Although my observation is that the risk of cork taint in wine has been reduced over the past couple of decades, it does still exist, and some even maintain that it is an increasing problem, affecting up to 5 percent of wines. Cork taint is the result of a chemical compound that can occur in the bark of cork trees (a type of oak grown in Spain and Portugal) 2,4,6-Trichloroanisole or TCA, which produces a musty, moldy odor that people are sensitive to in varying degrees. Although harmless to health, it is a fault that negatively impacts the enjoyment of a wine. Whether because of this risk or other factors such as cost or convenience, some producers have turned to other ways to close their wine bottles. These include corks that are made from bark that has been ground up, processed to eliminate TCA, and reconstituted as corks; synthetic stoppers manufactured to look and feel as much as possible like natural cork; ever-increasingly popular screw caps; rarely-seen glass stoppers; and plastic plugs. Plastic plugs are my absolute least favorite solution. They are hard to extract, hard to reinsert, and regardless of what the plastics industry continues to assert, nearly impossible to recycle.
An American Viticultural Area, or AVA, is an American wine-growing region classification system inspired by the French Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée, or AOC, but without the French rigor. An AVA simply defines a geographic area, and omits grape varieties, maximum production per acre, alcohol levels, etc. The requirements for wine with an AVA designation is that 85 percent of the grapes used must be grown there, and the wine be fully finished within the state or one of the states in which the AVA is located. AVAs range in size from several hundred acres to several million; some reside within other larger AVAs.
Nancy Tenuta is one of only six female winery owners in the 
Nancy Tenuta graduated from Portland State University in 1981, and spent the next twenty years in the business world. She held a number of sales positions, and in the 1990s she traded stocks. Ron Tenuta was general manager of Protection Services Industries in Livermore, which specializes in commercial security.
An American Viticultural Area, or AVA, is an American wine-growing region classification system inspired by the French Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée, or AOC, but without the French rigor. An AVA simply defines a geographic area, and omits grape varieties, maximum production per acre, alcohol levels, etc. The requirements for wine with an AVA designation is that 85 percent of the grapes used must be grown there, and the wine be fully finished within the state (or one of the states) in which the AVA is located. AVAs range in size from several hundred acres to several million; some reside within other larger AVAs.
In the early 1970s, Joe Phelps started looking for a place to make a little wine. After a stint in the Navy, he’d grown his father’s Greeley, Colorado-based construction business into a multi-state powerhouse, expanding to northern California in the mid-1960s to work on bridge and dam projects and the infrastructure for BART. As a hobby, he did some home winemaking in Greeley using grapes shipped by air overnight from Napa. After landing the contract to build the Souverain Winery, the idea of starting his own winery took hold.
Located 20 miles inland from the Pacific Ocean halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco, 
A fifth-generation farmer, Vijay Reddy came to the U.S. in 1971 to pursue a graduate degree in soil and plant science, and obtained a doctorate in 1975 from Colorado State University. Along with his wife Subada, Dr. Reddy established and ran a soil consulting laboratory for 20 years while also farming cotton, peanuts, and various other produce in the high plains of west Texas near Lubbock (Reddy is a fifth-generation farmer).
True Ports (now often referred to as Portos) hail from the 
They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and it’s a maxim Sosie Wines lives by. “Sosie” [so-zee] is French for twin or doppelganger, and as it says right on the bottle, “We are inspired by the wines of France. So we employ an Old World approach to wine growing that favors restraint over ripeness, finesse over flamboyance. Our aim is to craft wines that show a kinship with France’s benchmark regions. Wines that are their sosie.”
those bottles and the crossed-keys of the papal crest. It was a symbol you could trust, my mom used to say. I never forgot that, and as a young adult one of the first places I had to visit in France was Chateauneuf. To this day I still love those wines.”
First, let’s talk about brandy vs. Cognac. Brandy is a liquor distilled from grape wine and aged in wood. (Brandy can be made from fruits other than grapes as well, but that’s a story for another time.) Cognac is brandy that specifically comes from the town of Cognac and the delimited surrounding areas in western France. (The one which has the most favorable soil and geographical conditions is Grande Champagne.) So, all Cognacs are brandy, but not all brandies are Cognac. For more detail on Cognac, click 
Chuck Hope and his wife Marilyn came to 
In 1947, Dr. Lewis Gibbs Carpenter Jr., a farmer and psychologist, moved to Saint Helena from Gilroy and bought land on the Napa Valley floor. He began to work the property by growing walnuts, dates, and a small selection of grapes in the 1950s. Over the next twenty years, he replaced most of the nut and fruit orchards with several Bordeaux varietals of grapes, including Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, Sauvignon Blanc, and Merlot, all of which were beginning to gain international attention following the 
Dr. Lewis Gibbs Carpenter Jr.
Craig Handly
Spencer Handly
True Ports hail from the 