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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.

We were at the Association of African American Vintners’ 20th anniversary celebration in Oakland, Napa and Sonoma. Twenty years ago, three vintners – Edward Lee “Mac” McDonald, Vance Sharp and Dr. Ernest Bates – came together as the first members of an audacious undertaking, an association of Black winemakers. Audacious because at the time, Black faces were rare throughout the global wine industry. Although the number of Black people in the wine world is growing, from vineyard workers to those who make it and who sell it, of the more than 11,000 wineries in the U.S., fewer than one percent are owned by Black people or have a Black winemaker.