Bay Area Wine Society Taste-off Blog

Our January tasting took us out of our normal tasting venue into the tasting rooms of a select group of urban wineries. Thanks to the excellent assistance of Rena Ramirez, Executive Director of the East Bay Vintners Alliance, who set up our itinerary, we sampled a large variety of wines sourced from grapes grown, no not in Oakland, but in many outlying regions, from El Dorado County to the Santa Lucia Mountains in Monterey County.

The wines of the day, when one takes into account cost, was the Urbano Cellars Old Vine Zin for reds and the Dashe Cellars Riesling for whites. The Rockwall Cellars Viognier also offered a terrific QPR ratio, as did the R & B Cellars Swingsville Lodi Zin being offered by the winery for 10 bucks. The best of the best turned out to be a Carica Cellars Petite Sirah produced from Kick Ranch grapes (the owner of Kick Ranch, Dick Keenan, is a member of the Society, though our tasters that day didn’t know this).

All wines receiving a Very Good rating or above are highlighted in yellow. By the end of the day, members had understandably put aside their ballots–the n/a designation means that there weren’t enough ratings to justify a group score.

Surf over to their Flickr album of photos of the day taken by Emily Wilska.