About Wine, Featured, Winery tours / 03.04.2017

At Pat The Wine Guy, one of our mantras is “wine you can find”.  We’ll always focus on wines that are available where you shop. Thus, during our “PTWG Spring Break Northern California Winery Tour” (that’s a t-shirt just waiting to be printed),  we visited wineries that make wine you can find in the Portland-metro area. Our final tour stop, Ridge, was a slight exception. Ridge wines aren’t on every shelf around town. Those that are might be slightly above our $15-$30 sweet spot. We stopped at Ridge anyway. And we’re glad we did. Timing...

About Wine, Featured / 29.03.2017

As our PTWG spring break tour winds its way north out of Healdsburg, up Dry Creek Valley Road, past mom-and-pop "we're blending juice in our barn" set-ups,  all of a sudden,  boom!  Statement winery on the left! The Ferrari Carano estate, Villa Fiore, is a little bit of Italy plopped down in Northern Sonoma County.  No, make that a BIG bit of Italy.  A 25-thousand square foot Tuscan-style villa surrounded by five acres of meticulously-landscaped grounds and gardens.  Not a blade of grass out of place.  They say they...

About Wine, Featured / 28.03.2017

So many wineries, so little time.   That's the dilemma as we storm through Sonoma County on our northern California spring break tour.  Speaking of storms, just as we settled in at our next stop, the rains began, intensified and refused to let up.  We left Portland for this? No, we left Portland for this: Sonoma Cutrer. When we mapped out wineries for this tour, we had two requirements:  The wineries had to produce wine that you can find on retail shelves in Portland.  And the wine had to be...