At long last, five new award-winning wines from Jus Soli! Send us an e-mail or sign up for our e-list (at the bottom of this page) to get your hands on our latest newsletter entitled, “Paul Masson and Precious Medals”.
Six Pack of Gold!
2011 SF Chronicle Wine Competition results are in and we were awarded 6 Gold Medals for our upcoming releases! That’s right, it takes more than one hand to count all the gold. Hard to believe, as it doesn’t seem long ago that we only had a couple wines to enter in any competition. Our official release is coming right up, so head down to the bottom of this page and get on our e-list today!
Spring 2011 Release Gold Medal Winners: 2007 Windsor Oaks Vineyard Syrah, 2008 Dry Creek Zin, 2008 Windsor Oaks Vineyard Zin, and 2009 Bennett Valley Pinot Noir.
Fall 2011 Release Gold Medal Winners: 2008 Madder Lake Vineyard Zin, 2009 Dry Creek Zin.
Remember When?
Yeah, those were the good old days when Jus Soli made Pinot Noir.
Wait a minute, does that label say “2009”? And “Bennett Valley”?
We’re happy to confirm that it’s true, we’ve got ourselves a Pinot Noir in the bottle as of a week or so ago. It’s going to hibernate for several months now but here’s a sneak preview of our back label text:
“We decided not to make Pinot for a few years because it was such a hot varietal and we have an aversion to all things trendy. Now that it has come back down to earth a bit, we’re finally back in the mood. Go lightly, we didn’t make much.”
Slated for release Spring 2011.
PD Wine of the Week
This week’s Press Democrat Wine of the Week…2007 Roots Red!
For those of you who happen to live outside Sonoma County or don’t read the newspaper anymore (shame on you), here’s links to the online rundown including the full tasting panel, a brief interview with winemaker Tom Garrett and a food pairing by Michele Anna Jordan.
Reading all those compliments like “rich and generous”, “extraordinarily food friendly”, “serious wine with a recession proof price tag”, and “flawless”, is making us thirsty. If it wasn’t morning, we’d say it’s Roots Red time already. We suppose we can wait till dinner.
Jus Soli Zin - Touched By Angels?
Returned home from Las Vegas yesterday after pouring wines at the annual portfolio tasting of our Vegas distributor Red Rock Wines. Now that I’m older, I’ve learned to head off trouble preemptively and so brought along my wife and kids since the event was held at the family friendly Mandalay Bay Resort. And throughout our stay, whenever the kids encountered sights that struck them as particularly outlandish, they would ask “why would anyone do that?”, to which my answer was usually “because no one else was stupid enough to beat them to it at a different spot in Vegas”.
A prime example of Vegasian excess is the 42 foot high wine tower at Charlie Palmer’s Aureole. It’s encased in lucite so you can watch the “wine angels” gracefully climb up and then rappel back down with your trophy bottle of wine. I have to admit the concept became considerably more intriguing when we learned that our 2006 Madder Lake Zinfandel is on their wine list and therefore housed somewhere within the amazing tower of wine. Could it possibly be that an athletic/angelic young beauty has scaled to the top of the tower to retrieve a bottle of Jus Soli as part of a happy couple’s first romantic night of their honeymoon? We don’t think we have to worry about an older sugar daddy wining and dining his high class hooker with our vino since he would clearly buy something showier, right? And should you happen to visit and find out that our wine is situated down near the bottom within easy reach of any staff member, please don’t ruin the fantasy for us. We like to think that the angels are responsible for bringing our wine down from the heavens for the enjoyment of mortals before they head off for their night of depraved adult entertainment.
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- Sorry, the angels were taking a smoke break.
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- Our view from Mandalay.
2010 SF Chronicle Wine Competition Results Are In!
More symbolic medalry for Jus Soli (since we actually receive a lovely engraved plaque instead of the real thing):
Best of Class 2007 Dry Creek Valley Zinfandel
Double Gold 2008 Dry Creek Valley Sauvignon Blanc
Gold 2007 Sonoma County Roots Red
Gold 2007 Romano Vineyard Syrah
We’ll be pouring our winners at the SF Chronicle Wine Competition Public Tasting from 2-5pm on February 20th, 2010 at Fort Mason. See you there?
