and serene with […]

LaGayle and I are currently in South Africa visiting the major winelands of the Western Cape and tasting as many of their wines as we can that are available in the United States. On our first full day in Cape Town, after taking one of those Hop-On Hop-Off city tours, we walked up to the […]

Pedroncelli Winery, located in Geyserville, California, in the Dry Creek Valley of Sonoma County, was founded in 1927 by John Pedroncelli, Sr. Today, Pedroncelli is still a family-owned business, now in their fourth generation. Winemaker John Pedroncelli, Jr. has more than 40 vintages under his belt at Pedroncelli Winery. We first visited Pedroncelli Winery in […]