​And the wine!  Oh, the wine!  One after another great wines --- Aglianico, Montepulciano, Nebbiolo, Sagrantino, Sangiovese, and Negro Amaro!  For lovers of Italian red wines Orsi is wine utopia!  I was happy, very happy – until I had to decide which wines to buy….

​I had to take home some Negro Amaro.  Why, you ask?  Well, last January my wife, Doc Ed, and I attended a wine industry convention, Unified, in Sacramento.  One afternoon they had wines from all over the place, with most coming from California wineries.  We lined up early to hit the Sonoma wines, and there on the table we spotted a Negro Amaro from Orsi.  We were the first ones to taste it – like I said, we lined up early – and it was fantastic!  While bottles of Pinot Noir and Zinfandel remained only partially drained, the Orsi Negro Amaro was gone so fast Doc Ed never got a chance to taste it.  So, I contacted Mark Orsi about how well his wine did.  It turned out that he did not know that his wine was there!  Now my wife did not make the trip to Sonoma but based on our Sacramento experience she ordered me to bring home at least four bottles of the Orsi Negro Amaro.
After much soul searching and wine tasting, I chose to confer with the little Italian wine maker, Pinocchio’s cousin Giacomo.   He selected Sagrantino and strongly suggested I should purchase two bottles, so I did.  You can see him in the photo below with the Orsi wines.  Not a guy to argue with!  He can crush nuts with those teeth....

​ In total we purchased two cases of wine which included all of the wines listed above except the Nebbiolo.  Nice haul, but I can’t figure out why we left out the Nebbiolo.  We’ll have to correct that error in our next purchase.
On the rare side of things, we tasted the two unique wines I mentioned from our barrel tasting adventure – Biancolella and Schioppettino.  Both proved to be very interesting but, well, they had these other six wines….

​On my first visit to Sonoma, I picked out Orsi Family Vineyards as a ‘must’ for wine tasting aficionados.  After this trip I have to say that Orsi Family Vineyards is a ‘must’ for wine tasting aficionados.  But give yourself a lot of time and be ready to make some very difficult decisions – or to buy a lot of wine….  Some pictures on the inside of the tasting room:

​There’s an old adage, ‘be careful what you wish for, your wishes might come true,’ that sticks in my mind when I think about the first winery we visited on our latest adventure in Sonoma.  Why?  Well, it was cold and rainy on our first visit for the annual barrel tasting – something they order up every year.  So, naturally, I wished for warm, sunny weather on this trip, and my wish was granted – in spades.  You see it was very sunny and very warm – well, very hot is the proper term.  Unfortunately, our first stop was at Dry Creek Vineyards, located in the Dry Creek region of Sonoma (duh!).  Unfortunately because there is not a lot of shade in the Dry Creek facility, and other groups had it.  Hence, the only place they could put us was on their patio with small umbrellas providing the only shade.  Pretty uncomfortable.  Beautiful facility though….

​Fortunately, the wine was very good.  Dry Creek is one of the better producers of wines made from the Zinfandel grape, and they have a very nice gang of Zins that they offer, as you can see on the lists below:

​The visit was also very informative.  Our server filled us in on the story of Meritage, a term used to describe wine blends similar to those produced in Bordeaux.  These blends are usually Cabernet Sauvignon-based (left bank of Bordeaux – think Chateau Margaux) or Merlot-based (right bank of Bordeaux – from areas such as Pomerol and St. Emillion).  As the story goes, unable to call their wines “Bordeaux Blends,” some California winemakers decided that they needed their own name.  After years of reviewing potential names – or maybe it was minutes, not really sure because by the time we got to this part of the story I was fully baked – they came up with the name Meritage.  The name, by the way, is protected.
I did not purchase any wine from Dry Creek.  Given the wines we encountered on the rest of the trip this was a great decision on my part.