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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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Another new winery, this time in Temecula: Altisima Winery.

Lum Eisensan/San Diego Wine Competition

6/23/2019

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The Lum Eisensan/San Diego Wine Competition is named for – ta da! – Lum Eisensan. Now it is known that Lum, a physicist, helped many of the Ramona winemakers, which is why the competition is named for him. Now I feel that he should also be worshipped, as should all physicists, but I guess I'm a bit prejudiced. Maybe I should have a whole section on how much physicists have contributed to the wine industry in Southern California. Probably not....
Getting back to reality, in keeping with Lum’s spirit, the goal of the competition is to improve the quality of wine produced in San Diego County. To this end, the judges provide feedback to the winemakers. In most competitions, you get a medal or don’t get a medal and that is the end of the story. For this competition, the winemakers learn why their wine was rated gold or whatever to help them improve their wines. The feature speaker at the awards banquet, Somm. Maurice De Marino (shown below) from the Cohn Restaurant Group, was right in tune with the concept as his speech hammered on the importance of wineries in a region working together.

The event was held at the Ramona Backstage. Owner Orin Day owns the restaurant next door, (Maincourse) and his chef prepared the food. I had the fish and it was incredible. Naturally, there was plenty of wine at the banquet (see picture below).
The gold and double gold winners are shown in a table on the Winery News page. The Best of Show amateur wine maker was John Mann, shown below. We had the pleasure of dining with Alfredo Gallone and his family, owners of Principe di Tricase. Of course, they won Best of Show, Commercial. OK, it was purely by chance that we wound up sitting at the same table. Picture of Alfredo and son Alessandro with award is shown below.

Let me add a shout out to Don Bartrick, Wine Competition Chairman. Don has been running this event for three years, upping the number of wines entered from 77 to 128. That is only the tip of the iceberg, of course. Pulling all the pieces together, including judges and people to bag and number the wines (double blind testing) is an enormous undertaking. He also emceed the event. I have a picture of Don below. By the way, many of these pictures (actually, all but one) were sent to me by Don. Someday I'm going to help him pronounce Montipulciano….
Oh, by the way, Principe di Tricase has been reviewed on this website as well as the big winner for the night, Vineyard Grant James. They captured a double gold as well as four golds among their medals. A picture of Susan Sapier, Vineyard Grant James owner and wine maker, and her son Grant (the Grant in the name) follows Don's picture.

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Hatfield Creek Vineyard & Winery

6/3/2019

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I’ve visited around 60 wineries in the last 18 months or so. I could say that they all are pretty much the same – I could say that, but it would be a lie. A very big lie. The reality is that they are very different, kind of a something-for-everyone thingy. A case in point is Hatfield Creek Vineyards & Winery. Located along the road to Julian just outside Ramona, it has a most unique tasting room. In fact, it is so interesting that I won’t waste pictures on the exterior. Some pictures follow this paragraph, and others I’ve tagged onto the end of this review. (I should add that Doc Ed and I visited Hatfield Creek at the recommendation of the wine maker/owner of Vineyard Grant James).

The other thing that distinguishes Hatfield Creek is their very limited production span. They grow two grape varieties – just two: Zinfandel and Petite Sirah – as seen in the tasting menu below. They make a varietal from each, a blend of the two, and a dessert wine with the Zinfandel grapes. (Not sure where they got the grapes for the Moscato, but it is not listed as an Estate wine or on their website). Now, here’s the thing: both of their varietals are really good. I like a peppery Zinfandel, and theirs is very peppery. As also shown below, their wines have won a few medals…

Now a little bit about blends. The common blending method in the US is to blend the wines after they have been fermented. The winemakers try a little of this and a little of that, ultimately coming up with something that they like and think will sell. The uncommon method is to ferment all of the grapes for the blend together. This can be taken to the extreme, or French, way, called field blending, where all of the grapes are grown in the same field. You can see why this is uncommon – no chance to recover if you get a final product that you don’t like. Well, Hatfield took both routes. As noted on the tasting menu, they offer a wine blended after fermentation, then a later year field blended. Not sure if it was the field blending that did the trick, but both Doc Ed and I greatly preferred the field blended version.
Hatfield Creek does have a wine club. Quantities to be purchased are two to three bottles selected by the wine maker every four months, with quarterly pick-up parties and complementary wine tasting for two on each visit to the winery. Wine club discount is pretty low, just 10% on bottles and 20% on cases

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SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA WINERY REVIEW

Lum Eisensan/San Diego Wine Competition

Hatfield Creek Vineyard & Winery

Jim Treglio

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