Yesterday, we posted an update on the California wine country wildfires over on the Slow Wine California blog, where I served as the coordinating editor of the guide and contributing editor to the site (image via Vino Girl’s Instagram).

We had been planning to continue publishing the 2018 debut guide prizes this month. But we took a break in order to shift coverage to the developing and ongoing crisis in northern California.

I highly recommend reading Eric Asimov’s piece “Wildfires Spared the Vineyards, but the Wines Could Suffer.” And please be sure to check out Alder Yarrow’s post on how to help with relief efforts, “Helping Northern California Wine Country After the Fires.” (“Undocumented immigrants are not eligible for federal disaster relief,” wrote Alder. “That’s why UndocuFund exists.”)

The fire may be mostly contained. But the human crisis continues. And that includes human and financial challenges for cannabis growers as well.

I visited a biodynamic cannabis farm in Sonoma earlier this year (images above and below): just as growers were investing heavily in their farms in preparation for the launch of recreational cannabis in California on January 1, their nascent industry had been literally decimated by the wildfires. Because cannabis is still considered to be illegal by the federal government, growers and other entrepreneurs are not eligible for federal aid.

It seems that states rights only matter to conservative Christians when it comes to putting down blacks and Mexicans and restricting reproductive rights and access to health services. States rights don’t matter much to them when it comes to the cultivation of one of G-d’s creations — a plant that occurs naturally — and its medicinal and recreational applications. Most conservative Christians are okay with wine (which doesn’t occur naturally). But cannabis? It’s the devil’s lettuce.

I was glad to see this excellent piece published by Washington Post (#AmazonWashingtonPost #fakenews!), “Wildfires scorched marijuana crops, possibly complicating California’s rollout of legal sales.”

And although I was surprised not to see more coverage on the excellent blog The Cannabist, the editors were among the first to repost this article by AP, “At least 31 legal cannabis farms have been destroyed in the California fires.”

What a year 2017 has been… Now, more than ever, all voting-age Americans need to look deep into their souls and reflect on what kind of country and legacy they want to leave for their (and our) children. Thanks for reading and clicking.

The North Coast of California was hit last night by a rash of wildfires. Most of the fires were sparked by gusting winds taking down trees hitting above-ground power lines. Fires spread quickly with one of the largest, the Tubbs Fire in Santa Rosa, spreading to over 25,000 acres in a matter of hours. The Tubbs Fire has burned portions of the northern part of the city of Santa Rosa and forced the evacuation of two area hospitals and thousands of people…

Click here to continue reading a dispatch from Sonoma this morning by Slow Wine senior editor Elaine Brown.

The following is a preview of one of my posts this week for the new Slow Wine Guide to the Wines of California. Our site came online this morning. The Slow Wine prizes will be announced shortly. Producer profiles will follow.

Above: The western edge of the Santa Ynez American Viticultural Area. The Pacific coast lies just a stone’s throw away.

The time is right for the Slow Wine California.

Perceptions of gastronomy’s cultural value have changed radically since the Slow Food international movement was founded in the late 1980s in Piedmont, Italy as a champion of traditional foodways threatened by Italy’s growing appetite for fast-food. As a wide-eyed undergraduate student in Italy on my junior year abroad in 1987, I was keenly aware of the controversy sparked by the newly opened McDonald’s at the foot of Rome’s Spanish Steps. It was that year that I first heard the name Carlo Petrini, the essayist and political activist who had founded Slow Food the previous year. In 1989 he would publish the Slow Food Manifesto, a battle cry for an emerging generation of Europeans who saw their culinary traditions being eclipsed by the march of industrialism and the growing popularity of Coca Cola and assembly-line pseudo-sustenance.

“Speed became our shackles,” he wrote. “We fell prey to the same virus: ‘The fast life’ that fractures our customs and assails us even in our own homes, forcing us to ingest ‘fast-food’… In the name of productivity, the ‘fast life’ has changed our lifestyle and now threatens our environment and our land (and city) scapes [sic]. Slow Food is the alternative, the avant-garde’s riposte.

(Click here for the complete manifesto and click here for a Slow Food timeline.)

Borrowing from the fencer’s lexicon (with his “riposte,” the sport’s return thrust, made after parrying a lunge), he underlined the urgency of his cause and mission.

Click here to continue reading my post today for the Slow Wine California blog…

What a revelation for me to tour and taste through Skyline Ridge in the Santa Cruz Mountains yesterday!

So much of California wine is known for its manicured character. But up on the ridge that looks down to the east on Silicon Valley and to the west out to the Pacific Ocean (about 15 miles away), the landscape is wild and untamed.

It blew me away to find such robust mountain viticulture here. It certainly wasn’t what I was expecting.

It was also really interesting to see the San Andreas fault here and learn how the collision of the tectonic plates brought ancient marine bed to the surface.

I’m spending the next few days between Sonoma and Napa working on a new project that I am really exited about. It’s a little too early to reveal it yet but stay tuned.

Thanks to everyone who tasted with me and showed me around yesterday. There is a soulfulness to the place and the people here and it definitely comes through in the wines.

That’s all I have time for today. Now it’s time to hit the road again, taste, and tread through some more vineyards…

Last week, over the course of 24 hours on the ground in Southern California (my dolce natio loco), it felt like I spanned the extremes of viticulture there.

On Tuesday evening, I tasted some of the extraordinary Santa Barbara-grown wines of Scott Sampler, a show business veteran who has been buying and bottling fruit since the 2012 vintage there under the Central Coast Group Project label.

On Wednesday afternoon, I toured vineyards in Valley Center (not far from where I grew up in San Diego) with winemaker and grape grower Chris Broomell whose family has been farming there for five generations.

Chris’ family started growing grapes, he said, in the era after the Second World War when ongoing drought made viticulture more lucrative.

Scott abandoned a robust career in entertainment to become a full-time winemaker.

Chris vinifies delicious, moreish, and highly affordable monovarietal wines for his family’s Triple B Ranches winery. I especially loved his gorgeous Vermentino.

Scott employs extended maceration times to make brilliant, jaw-droppingly beautiful expressions of Rhône Valley grape varieties that cost more than I can afford and sell out as soon as he releases them. I was blown away by his 2013 Grenache, Mourvèdre, and Syrah blend below and its ballerino’s balance despite its muscular alcohol.

Meeting and tasting with both winemakers was an exhilarating and eye-opening experience for me. In part because they each represent distinct and powerful voices in the new wave of California winemaking and in part because they share a vision of transparency in winemaking. And by transparency, I mean clarity and sincerity of fruit in their wines.

Chris and I talked a lot about the historic disconnect between California grape growers and winemakers. California is a great place to grow fine wine grapes, he explained (and we all know this to be true), but until the current generation, Californian winemakers have focused more on their work in the cellar than in the vineyards. When he returned from a year working in vineyards and wineries in Australia early on in his career, he said, he was nonplussed by the way California winemakers interpreted the fruit delivered to their cellar doors by local farmers.

Similarly, Scott seems to belong to a growing number of California winemakers who see their role as custodians or guardians of their fruit. He works with growers who deliver superb grapes to his cellar door and like Renaissance master Pietro Bembo meticulously transcribing the idiograph Italian poems of Petrarch, he appears (at least to me) more as a protector and defender of the berries than their interpreter or manipulator.

Both winemakers have looked abroad for inspiration. And both are making delicious and — in my view — thought-provoking wines, both for their historical perspective and their wholesome deliciousness.

And both of them have me thinking big thoughts. I’ll have a lot more California on my mind this month and the months to follow. Thanks fo reading and stay tuned…