Yesterday, after a month-long hiatus, we’ve picked up on the Slow Wine California blog where we left off before the northern California wildfires shifted our attention to wine country’s recovery.

Yesterday, we published the 2018 debut guide’s “Slow” awards. Please check out the post and the site.

In the aftermath of the fires, there was no question that it wasn’t appropriate to follow our planned editorial schedule of publishing our editors’ top picks and our producer profiles.

Instead, we decided to focus on relief efforts and how all of us can help in the wine trade’s recovery.

And the bottomline is this: the number-one thing all of us can do — every Californian winemaker I’ve interacted with says exactly the same thing — is to buy California wine.

With every “depletion” (as we call it in the wine trade), retailers and restaurateurs are prompted to re-order the wines. And with their orders, capital flows back to the region. It’s exactly what the industry needs — from farmhand and hospitality worker to vineyard and winery owner.

This devastating natural disaster has given new urgency to our mission as editors of the guide (I’m the coordinating editor and one of the contributors). Initially, we had conceived the guide as a way to raise awareness of the vibrant “slow ethos” that thrives already in California. Today, we hope the guide will become the inspiration for bottles to be purchased and wine country trips to be planned.

Please stay tuned into the Slow wine blog as we publish the final prizes and we begin to publish our producer profiles (next week).

Thanks for reading and clicking. And thanks most of all for drinking California… (Tracie and are currently drinking Bedrock Wine Co. Sauvignon Blanc.).