Wine Spectator April 30, 2017

Visit www.winespectator.com/043017 to find links to all of the following resources. Free resources for all our WineSpectator.com readers: SPRING ENTERTAINING Celebrate the change of seasons and the holidays with fresh new recipes from some of the country’s best chefs. Whether you’re celebrating Passover, Easter, a birthday or an anniversary, we’ll make it easy, with meals just right for milder weather and our editors’ picks of highly rated wines. EDITORS’ BLOGS Join the discussion as Wine Spectator senior editors plus our team of news and features writers blog about hot topics in current events and wine culture, their latest wine finds, dining discoveries, notes from their travels, conversations with people in the wine business and more. PRIVATE GUIDE TO DINING Our twice-monthly, free e-mail newsletter spotlights the best restaurants for wine lovers, from bucket-list destinations…

Italian wines have had a strong run in recent years. Traditional regions have improved, while emerging regions are creating new excitement. This issue covers a broad range of Italy’s best, with tasting reports focused on Piedmont in the north and Umbria in the central part of the country. Our cover story focuses on a dynamic family that is having success in three major regions: Veneto, Bolgh-eri and Brunello di Montalcino. The Allegrini family has deep roots in the vine-yards that surround Verona, in north-central Italy. But when siblings Marilisa, Walter and Franco took over the company after the death of their father, in 1983, both the winery and the region were in dire straits. Marilisa took on the daunting task of selling Al-legrini wines in the United States. She quickly dis-covered that Americans…

Full Marks For the Finger Lakes As a Vermont home wine-maker since 1978, I’ve had the pleasure of acquiring Riesling, Gewürtztraminer and other grapes from Keuka and Seneca vineyards in the Finger Lakes. This beautiful fruit has led to numerous awards in national amateur winemaking competitions, so I was particularly delighted to read James Molesworth’s arti-cle “Finger Lakes Passes An-other Test in 2015” (Wine Focus, Jan. 31 – Feb. 28). I hope that such publicity will increase the recognition and availability of commer-cial Finger Lakes wines that they so richly merit. Gordon Gribble Norwich, Vt. It Was a Very Good Year Loved your [40th anniver-sary] issue (Nov. 15, 2016), and read it cover to cover. I will keep the “First Issue” insert. Fascinating. Found it interesting that you started in 1976, the year the American wines beat…

After more than five years of un-relenting drought, a series of storms drenched Northern Cali-fornia this winter. That’s wel-come news for the wine industry, as heavy rain and snow helped ameliorate the state’s water deficit. But no one’s cheer-ing too loudly yet. Large parts of California remain in a drought. “We are off to an incredible start,” said Eric Jensen of Booker in Paso Robles, one of the wine regions hit hardest by the drought, speaking in late January. “While it hasn’t taken us off the severe-drought list yet, I am giddy like a kid at Christmas that we have obtained these totals.” According to U.S. Drought Monitor, a partnership between the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and federal agencies, nearly 50 percent of California, including Napa, Sonoma…

Fires ravaged Chile’s Central Valley for several weeks in January and February, and more than 100 vineyards in the Maule and Colchagua regions were damaged or destroyed in the blazes. President Michelle Bachelet declared a state of emergency on Jan. 20, calling the fires some of the worst in the nation’s history. The blazes ragedfor another two weeks before she declared them contained. At press time, 11 people were dead, mostly firefighters, 1,500 homes had been destroyed and more than 1.4 million acres burned, according to CONAF, Chile’s National Forest Corporation. “Smoke has covered the sky every day, and ash is falling like snowflakes,” Sven Bruch-feld of Viña Polkura in Colchagua told Wine Spectator during the fires. The fires were scattered up and down the vast Central Valley, south of Santiago. The…

New Life For Cameron Hughes Wines Cameron Hughes Wine Inc. has a new owner, saving the négociant firm from bankruptcy. Vintage Wine Estates purchased the company as part of a court settlement in January. The Santa Rosa, Calif., firm emerged as the winner in a blind auction, agreeing to pay $5.5 million. The proceeds will largely go to creditors. Founder Cameron Hughes became a prominent name in the California wine industry during the global wine glut of the past decade. Recognizing that even premium producers had excess wine, his company bought juice, blended and repackaged it under its own label, and sold it in limited-series “lots.” A deal with Costco put the wines in front of a loyal customer base. But when the excess wine dried up, so did Hughes’ business, despite…