Food & Wine September 2021

2018 LAIL VINEYARDS BLUEPRINT CABERNET SAUVIGNON ($80) I visited Robin Lail on Napa Valley’s Howell Mountain on my first trip back to wine country earlier this year. Her late father, John Daniel Jr., was a Napa legend, and undoubtedly he would have been proud if he’d ever had the opportunity to taste this dark-fruited, elegant, aromatic red. 2018 TABLAS CREEK ESPRIT DE TABLAS BLANC ($45) Our Food & Wine Classic in Aspen is happening in September this year, and for my seminar on “green” wines—organic, biodynamic, sustainable, and so on—I’m pouring this chiseled, complex white from one of the only Regenerative Organic Certified wineries in the U.S., the Paso Robles area’s Tablas Creek. TAYLOR FLADGATE CHIP DRY & TONIC ($18 FOR FOUR CANS) I’ve long been a fan of white port and tonic, the spritz-like…

Happy Place GREETINGS FROM Northern California wine country. Back home, elementary school starts in a few weeks, but that busyness feels distant on the horizon. For now, we’ll take the golden light glimmering off the Sonoma headlands. Mornings are for pool swims and evenings for epic games of tile rummy. At the table unfurl simple menus: salt-and-pepper chicken wings grilled over charcoal, grilled oysters from Tomales Bay, big skillets of buttery, garlicky shrimp. We open local wines like Robert Sinskey’s copper-hued 2016 Orgia or Donkey & Goat’s The Gadabout, a barely effervescent, modern nod-and-wink to classic California Chardonnay. Three hundred miles south of where I am, winemakers Mireia Taribó and Tara Gomez are also redefining our ideas of classic California wine. F&W joins them for a harvest dinner (“California Dreamin’,” p. 76) in…

STEPHANIE SUMMERSON HALL grew up treasure-hunting with her grandmother Estelle at antiques stores and yard sales in small towns around Charleston, South Carolina. When her grandmother passed away, Summerson Hall inherited a few pieces of colored glassware and quickly realized the only places she could find similar pieces were on the secondhand market. “It was like a light bulb moment,” she says. That epiphany prompted Summerson Hall, a serial entrepreneur, to partner with a 100-year-old heritage company in Poland and launch Estelle Colored Glass in 2019. For Summerson Hall, the high-quality colored glass pieces, in modern silhouettes, are worthy of displaying as well as enjoying at the table. When Estelle Colored Glass first started, the company offered stemless and stemmed wineglasses, as well as Champagne coupes in seven colors. Today, the…

I FIRST DISCOVERED Vintner’s Daughter Active Botanical Serum in a moment of private despair during the pandemic, when it seemed there was nothing left to do but order things online and wait for them to arrive. I had a new baby, and the world had shut down; I was thoroughly exhausted. And so, despite my usual sensible devotion to the drugstore beauty aisle, and my underlying embarrassment for wanting to believe that a single product could actually change my life, I went for it—and promptly fell in love. Vintner’s Daughter, helmed by April Gargiulo (who hails from a family of fine California winemakers), was established on the principle that a hardworking beauty product could be nursed to life in the old ways of wine-making, through quality natural ingredients and time. The…

SOMEWHERE BETWEEN VINEGAR, wine, and sparkling grape juice sits verjus, a product made by pressing unripe wine grapes harvested early in the growing season. The journey from vineyard to bottle is short and sweet. (Unlike vinegar or wine, there’s no fermentation.) But in verjus’ simplicity lies boundless potential for nonalcoholic cocktails, marinades, vinaigrettes, and deglazers. Lately, some of our favorite winemakers have been giving verjus the same level of attention and care that they show their wines. The result? Five top-shelf bottles destined for your pantry. SCRIBE VERJUS OF PINOT NOIR After fielding years of questions about the salad dressing served at Scribe winery’s hacienda in Sonoma, chef Kelly Mariani dished on the recipe: ⅓ cup verjus; ½ shallot, diced; olive oil; salt; and white wine vinegar. Mariani loves the tart flavor…

BY THE TIME he was 28 years old, Chris Christensen had been through two careers: For one, he sat in a cubicle working in banking during the 2008 financial crisis; the other involved clocking in at six in the morning to test samples from 150 tanks of wine for sulfur and sugar content. The former was absolutely untenable. “I thought I should use my degree in data sciences like a good Stanford grad,” he says, laughing. Fast forward to today, and Christensen has put the past 11 years into making Muscat, Syrah, and, notably, under the label Bodkin, the first American sparkling Sauvignon Blanc in Sonoma County. Formative stints spent learning the ins and outs of winemaking as an intern at Sonoma’s Gallo winery and, later, at Meeker and Armida wineries in…