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SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA WINERY REVIEW

Southern California has become a great place to go wine tasting! Great wines, great wineries -- and great people! This website is dedicated to bringing you the best info on wineries in San Diego and Riverside counties -- and a few other places as well. Enjoy!

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Ramona Ranch has upgraded their winery, and released their 2019 Tannat. We dropped in with a small crowd....

Mahogany Mountain

6/17/2018

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Mahogany Mountain is a small winery located in Ramona. While there is a sign for the winery on route 67, the winery is not close to the highway. Oh, and it is on a mountain, about 1500 feet above sea level. As seen in the photos below, they have a very nice facility with a great view and outside seating. This is pretty much a visit-and-drink wine place, i.e., they don’t have a restaurant or entertainment. But it is not a bad place to visit-and-drink wine.

The tasting room is quite nice as well, with a very interesting décor and plenty of seating. It was a chilly day when I visited, so I don’t know how the tasting room fares in the summer heat. The winery has been around since the mid-90’s, but like most of the wineries in Ramona is open only on Saturday and Sunday for wine tasting. All of the wines are estate grown. Fortunately, they do not pump gas in the tasting room....

As you can see in the wine tasting menu below, their wines have won awards, so this is a quality winery. Among the wines listed are their 2009 and 2010 Zinfandels. This afforded me the chance to see what difference a year makes. I had seen this before with Pinot Noir’s up in the Solvang area, where the 2007 vintage was way better than the 2008. In this case, the server and I agreed that the 2010 wine tasted better than the 2009. They have another varietal that I had not tasted before – Petit Verdot. Can’t say I liked it, which may explain why it is not all that common as a stand-alone.

They have a wine club which requires members to purchase just six bottles per year in three two-bottle offerings. Price for these six is 20% off retail or a special wine club price, since not all of the wines that go to the wine club are offered to the general public. Wine club members get free tasting for two every time they visit the winery.

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A crazy idea....

6/11/2018

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I have a crazy idea – ok, maybe not that crazy – that I would like to present to you. First, a bit of background. Now most red wines improve with age, some more than others. I understand that the wines that improve the most with age are the most acidic and have the highest tannin levels. Cabernet Sauvignon falls into this category. Pinot Noir, on the other hand, has low acidity and low tannin levels, so reaches peak with much less aging.
The problem is that you need to have a place to store the wine at low temperature. If you have a wine chiller you may be ok, unless, of course, you have no room to store bottles of wine for four years or more. What to do, what to do? So here’s my idea: store the wine at the winery. Now you have to get the winery to go along with this idea. They might, if you buy enough wine (maybe a full case?). Win-win situation, yes? I mean, the winery sells more wine and their customers have a place to store the wine….
The problem here, and what makes my idea rather crazy, is that if the winery has extra space to store customers’ wine it’s likely because they sell most of the wine that they make. If they sell most of the wine that they make they don’t need to store wine for their customers to sell more wine. Conversely, if they need the sales they probably need the storage space for their unsold wines.
Most wineries offer a discount if you buy a whole case, so maybe in lieu of the discount they can offer five years free storage. It would be nice if the customer did not have to purchase a case of a specific wine. Of course, any program like this would have to allow the customer to pick up some of the wine whenever he wants (within reason). A program like this would be a nice perk for wine club members like yours truly…

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SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA WINERY REVIEW

Mahogany Mountain

A crazy idea....

Jim Treglio

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