Mark's Wine Blog

Since I began writing this blog I’ve enjoyed passing on the stories of wineries that we’ve visited and the people that make the wine happen at those wineries. Although it’s great that we’re now permitting and shipping wine, one of the off-shoots of that is that we can no longer be quite as free with sharing stories about wineries that we visit, until we have purchased wine from them for our wine clubs and online wine store.

Most of the time you’ll hear about the wines and stories about people involved in the wineries after the wine has been delivered to our club members and the small amount of extra wine has either been re-ordered by those same club members, or the bottles have been placed for sale on our store.

In some rare cases where we find what we consider to be a perfect fit in so far as a winery is producing outstanding world class wine and they are the type of people we’d love to do business with over the long term, we’ll make sure we have an adequate supply for our clubs and the store moving forward.

One of these wineries that we consider such a partner is Stolpman Vineyards, based in Los Olivos, California.

We met with Peter Stolpman and had a very enjoyable afternoon with both a tasting session in their Los Olivos tasting room and an eventful trip to the vineyard which including taking a short time out from the (very serious lol) business of wine to do a little off-roading. You can see the brief video below, car makes and models have been left off to protect the innocent (ie warranty), but the ground cover had grown at least six inches higher then usual because of the unusually wet weather we’ve experienced of late in California.

I’ll fill in the details tomorrow with why we enjoy Stolpman so much as we have an affection for their wine and their socially conscious winery operations, but generally speaking this is how I expect the blog to be set up in the future.

As many of you know and I’ve mentioned before I live in San Diego. Over the past 5-6 days my little section of inland north county has been gripped by the story of Chelsea King, a missing 17 year old student from Poway High School who was discovered in a shallow grave after being assaulted and killed late last week.

It’s a story that hits peculiarly close to home given that my wife and I have walked, hiked and jogged on the exact trail that she was (presumably) killed on last Thursday. It’s an exceedingly safe area that we’ve been surprised, in the past at the amount of people you see walking, jogging and biking on in the afternoons.

This wasn’t a kid doing something she shouldn’t have been doing, she was simply going for a jog to stay in shape and as a cross country runner in high school she must have done this literally hundreds of times before.

It’s hard to deal with, given I haven’t been blessed with my own children yet, but I have friends and family with young children and this has brought up a ton of concerns for me and our local community. In many ways it has made people feel incredibly unsafe in an area that they should feel anything but unsafe. It also is hard to see close friends and family friends be among the adults tasked with helping to pick up the pieces at her high school, despite needing to deal with their own grief. I hope everyone can appreciate the difficulty of the tasks being asked of the principal, counselors, teachers and the athletic trainer who knew her well. The candlelight vigil was held at the church that my wife and I have both regularly attended for some time both as children and adults.

I hope we’re able to bring some type of change from this event to make it less likely in the future. It appears that the person being charged with the crime, literally as I write, is a convicted sex offender that could have been in jail for 30 years, but the judge gave him an 11 year sentence and he was out in 5 on good behavior despite the psychologists recommendation that he stay in custody. Clearly something went wrong when the offender would still have been in jail serving his 11 year sentence if he were not released early. Additionally, why given Meghan’s Law in the state of California are sex offenders able to list only a primary address even if they live multiple places? In this case he listed his Lake Elsinore address (about an hour’s drive north) but did not list his parents address which would have been ineligible based on being 1,000 feet or so away from a school (the requirement is 2,000 feet).

As of now I hope her family can take some comfort in the outpouring of support that has come from our local community.

I do have hope that something good can come of this terrible tragedy.

Every so often you get a piece, or three of good news. Today the biggest event for Uncorked Ventures was getting a spot from a very good wine blog, see the interview with my business partner at

Blog Wine Cellar

Additionally, I took some time to check our SERPS on Bing (which I’ve frankly never used before today) and found our site at #80 and #91 for a couple of our keywords which is a very good sign since I haven’t taken any time at all to work on improving those. It’s not like those positions are going to bring in business, but they will certainly continue to improve over time and it makes sense to pay attention to them in case Bing is able to cut into Google’s market share over the coming months and years.

Until next time, Cheers!

So I was quite happy a few weeks ago to join the blogging community at Cork’D. Aside from the chance to get to chat about wine with some interesting people within the industry Cork’D is one of the industry leaders at allowing and encouraging wineries and consumers to interact. I think both Matt and I at Uncorked Ventures have plenty to share from our tasting experiences and I look forward to continuing to be a part of the conversation there.

Please check out my first article which features two of my absolute favorite wineries, Copain and Audelssa, as my readers know I don’t believe either of them receives the type of attention and media accolades they deserve.

Mark at Cork’D

The End, Feels a lot like the Beginning

As I sit here on the last work day of this week and also this month of February quite a few things are going on.

