Locals - A Collective Tasting Room
Come visit us at Locals located at the gateway to Alexander Valley in the once sleepy hamlet of Geyserville. Locals is a collective tasting room featuring the wines of 6 local boutique wineries. Taste over 30 unique wines from talented and noted neighborhood winemakers. These are small-scale producers making premium quality and hard to find award-winning wines.
While sampling these unique selections, discover the works of area black and white photographers, listen to music from local Sonoma Country musicians and be intrigued by Locals whimsical collection of art moderne wine accessories. It all combines to create an eclectic and tasty environment.
www.tastelocalwines.com
707.857.4900
yummy@tastelocalwines.com
Chardonnay & Oak Aging
This dry white wine, made from the Chardonnay grape, is the most popular of its variety. Chardonnay ranges in style, with some oakier versions contributing to taste. The purpose of Chardonnay aged in oak is to add some of the oaks characters, along with helping the wine develop its texture. Winemakers may lightly toast the inner surface of barrels, allowing the smoky oak or toasty characters to be detected in the final product. Oak gives the taste a dimension of spiciness and adds a hint of vanilla or coconut to the grapes aroma. The oak and Chardonnay combination is a favorite that is sure to last!
Riesling (pronounced REES-ling)
Also known as johannisberg or white riesling, this classic, cool-climate German
variety is perhaps the most underrated of the world’s white wine grapes. Although it reaches it apogee in Germany’s great
Mosel and Rhine River valleys (the northermost major growing regions in Europe), where it produces an array of wines
ranging from bone dry to decadently sweet (a result of botrytis cinerea, the “noble rot”), riesling also
makes quality wine in Alsace, Austria, California, Washington State, New Zealand and Australia.
Riesling’s great attribute is that it combines high natural acidity with tremendous fruit concentration, in both aroma and flavor. Thus, it can produce low alcohol wines of great character, at every level of residual sweetness, wines with incredible aging ability. Riesling’s other hallmark is its beautifully expressive bouquet, which suggest flowers, green apples, and honeysuckle blossoms.
The difficulty with riesling, from the consumer’s standpoint, is that it is made in a bewildering array of styles and gradations of sweetness, at least in Germany, a problem compounded by the incomprehensibility of German wine labels, which are a hash of hard-to-pronounce appellation, producer, vineyard, and style names. As a result, the appreciation and patronage of Riesling by American consumers has been limited.
However, these obstacles should not prevent true wine lovers from experiencing one of the world’s truly noble wines, which is a wondrously versatile food wine that complements everything from light seafood entrees to rich pork and sausage dishes and spicy Asian cuisines.
