Flickr user marqueton

Building A Winery Online

If your resolutions include expanding your wine fridge offerings beyond Trader Joe's corporate specials, UK-based Naked Wines opened a Napa outpost last year with a wine program that, in theory at least, makes small-batch bottles straight from winemakers more affordable.

The California winemaker's dilemma: Making wine for the retail market in our gloriously sunny state is an expensive endeavor. You need investors with loads of cash to build a winery. Investors with loads of cash have lots of opinions about what the winemaker should and should not be making. The bottles are often priced well beyond the average consumer's nightly dinner budget, so the investors sell them to their wealthy friends while the rest of us stock up on imports at Trader Joe's. Again.

Find out more about the Naked Wines' $40 click-to-invest approach after the jump.

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Shafer Vineyards

Winemaker Elias Fernandez

Elias Fernandez has been the winemaker at Shafer Vineyards in Napa for 28 years -- a lifetime in winemaking terms. While some winemakers hop from winery to winery over their careers, Fernandez says he prefers "the community, the quality" of working for the same vineyard that snatched him fresh out of UC Davis' Enology program in 1984.

Today, he produces one of the most expensive cult Cabs in the Napa Valley (the winery's Stag's Leap Hillside Select retails for $230); Shafer's Relentless label was named after him ("Pain in the Neck" was another label consideration, says winery owner Doug Shafer, a compliment to Fernandez's pursuit of perfectionism). Back in the day, Fernandez also happened to be a pretty bad-ass trumpet player. Get the interview after the jump.

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Kathy A. McDonald

2009 Brooks Temperance Hill Pinot Noir at Buzz Wine Beer Shop

What's in a glass of wine? The answer might be surprising. Wine is basically spoiled grape juice. (Whoever first ingested it millennia ago: hat tip.) But these days wine's ingredients can also contain a laundry list of adds in's: sulfur dioxide, egg whites, oak chips, water and numerous chemical additives, in addition to the base of fermented grape juice. As chefs and home cooks have turned to farmers markets for organic and small batch-grown produce, wine drinkers are increasingly seeking out natural wines, in response to the preservatives and stabilizers found in conventionally-made wine.

Natural wine is more than just winespeak or a marketing gimmick. Artisan winemakers are essentially going back to basics when making wine in a non-interventionist way, with as little manipulation as possible, avoiding mechanization in farming and production (foot stomping grapes is now in vogue), using grapes grown without chemical fertilizers or pesticides. Some words frequently used to describe natural wine's flavor profile: alive, snappy, complex, dense and fuller on the palate. Natural wines do taste and often look differently than conventionally made wine. Turn the page to discover why.

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Flickr user prayitno

A Feral Chardonnay?

We've long been keen on winemaker Greg La Follette's Pinot Noir style, his bagpipe back story and the Friday night Bingo shirts he sports at wine tasting events. He's also weathered the wine business long enough that he doesn't worry about telling the whole wine truth, and nothing but the truth (so help his marketing department). Consider the label description on a recently released 2010 Sangiacomo Vineyard Chardonnay from his namesake winery: "Intriguing, almost feral aromas over bright, crisp structure."

"Wild, animal, funky, bloody, the smell of the bear cage at the zoo -- all of it," said Richard Betts when we asked him to clarify the definition (Betts is one of 120 or so Master Sommeliers in the U.S.; he also happens to be a winemaker and distiller). "Feral implies the presence of things that some technocrat winemakers call faults but romantic wine lovers often find full of allure," he continues. "I'll be amongst the lovers." [Note: Betts is speaking generally about the word feral; he did not taste La Follette's wine.]

But this is Chardonnay, not a wine like Pinot Noir that we often think of as having occasional foraged funk tendencies.

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Anonymous

Pot + Wine

Roll up a towel, wedge it under the door, and put on a record -- Alice Coltrane or some pre-disco Bee Gees.  You may have to part the paisley curtains on your way in.  And find a comfy cushion to melt into.  Are we smoking weed?  Nah, we're drinking wine, man. According to a report in The Daily Beast late last week, it's the new thing.  

