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We remember when New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc was new and exciting. It was vibrant and pure. Drinking it was like ringing a bell. In time, too many became predictable and boring. They became paint-by-numbers wines — pleasant enough, but they could have been created in an AI lab if AI could create wine (hmmmm). But a few weeks ago, we went to a portfolio tasting of Vintus New York, an offshoot of the 20-year-old importer and wholesaler of family-owned, conscientiously made wineries around the world. There were hundreds of wines, so we split up, as usual. At some point, Dottie came over, grabbed John and said, “You have to taste this New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc.” John was skeptical, but, hey, we’ve been married 50 years so off he went.

A few days after our dinner at Melba’s, we reached out to Deneen Brown, CEO of Brown Estate, to talk about the House of Brown range and what looks to us like smart ways to reach a new generation of wine drinkers while retaining longtime fans.

Beaujolais is a great year-round wine. It’s excellent with a wide variety of dishes, from seafood to outdoor grilling to hearty stews. And, of course, for one day in November, Beaujolais Nouveau is a great excuse for a harvest party. So, like Meryl Streep, it can be whatever you want it to be, without ever losing its own character. But we especially associate Beaujolais with fall, maybe because its life and vibrancy remind us of the changing colors of leaves and beautiful weather.

The modern California sparkling wine industry is very young. Jack and Jamie Davies were among the pioneers when they founded Schramsberg in Napa Valley in 1965. In 1973, Moët & Chandon founded Domaine Chandon in Napa and it was such a big deal that we had a sparkling-only dinner at its onsite restaurant in Yountville on our honeymoon in 1979. Chandon led a surge of interest among foreign companies to make bubbly in the U.S. Considering that sparkling wine has been made in Champagne for hundreds of years, the development of Méthode Champenoise wines in the U.S. has happened in the blink of an eye.

Hope Goldie, whose chemist father made wine at home in Washington, studied enology and food science at UC-Davis and worked at Opus One, Stags’ Leap and Rutherford Hill Winery before joining Darioush in 2005. She has held various winemaking jobs there, from enologist to assistant winemaker to director of winemaking and, now, vice president of winemaking. John met her earlier this year during the Wine Writers’ Symposium at Meadowood Napa Valley. She is charming, funny and deeply knowledgeable, so we were eager to catch up and ask her some questions, including the simplest: Why Viognier? While it’s widely planted around the world, especially in the Rhône Valley, where it’s especially famous in Condrieu, it’s fairly unusual in the U.S. and even more unusual in Napa Valley, especially as a stand-alone varietal. In 2023, there were 2,555 acres of Viognier in California and 88,063 acres of Chardonnay, according to the California Grape Acreage Report. And last year, the report noted, there were only 117 acres of Viognier in Napa compared to 22,945 of Cabernet Sauvignon.

“Diversity, equity and inclusivity. I hate those words together. That’s a program, that’s a seminar for 30 minutes you get from your corporation,” said Ikimi Dubose-Woodson, 42. She’s executive director of The Roots Fund, TRF, a nonprofit whose mission is to help Black, indigenous and people of color and other underrepresented people enter or rise in the wine industry, and soon, the spirits industry. It provides financial support, wine and business education, mentoring and job placement. “I want to work with people who want to work, not have meetings, and I want to do real work and create real change and that’s the only thing I want to talk about. While I’m doing this for my people, the education and awareness piece is for everyone.”

We had a wine the other night that we rated Yech. This is special. When we began taking notes on wines 50 years ago, we created a very personal, and simple, informal rating system. It ranged from Yech to Delicious! In-between were OK, Good, Very Good and Delicious.

Over time, we’d guess the chart of our wines would look like a snake that swallowed something large: Most wines fit in the middle. From time to time, we have a wine that we find Delicious. Of all the wines we taste, just three or four each year rate Delicious! That means the wine didn’t just taste great and was beautifully made and seemed intentional, but that we found it genuinely exciting. 

At wineries, parents and their offspring who have joined them in the business can have fraught relationships. And sometimes their disagreements are elemental: They are about grapes, nature. We have no way of proving this, but it seems to us that more generations are leaving their wineries, or the winemaking, to their daughters, and that creates a particular kind of dynamic. (We have two daughters, so we know something about this.) 

A vitis vinifera, Cabernet Franc is one of the world’s great grapes, of course, a fundamental building block of great Bordeaux and Bordeaux blends around the world. It’s the standout red grape in the Loire region of France, used to make stunning Chinon. We've been fans of Cab Franc from Long Island, N.Y., for many years and have had some outstanding examples from California.

We’ve been drinking wines from Alsace for decades and have especially enjoyed those from Domaine Paul Blanck in Kientzheim. So it was wonderful to finally meet Philippe Blanck, who runs the business now with his cousin Frédéric.