Mendocino lies just to the North of Napa and Sonoma. It’s wine history dates back to the 1860’s, when immigrants to the area planted the first vines. Most of the wine produced in Mendocino was consumed only by the locals, and the isolated nature of the area due to mountains prevented a great deal of [...]
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Sonoma Valley AVA
Sonoma valley is a thin 25 mile long stretch that runs acorss the middle of the southern half of Sonoma county. It’s bordered on the east by the Mayacamas mountain range, which separates it from Napa. This part of Sonoma benefits from the cooling influences of the San Pablo Bay, much like Napa. [...]
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In the 1990’s, some growers began to support the idea of dividing the valley floor of Napa up into several sub-AVA’s, which would be named after the towns of the area, much like Bourdeaux’s appellations. The effort to create these AVA’s was never fully completed because the phylloxera outbreak became too demading on wine makers, [...]
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The Napa Valley is the name of a county, but it is also a general AVA that contains many smaller AVA’s within itself. The area is only 30 square miles, and it has about 250 wineries. The Napa Valley soil consists of a complex range of different sedimentary soils, caused by repeated flooding of an [...]
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As I discussed briefly before, one of UC Davis’s earliest contributions to California wine was the heat summation map. The system is based on the number of “degree-days” in a given area. Degree-days are determined by mutiplying a month’s average temperature above 50 by the number of days in the month, times 7 (April through [...]
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California is considered to have a mostly mediterranean climate, with only two seasons. The wine regions of California, however, are a bit different from the rest of the state, due to the many microclimates created by the series of mountain ranges running up and down the coast. These mountains interact with cool breezes and fogs [...]
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The American Viticultural Area (AVA) system was introduced in the United States in 1978. Unlike the French AOC system, which is designed to indicate quality, the AVA’s only purpose, according to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firemars (BATF) was to establish, “a delimited grape growing region distinguished by geographic features, the boundaries of which [...]
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Today, the University of California at Davis is one of the most influential institutions studying wine making. People from all over the world now come there to study, and California owes a lot of its success to the program. The history of UC Davis dates back to the 1930’s, when Maynard Amerine and Albert Winkler [...]
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In the 1950’s Ernest & Julio Gallo became the top producer of wine. Much to their embarrassment today, their success was largely based on a product designed to target the so called “misery market,” a cheap fortified wine called Thunderbird. Thunderbird was apparently developed as a result of market research that showed that homeless men [...]
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The biggest thing to happen to wine in the early 20th century was Prohibition, in the 1920’s. While Prohibition made the sale or use of alcohol illegal, there were a few loopholes, which often led to hilarious business ventures. Wine was allowed to be grown for sacramental and “medicinal” purposes, and home wine making on [...]
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