Michael Steinberger writes that marijuana-fermented wines are no longer a novelty but a full-blown trend, as more and more vintners throughout California's Central Coast and fertile northern valleys are combining two popular buzz-delivery systems in one bottle. Still sounds like a novelty to us, just a slightly less novel one -- now that The Daily Beast has blown up the spot like a straitlaced R.A. getting all vigilant on his rounds.

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Sonoma Magazine

In the vineyard with The Bachelor and partners

Most people dream of quitting their day job to be on TV. ABC's The Bachelor Ben Flajnik says his reality star turn is a means to an end: His heart is in winemaking. (He auditioned for The Bachelorette originally as a way to pursue winemaking full-time). After his proposal was turned down last season, he was cast as the The Bachelor, where a lot of well-coiffed ladies angle for his attention (and date cards and roses).

Forget those picturesque horseback-riding dates in Park City, Utah, or dance-offs on Ellen or guest shots on The Chew with Mario Batali, what Flajnik says he really wants to do is make Sonoma Valley wine, along with middle-school friends Danny Fay and Michael Benziger (of the Benziger Family Winery clan). The roommates and business partners were in Los Angeles recently for promotional appearances and to set up new outlets for Envolve Winery, their Sonoma Valley winery that is sourced primarily from organic and biodynamic vineyards.

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Flickr/Southern Foodways Alliance

a glass of Cab

Sure, that nice vintage Cabernet Sauvignon you have sitting in your wine cellar may have notes of dark chocolate and hints of sweet cherries, but does it really taste out of this world? No? Well then, you may want to head to Chile for the Meteorito, a red wine that is infused with the potentially tinny taste of a meteorite.

According to The Drinks Business, Meteorito creator Ian Hutcheon is both an amateur astronomer who owns his own observatory and a dedicated oenophile who owns his own vineyard in a former gold mine in Chile. As people who have both an observatory and a vineyard are wont to do, he decided to put a little bit of cosmo in his vino.

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buckzin.com

Bucklin: Same Zinfandel Grapes, Different Price

Ah, the holiday party wine gifting season. That time of year when you'll inevitably spot a bottle of Shafer Hillside Select sporting a shiny red bow among the hostess gifts -- right as you hand over a $19.99 Cabernet you snagged off the Ralph's weekly special list on the way to the boss' house (but it was really $30 full price, right?). When it comes to financial discrepancies, there are few times of year when it's more obvious that your wine budget is nowhere near that of your corporate superiors.

That's why we prefer to do a little upfront research and hand over wines with a great back story. There are plenty of growers who simply sell their top quality grapes to wineries (often used in high-end vineyard-designate wines, not blends). Many of them also happen to be winemakers on the side -- not for another winery, but for themselves. In other words, these are the wines they really wanted to make with their grapes if they weren't handing them over for the boss' pet project. (Sound familiar?)

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Xinhua

Yao Ming and his new wine

Given the size of the man's paws and his height relative to that of the hoop, the sight of Yao Ming shooting always made us think of a toddler dropping grapes into a plastic cup. The recently retired NBA star from Shanghai had a sweet shot, but the jury's still out on his new wine crafted from cabernet sauvignon grapes grown in California's Napa Valley.

Several days ago, Yao auctioned off a bottle of Yao Family Wines' "Yao Ming Wine" at a charity event for Special Olympics East Asia. The bottle sold for a breathtaking $23,499. The next 5,000 cases are going to be sold only in China. The cost will be lower -- a mere $278 per bottle -- but we're not talking Carlo Rossi here.

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Dreaming Tree

Steve Reeder (left) and Dave Matthews have teamed up to create three wines

It's a different kind of crush for Dave Matthews. He may not want you to drink the water, but the musician has collaborated with award-winning winemaker Steve Reeder to create a line of vino they're calling Dreaming Tree Wines, after the Dave Matthews Band track "The Dreaming Tree" from the 1998 album "Before These Crowded Streets." (Ben & Jerry's had already claimed "One Sweet World/Whirled." Ice cream and wine aren't a good mix. But, we digress.)

The wines portfolio, founded and harvested in California's wine country, includes the 2010 Central Coast Chardonnay, 2009 North Coast Cabernet Sauvignon and 2009 North Coast Crush red (Merlot and Zinfandel) blend, available nationwide with a suggested retail price of $14.99. The collection of wines was developed in partnership with Constellation Wines U.S.

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