Mark's Wine Blog

Let me take a minute and introduce my first guest blogger, Guillermo Bravo of Napa Wine Tours. I hope you’ll enjoy his post and please visit his blog for an insiders view of Napa.

Rules for Better Wine Tasting

A great wine tasting experience starts with finding a nice wine shop. Look for one that’s close and convenient to your everyday routine. You need a shop that you are comfortable stopping by on a regular basis. It’s the wine version of that great little bookshop you loved in college. Many upscale wine shops like to put in all kinds of flavor-destroying display lighting systems over their wine collection. You’re looking for something more down to earth, where you can gossip with the shopkeepers about such abominations. Once you think you’ve found the perfect shop, let them recommend a wine to you.

Request Wine Recommendations from the Wine Shop

Even if you’re well educated when it comes to wine, letting a shopkeeper recommend a new bottle to you is a great way to make a deep connection. You will learn something about their character, as well as their skill in choosing interesting wines. (Did they recommend something much too expensive? Did they take time with you to find out what your interests were? Or, were they pushing some kind of ‘special’ on you?) Also, accepting a wine recommendation is a great way to be remembered by the shopkeeper. Here’s the secret: Buy the wine. Take it home and return a few days later to discuss it.

You don’t have to lie and say it was the best wine you ever tasted, be honest. Have something interesting to say about your experience with the wine, and you’ll have an “in” for future goodies that come their way. Good shop, check. Good wine, check.

Picking a Wine Glass

Now, believe it or not, you need a good wine glass. The shape of the glass will shape your experience of the wine. Red wines are served in the larger glasses with a flatter, bowl-like shape. The design of the bowl helps you access the variety of rich characteristics in the aroma of a red. White wines, with their clarity and directness, are served in narrower glasses. The small glasses with the beautiful tulip-shaped flutes are reserved for champagne to preserve (and display) the bubbles.

Pre Tasting Process: Look, Swirl, and Smell

Your glass should only be 1/3 to ½ full, allowing you to experience the flavor and aromas of your wine. The basics are universal: we look, we swirl; we smell; we taste. Look at the wine through the side of the glass. It is more than just a “red” or a “white”. Is it garnet-red? A ruby, perhaps? Is your wine a pale ethereal white? Or golden amber? The depth of the color can tell you something about the age of the wine and lead your other senses for the wine tasting experience.

Swirl the wine gently in the glass, allowing it to gently mix with more oxygen and serve the more complicated undertones in the aroma. Swirl for about 10 seconds, then smell. Now, swirl again and smell again. You will notice the character of the aroma developing after time.

The Wine Tasting Process

Next, we begin wine tasting process. Take a slow sip and let it rest in your mouth at the tip of the tongue. Now, take the full sip in and breathe in a little sip of air. The air escapes through your nose. You experience the taste and the aroma as one composition. Relax and take some time in the experience. Think about what you’re sensing and absorb it. You can compliment your wine tasting experience by adding food. Food can bring out the flavor of a wine. Fruits, berries and cheeses work well, and can be recommended by your now favorite shopkeeper.

Keep a Wine Journal

Now for the homework, write about your experience. Keep your thoughts organized, so you can reference them anytime down the road. Learn to be specific. Record the type of wine, Pinot noir? Chardonnay? Cabernet? What flavors were present? Was it acidic? How were the tannins? What foods were paired with the wine? This is a key step in developing your skills in finding and experiencing truly remarkable wines. Also, continue to read about wine. Local shopkeepers and fellow wine fans will all have a title to recommend. Most local libraries will carry at least a selection to get you started. Reading will help you understand what you’ve experienced so far, as well as guide you on your next wine adventure.

If you’d like more wine tasting advice please visit our Napa Wine Blog. We have helpful wine reviews, recommended food pairings, winery reviews, and much more. Also, if you’re visiting Napa Valley, we have resources for private Napa Wine Tours during your stay.

So I recently wrote a short guest post over at Inexpensively. I talked a little about buying wine on a budget and they aptly titled the piece, Wine on a Beer Budget. Follow the link to find 3 quality wines you can bring home tonight for less then a 6 pack.

If you like that, please check out my wine clubs where we deliver incredible value to your front door each and every month.

A Wine Blog You Should Be Reading:

Over the next few weeks I’m going to try and bring my readers some more information and links to wine blogs which I feel provide valuable information either for the consumer directly, or for the industry as a whole.

As for the latter, one of the best out there is Tom Wark’s Fermentation Blog. He’s a PR professional that represents wineries in his work life so he has an inner knowledge of the industry as a whole.

