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We began to enjoy the taste of wine soon after we met in 1973, but we began to love wine when we discovered its stories. Hugh Johnson’s “The World Atlas of Wine” gave it geographical context. Even more important to us was Leon D. Adams’s “The Wines of America,” which felt like a guided tour of people and history, like this section on Michigan:

“Two more wineries in Paw Paw offer tours and tasting. Next door to Warner on Kalamazoo Street is the million-gallon St. Julian cellar, with a handsome tasting room built since a fire destroyed part of the building in 1971. Mariano Meconi started this winery in 1921 at Windsor, Ontario, as the Italian Wine Company, moved it at Repeal to Detroit, and five years later brought most of its equipment to Paw Paw.” 

Wine is about history, geography and people. Rarely has a book combined the three more powerfully than “The Wines of California” by Elaine Chukan Brown, from Academie du Vin Library ($44.95 at amazon.com and the publisher). And this book brings something additional, something different, as Brown explains:

“In looking at the state’s wine history within a larger context, I have tried to demonstrate the connections between its successes and pivotal challenges, its triumphs and the costs that came from them. This includes acknowledging that its history of winegrowing has depended on the labor of people of color. Other histories on the wine industry have tended to overlook or erase this reality. By incorporating this important part of wine’s development, we can better understand the history of California and perhaps also what solutions for today’s labor issues might be possible.”

The book doesn’t only discuss every wine region of the state in depth, but, in many capsule introductions, includes the first peoples. 

Santa Barbara County.

Known for: Pinot Noir, Sideways.

Lesser-known strength: homes to Charlie Chaplin, Oprah Winfrey, and Ronald Reagan.

Leader in: savory Chardonnay, Santa Maria BBQ, pinquito beans.

First peoples: Michumash.

Consider the elegance there of combining humor and education, history and current affairs. That’s a good example of the whole book.

Brown is a highly regarded speaker, writer and educator whom we have known for several years. Brown and Dottie serve on the board of the Wine Writers Symposium at Meadowood, which is sponsored by the Napa Valley Vintners trade organization and Meadowood Napa Valley. At the Symposium in 2023, for a panel called Writing Across Styles, John interviewed Brown about a 793-word masterpiece Brown had written for Wine & Spirits called “Caribou Bones and Burgundy.” Brown is Indigenous – Inupiaq and Unangan-Sugpiaq – from what is now Alaska. As John spoke with Brown about the creation of that article, Brown explained that it really was all about their family and started to cry. Then John started to cry – and then everyone in the whole room cried.

(Elaine Chukan Brown, Dottie, and sommelier, Miguel de Leon)

The book is dedicated to Brown’s daughter, Ellaita, and “For Dottie, who did it first.” So we would not pretend for a minute that what you are reading here is objective. But it is true. 

This book is core, essential. For anyone just beginning their journey, this will put wine in context in straightforward language with little jargon. For example: Cabernet Sauvignon’s “move into the steep slopes and mountain ridges of the state brought recognition of mountain tannins. While there are high elevation Cabernet vineyards elsewhere in the world, nowhere else is there a high enough concentration of them to create the notion of a mountain Cabernet.”

Like Karen MacNeil’s “The Wine Bible” and Jancis Robinson’s “The Oxford Companion to Wine,” this book needs to be on the shelf as a reference.  For those who want more structured learning about wine, there’s Kevin Zraly’s “Windows on the World Complete Wine Course,” which celebrated its 35th anniversary edition in 2020.

Those of us far along on our journeys will find all sorts of interesting material, too. We thought an American Viticultural Area was primarily a defined geographical place of origin. Turns out it’s more than that: “The Mendocino Ridge AVA only takes in vines grown at 1,200 feet (366 meters) and...

Lamberto Frescobaldi thinks long term – really, really long term. He is the 30^th generation of one of Italy’s most storied winemakers, with prominent family roots going back more than 700 years in many endeavors -- economic, political, cultural. So when Frescobaldi, president of his family’s company, Marchesi de' Frescobaldi, plants its first flag in the U.S. – specifically, at a small winery in Oregon – it’s worth taking special note. Why did he do this? And why not Napa?

We’ve all had those moments during our wine journeys. Whether we’re new to wine or ...

When we invented Open That Bottle Night in 1999, to persuade people to finally uncork the wine they’ve been saving forever for a special occasion, we had no idea we’d create a worldwide community. Every year, OTBN, on the last Saturday of February, is wonderful. But this year touched people more deeply. For whatever reason, wine lovers truly embraced the concept: There’s no better day than today to celebrate.

