Sonoma County Chardonnay garners 88 points from Wine Spectator Online!

Wine Spectator Online listed 10 of its favorite Chardonnays for $30 or less on Monday, and our 2007 Sonoma County Chardonnay is included! The average price of the Chardonnays is around $23, with the majority of the bottlings selling for $24-30 a piece.

We're proud to say that our Sonoma County Chardonnay, a perennial favorite, is offered at our tasting room for $13, giving the wine consumer a whole lot of bang for just a few bucks! We are committed to producing wines of excellent quality for the value, and are pleased to receive recognition for this on Wine Spectator Online.

You can download a copy of a sell sheet from our trade site.

Wine Spectator Editor's Pick!

The latest issue of the Wine Spectator has named Sebastiani Vineyards and Winery as one of their Editor's Picks for Recommended Values. It's a short list; only 16 California wineries were named. Thanks guys-we're honored!

You can print out a copy of the review here:

WineSpectatorBestValue.pdf

Photo Contest Winners Announced!

As the saying goes, it's "out with the old and in with the new" this time of year. However, before we get too far into 2009, we want to recognize several outstanding photos entered in our 2008 Photo Contest. Our contest stipulates that the picture must be taken at Sebastiani Vineyards or include a bottle of our wine, but the rest is up to your imagination and photographic skills! Do you have a photo for the contest? Enter our new 2009 contest now!

GRAND PRIZE WINNER 2008
Our Grand Prize Winner for 2008 is from Jim Worby, a longtime Cherryblock Club member. The photo was taken from his vacation condo balcony at The Beach Club in Gulf Shores, Alabama. We wish all of us had a view like that while we sipped Sebastiani! Congrats to Jim!

FALL QUARTERLY WINNER 2008
The winner of our Fall 2008 Quarterly contest is by Bev & Stan McCadam from Waterloo, Iowa. With the submission of their photo this fall they wrote: "It was reassuring to see an original ancient, vine still healthy and quietly productive, showing what is possible in this time of fleeting values and uncertainty." The vine pictured is our Mission Vine, located in the Mission Vineyard adjacent to the winery. The Mission Vineyard has been planted to grapes since 1825 and was the first sacramental vineyard north of San Francisco.


PAST WINNERS:

Photo by Louis Episcope, taken in 1990. He and his wife, Joan, visited the winery on their honeymoon. This picture includes Sylvia Sebastiani (third from right) and Jim Davis, who was the Winemaker at that time.

Photo By Mike Stricker, taken in September 2007 during his Cherryblock Club Anniversary Wine & Cheese Tasting. Also in the picture: Mike's wife, Tanya and their friends, Eric and Linda, and Pat, a longtime Tasting Room employee.

For more information about the contest, visit our website. Good luck!

Cherryblock Comes In

This morning we watched as our crew brought in Block 8 of our Cherryblock Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon. One of the signature vineyards in the Sonoma Valley, Cherryblock was originally a cherry orchard and was planted to grapes by August Sebastiani in 1962. This video takes you from the vineyard to our small lot crush set up, where, vineyard block by vineyard block, the grapes are painstakingly hand sorted, first on a sorting table, then on a shaker table, to remove all but the most pristine fruit before it is crushed and fermented.

Here Come The Bloggers!

Typically there are more cobwebs than interwebs in our barrel room, but on Saturday the 25th we will be hosting a dinner for over 150 attendees of the first annual American Wine Bloggers' Conference here at the winery. The conference has grown enormously, a real indication of the keen interest in wine around the country, and the unique relationship there seems to be between wine writing and the phenomenon of blogging. You can get a flavor for the quality of wine writing on the web by clicking on any of the links to the right of this blog; this is just a tiny fraction of what's available out there and after the conference I'm sure we'll be linking to many, many more.

We'll update you on what was covered during the conference, including remarks made by author, columnist and blogger Alice Feiring, who will be the keynote speaker at our dinner. Welcome to the ever expanding wine blogosphere!

Wine Spectator 90 Points For Our 2006 Dry Creek Zinfandel!

We were pleased to see the Wine Spectator praising our 2006 Dry Creek Zinfandel, with 90 points, calling it "supple and jammy". Sounds good indeed! Production was small, so you better get on it if you want some...

Click here to see the review.

Harvest is Here!

On Friday, August 29, Sebastiani crushed its first several tons of fruit for the 2008 Harvest. We crushed a small amount of Chardonnay from the Rancho Miguel Vineyard in the Alexander Valley. Here, the grapes are being tipped into our brand-new auger where they are gently picked up by the conveyor belt and moved into our state-of-the-art winemaking facility completed in late 2006. The Chardonnay from Rancho Miguel looked fantastic, a great sign of what's yet to come this harvest.

Right now, we're stepping into harvest high-gear, so we'll have plenty of pictures and video of our new winemaking equipment and our production team in action!