Karly Wines

...or, which wine is your favorite?

I am often asked this at tastings or in the tasting room. My stock reply is “which of your children is your favorite?” It is an appropriate response. They are all different, have different attributes and personalities, and all can be beguiling. How can you choose? You don’t have to choose. You can enjoy them all.

And that is what I do. I think there are more wines from more wineries from more countries than ever, or at least there are more labels. I want to taste them all, but I haven’t enough days in my life and I refuse to hurry through them. So I try to learn about wines and regions and then sample a cross section. I seek the artisan producers and crafted wines as opposed to large producers, wines that have been made with passion and simplicity and have something special to reveal about their place of origin. So I don’t have a favorite, although I do collect wines I particularly enjoy with food Karly and I like to eat. I collect a few really odd wines I could not recommend to anybody. Often, they were at first losers, but on some unusual occasion we opened a bottle and Bingo! They were great with that particular dish we were eating. So I keep a small number of really strange wines in our cellar, and we create meals from time to time using weird wines to relive a novel experience.

Aside from Karly wines, our personal cellar seems to be over-represented with wines from Burgundy, the Rhone, and the Piedmont. I am surprised we don’t have more wines from Alsace. I think I am still sulking about the price increases in recent years as the region has been discovered and is no longer bargain priced. The dollar collapse against the euro has not helped.

All this is written by a guy known for Zinfandel. Well, I am a lover of Zinfandel, but I like it with a little balance. I am not a big fan of the jammy, oaky, high alcohol style. I like the Dry Creek wines made for example by Doug Nalle and The Rafanelli’s. When I am in the mood, they are a nice cultured fruity change-up from our Amador zins which speak instead of climate extremes and granite soil.

Which wine do we drink the most? Surprise: Karly Sauvignon Blanc! This may be a case of house palate, but the wine tastes good with anything, even nothing. It is our cooking-cocktail wine and then we finish the bottle with dinner if we are not going red. On a crazy impulse, we even discovered we enjoy it with steak. Apparently a lot of people agree with our selection as we sell darn near all of it locally in the Central Valley and in the nearby mountains. When we retire with millions and leave the winery to our children, we probably will alternate White Burgundy with the Sauvignon.

And oh yes, back to the best wine. The best wine is the one YOU like. Forget all the ratings, medals, pontificating, and hype. Just start drinking lots of different wines. When you find one (or a few) that YOU really like... then THAT is the best wine!