We had a rosé we enjoyed very much recently that costs around $12 a liter and in some places even less. It was so good that we reached out to the winemaker to ask how he could make such a nice wine for that price. His answer was charming, much like the wine.

Rosé is easy – and hard. Clearly, it’s easy to pump out oceans of OK rosé, since there are so many on shelves. But making a good rosé – a wine with character, a beverage that earns the right to be called wine – is another matter.

Some rosé is excellent.  Some is really bad. Most, to us, exist in a kind of in-between zone. We have been tasting rosés for months to prepare this column and our notes on some will show you what we mean:

“Perfectly OK and tongue-wetting, but there is not much to it. It’s kind of meh.”

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MacNeil’s Wine Bible is the best-selling wine book in the U.S., with almost a million copies sold, and since its first edition, we have recommended it as a great gift for the wine lover in your life, and we do so again. 

Over the years, we have read quite a bit about how wine palates change. The conventional wisdom is that people tend to start with sweeter wines, then move to dryer wines and then move to more elegant, softer wines. The cliché then was that your parents liked Bordeaux while your grandparents preferred Burgundy.

We were at a small wine shop, looking for a nice end-of-summer white. We spotted the bottle at the same time and both said, “Awwww.” It was Menetou-Salon, a Sauvignon Blanc from the Loire Valley of France, which we don’t see that often. When we do, we think of Windows on the World in New York’s World Trade Center, where we first tasted it decades before terrorists brought down the twin towers on Sept. 11, 2001, killing almost 3,000 people. We recalled that first bottle when we had another Menetou-Salon at a French restaurant in St. Maarten during a cruise in 2006 and toasted our dear wine-loving friend Cathy, who we lost in that devastating attack 21 years ago. 

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We were at a large tasting hosted by the Association of African American Vintners in Oakland a few months ago when John sampled a Grenache Blanc, a variety we generally consider more solid than exciting. This was an exception. It had a combination of generous fruit, tropical life and an earthy roundness that made it complex and delicious. When John said all of this, the man who poured it smiled and said: “That’s good to hear because otherwise I wasted a whole lot of money on terra cotta pots.”

John rushed to get Dottie to taste the wine. Then we vowed we’d find out more about this man and his wine.

The man is Raymond Smith, owner of Indigené Cellars, with a winery in Carmel Valley and a tasting room in Paso Robles. It turns out he has a story quite unlike any other we’ve heard over the years, featuring bottling lines, the value of mentors and even a soul food supper club for at-risk youth in San Francisco.

And many amphoras.

Amphoras are ancient, but also a little bit of a trend in local winemaking. Famed Napa Valley winery Dalla Valle Vineyards has used some since 2018. In a recent press release, winemaker Maya Dalla Valle said the use of amphora “adds to the complexity of the wine without introducing higher quantities of new oak to overpower the fruit and nuances it contains.”

Smith, who is 59, studied journalism in college, but he found a job at a large winery in Paso Robles. “I learned all about bottling and barrel work, like the mid-part of winemaking,” he told us when we called.

A few years later, someone contacted him about helping to start a mobile bottling operation. “So we got this business up and running,” Smith said. “These guys were the money part and I was the sweat equity part, the guy who had the knowhow. It changed my perspective of winemaking from learning from one guy to learning from 400 guys because I was traveling all over California and meeting new people and learning about new ways of blending wines, new ways of making wines.”

As a result, Smith speaks with intimacy about multiple regions of California in a way we’ve rarely heard.

In a short time, Smith bought the bottling business. That’s when his education really took off. He told us he always had mentors, winemakers who were eager to discuss everything with him. Many had one thing in common: “I always for some reason was hooked up with some crusty old Italian guy. I always met Italian varietal makers for some reason and kind of stayed close to them and these were guys who I had a deep relationship with.”

We think his secret was that he listened. As he put it: “I had no problem ever saying I didn’t know and once I did that they had information for me every time I showed up.”

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We hopped the M10 to attend a tasting in Harlem recently. We had no idea the bus would transport us to a different time. We were on our way to sample wines from Chile. Among the wineries represented, one named Santa Rosa de Lavaderos, from the Maule Valley in central Chile, was offering a vertical – 2018, 2020, 2022 – of its País. País? We rushed over.