To start the Paso Robles Grand Taste event was quite a bit of fun. I met some incredibly interesting people whom I’ll write a short post about each in the coming days and weeks, but it was nice to see a big turn out in San Diego, which isn’t exactly known for its wine.

It great to get some taste some very good wine from places that are familiar like L’Adventure and also to get an unexpected treat when I realized Terry Hoague whom wasn’t on the website list was pouring at the event.

So what’s coming up in March for Uncorked Ventures? We’ll be featured on perhaps the biggest wine radio show in the United States, my columns over at Cork’d will start being printed and the long talked about magazine that I’m writing for, called Metro Citizen should start.

BTW, if you know anyone looking for a unique advertising opportunity while supporting a quality start up, check out MetroCitizen on Twitter for more information and a media kit.

As always please stop by and say hello over at our wine club page.

Hope everyone is having a good start to their Wednesday.

This afternoon I’ll be out at the trade and media event for the Paso Robles Grand Taste here in San Diego. Given the relative lack of quality wine being produced in Southern California (no Santa Barbara and Paso Robles are not Southern California, they are part of the central coast) it’s nice to get such a large scale and high quality event here in town. I’m especially happy to be able to attend today because this is the first event of this nature in San Diego since Matt and I started Uncorked Ventures.

I have a number of wineries on my tasting list, some of them for possible inclusion in one of our upcoming wine club shipments and others simply for my personal enjoyment.

The event features some big names in the Paso Robles wine scene and most of the high profile up and coming wineries will be represented as well which is really nice.

Hopefully I’ll be able to grab some video and interviews while I’m there. The only winery I wish was attending that isn’t (no, I’m not going to say Turley) is Terry Hoague whom is starting to build a nice reputation for himself as a winemaker.

One thing that I think helps to make us all unique is the different places we’ve lived and the experiences that we had in those places. Having been born in Western New York I have been able to experience some of what Syracuse basketball means to the community and additionally have spent some time on campus as a middle schooler at basketball camp, which I have fond memories of.

This comes to mind because Syracuse plays Villanova in mens’s basketball on Saturday night with ‘Cuse having the chance to win their first outright Big East regular season title since 1992. It’s amazing to think it’s been that long given the history of the program and the fact that the years since have included a national title, another title game appearance and 20 wins in all but one season since then. The Big East is certainly the type of college basketball conference I wish we had anywhere on the west coast. At least I can count on great wine out here for my wine clubs.

Saturday night should be an interesting scene at the Carrier Dome with over 30k in attendance.

A quick entry today, to start a rather large event that seems somewhat anticlimactic given processing orders for our 2nd month of shipments as well as writing newsletters etc etc…but Uncorked Ventures now shows up on the first page of Google search results for the term: wine clubs.

It was one of the first terms we targeted and are incredibly happy with the progress, although there is still plenty of room for improvement until we hit #1 and gain the lions share of the search results that come with that ranking.

Also, a funny video from our recent trip to Paso Robles and Los Olivos in SB county.

As you can see we basically ran out of gas at our last appointment. Demetria makes some good wine and the drive in to the winery is certainly worth the trip, but it is tucked into the central coast’s rolling hills pretty good, about 2-3 miles past the main gate even….which is when we realized that we weren’t going to make it to a gas station and needed to ask (embarrassing huh?) for a little gas. More on Demetria and the other outstanding wineries we visited in coming days. The Rhone Rangers certainly are still doing well on the California central coast.

Had a nice day today, well the 90 minute security line in San Diego did not exactly get it off to a good start, but it was nice to get to San Fran, if only to spend two and a half hours in the car getting down to Paso with my Uncorked Ventures Wine Club business partner, Matt.

We had a great vineyard visit and tasting with Alta Colina and then spend about 2 hours tasting at a winery in which two winemakers combine to make one label while each makes their own label as well. One winemaker takes an Australian style while the other takes more of a French style, both of which we were impressed with. We’re happy to name them at a later date, but we’re not likely to ship them until March or April, so they need to be played close to the vest for now.

Well tomorrow it is time to spend some time in Santa Barbara county which I am incredibly excited about, in many ways that still feels like home.

Looking forward to our Paso Robles trip this week. It should give us the opportunity to source some truly outstanding Rhone varietals for our various clubs.

Aside from getting the chance to spend some time on the central coast again (an area I love) it’ll be nice to spend a couple days with my business partner Matt as we continue to build both our customer base as well as winery partners for our Uncorked Ventures Wine Clubs.

Although we’ll try and get a few video’s up during the trip, things can be rather hectic with 3+ tasting appointments every day, so most likely I’ll have a complete update on Friday once I’m back in San Diego.

Cheers!