Why You Should Read Tom: Simply put, Tom is the most consistent and effective messenger against the 3 tier distribution system in the blogosphere. For that, I genuinely appreciate his efforts and candor.

So this is officially my 100th post since starting to work on Uncorked Ventures, for some reason it doesn’t feel any different then #99 or how I’m sure #101 will tomorrow. Maybe it’s because I always knew I’d make it this far, but it’s fun to look back and see how much things have changed in 7+ months. Frankly I’m sure that some other nice round numbers will feel strange, but we’re not there yet on this blog.

Secondly and more importantly, my second article is up over at Cork’d. It talks a bit about Paso Robles and some of the great wines available there.

Check it out!

Over the next few days you’ll most likely see the first guest blog that I’ve allowed on this site. When I first started this wine blog I hadn’t given much thought to having guest bloggers, but when the opportunity presents itself to lend a hand to other small businesses working in the wine field that’s something I’d like to be a part of, even if my business itself is still very much a start up. If you fit that profile, or generally have something interesting to share in this space, please feel free to Email Me .

Hopefully as my wine club continues to grow I can become a resource of sorts for others in the start up stages of their business, I don’t plan on ever forgetting both the tribulations and excitement that comes in these early days.

Oh and a short editorial note, if you’re leaving a comment for a SEO backlink….try to follow general blog decorum. Read the post. Watch the video. Remember this is a wine blog, so if you hope to be published…perhaps share something wine or at least business related. Oh, and I don’t need you to tell me that I wrote a good post (I have family and friends for that), thanks anyway. I’m not trying to be harsh, but the amount of spam is bordering on annoying once again.

Stolpman Vineyards

As I mentioned in a previous blog entry, at Uncorked Ventures Wine Clubs we were excited to have shipped Stolpman Vineyards Hilltop Syrah for a variety of reasons, but to sum them up in a few points: quality of the wine, unique farming practices and the outstanding people that own the winery.

As with all wineries, if the wine isn’t good we aren’t interested. We were excited to taste what Stolpman had to offer because they’ve received some quality scores from major wine critics and have a very good reputation in the industry.

When we started tasting we were immediately struck by a couple of things. To start we got along quite well with Peter Stolpman whom is running the winery that his father purchased and has gotten off the ground. We appreciated immediately Peter’s candor in regard to the quality of certain wines (ie which were showing the best right now) and frankly on price for our wine clubs. The main thing that stuck out for both Matt and I was the wine though. The La Coppa Blanc was incredibly complex and balanced at once and may be the best white wine we’ve had the privilege of trying since beginning Uncorked Ventures.

Interestingly, Stolpman isn’t known for it’s white wine though. It’s generally known around the industry for Syrah and other Rhone varietals. We found that the Hilltop Syrah hit the spot for what we’re looking to source for Uncorked Ventures. Aside from the general quality which was incredibly high we think it offers some unique flavor profiles, including a sense of blueberry and honeysuckle which are rare flavor traits to be found in a Syrah. It’s a great mid palate (for a Syrah) wine that can easily be aged for 5-10 years to lend richer and even more complex flavors.

The second significant factor that led us to be interested in Stolpman was their unique farming practices. In the video below Peter Stolpman talks about one of their experimental farming practices where they are leaving the umbilical chords of the vines attached which may help prevent disease, may allow the mother vine to produce fruit for a longer period of time and allows them to plant a larger portion of their vineyard.

Lastly, as I mentioned we not only enjoyed our time with Peter but have a lot of respect for the type of business that Stolpman Vineyards is running. They are currently the only winery in the state of California (that we’re aware of and no one has even heard of anyone doing this currently, or ever before) with a full time vineyard staff. They do not use day, or seasonal laborers with the intent being that their farm workers will do a higher quality of work if they feel attached to the vineyard. To that end the Stolpman’s give their 11 full time workers access to a portion of the land in order to make their own wine. They have called this their La Cuadrilla Project. The workers participate in all aspects of the winemaking with lead winemaker Sashi Moorman, with the goal being to provide their workers another way to not only feel connected to the company, but to also make a better life for themselves. Lastly, during our trip through the vineyard we saw a ranch style home that looked new. Immediately we thought that the home must belong to the family. After pointing out that they truly believed the old wine mantra that wine is made in the vineyard, Peter informed us that they had built the house for their vineyard manager whom lives there. Needless to say this type of socially conscious farm is one that we’re incredibly happy to represent. Tom Stolpman got his start as a lawyer and has been instrumental at raising capital for the Legal Aide Society.

For our Special Selection Club members you’ve already received a bottle of the Hilltop Syrah in your shipment last month. If you’re not a member of our Special Selections Club, we’re happy to offer this incredible wine in our online wine store.

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