Zin and Cheese
Our new release 2007 Dry Creek Zin was featured last month in the Wine Club of SF’s outstanding Ferry Plaza Wine Merchant. Here’s a taste of their write-up: “This juicy, ripe, spicy Zinfandel was a very pleasant discovery at a recent tasting. We suggest you try this one and stock up before the rest of the wine world discovers it.”
And their Cheese Pairing Suggestion? L’Amuse Gouda from Fromagerie L’Amuse, Beemster, Holland.
Read about this cheese in the Cowgirl Creamery Library of Cheese.
We know one place you can’t buy this cheese, the Monty Python Cheese Shop. Still worth a visit if you have 5 minutes or so to watch the classic sketch.
We’re big at the Harvest Fair!
Check the Jumbo-tron — not one, or even two, but three giant bottles of Jus Soli Wines! That means three big awards at the 2009 Sonoma County Harvest Fair for little tiny us: Best of Class in Rhone Reds for 2007 Sonoma County Roots Red (two vintages in a row), Double Gold for our 2007 Dry Creek Valley Zinfandel and Gold for our 2008 Dry Creek Valley Sauvignon Blanc.
Note: Now that 2007 Roots has entered the world, we’ll get everything on this site updated shortly so people can actually buy it from us too! Be sure to e-mail us about it if you just can’t wait to get your hands on some.
It’s Not Easy Being Green
Our latest project in greening our business was switching our label printing to a certified green business in our home county, Paragon Label. Check the link to read about their impressive conservation efforts, including innovative recycling projects and carbon neutral manufacturing facility. But having battled the painful label printing process many times before, we knew that we were subjecting ourselves to all kinds of potential headaches by starting again with someone new. And all went swimmingly except for a little confusion over one very important part of the job, our bottling date. Alright, it was very close to a huge disaster requiring us to bottle all our wine without labels to run them all back through the line at some later date at considerable extra expense but let’s skip over the part about assigning blame and head straight for the problem solving part, which thankfully Paragon embraced along with us.
The main issue was that our labelstock didn’t arrive until the day before bottling so I was on call to race over to press check as soon as they unpacked the boxes and fired up the press. Thankfully, the main colors were very close from the start but the digital background needed considerable work. We tweaked and tweaked and finally dialed it in at 5:30 pm. Then they printed and cut the big rolls overnight in time for me to pick up at 6:30 am the next morning to bring to the bottling line for an 8am start. All my partners and everyone else at our facility seemed shocked and impressed to see me arrive with the label boxes before the bottling line labor crew had even arrived for duty.
It certainly could have been smoother, and I still have a giant box of pressure sensitive backing paper to bring back to Paragon for recycling to complete the process, but thankfully all turned out well in the end. Our new vintage is labeled and looking the way we like it, and we took another important step in reshaping our business. But if there was a soundtrack to the whole situation, it would undoubtedly be the Kermit the Frog classic.
How I Spent Bastille Day
Usually Bastille Day comes and goes without much of a thought for me, but this year my mom chose Chloe’s French Cafe in Santa Rosa as our lunch spot without being aware of the Bastille Day significance. Chloe’s is the finest little French Cafe ever housed within a medical building, looking as if it should be just another boring cafeteria serving uninspired lunches to a captive audience in need of quick bite. But the food is wonderful from grille sandwiches to salads, crepes and pastries, all best enjoyed from the sizable back patio (and so what if it’s practically tucked up against the freeway). I went with the Jambon Brie sandwich with their honey dijon dipping sauce and house-made pickles served on the side. Delicious as always.
Our lunch inspired a quick stop at nearby Bottle Barn for a wine to bring along to the Tuesday night farmer’s market in the Sonoma square. I selected a 2008 Le Clos du Caillou Cotes du Rhone Rose (North Berkeley Imports) to go with our typical market meal of bread, cheese, and salami supplemented by fresh produce from the market. And in case you’re picturing wine surreptitiously poured into dixie cups, the square in Sonoma is one of the few places left where you are actually allowed to publicly consume alcoholic beverages. On market night, some tables have staggering amounts of open wine bottles and a wide selection of microbrews can be spotted as well, particularly near our blanket. Our 2007 Jus Soli Sauvignon Blanc, the Rose and cold beers all cut beautifully through the still 90 plus degree heat.
Back home and kids in bed, we topped the day off by watching the recap of the day’s Tour de France action.
The only way to have been more French for the day would have been to wear berets and smoke cigarettes while debating whether Godard or Truffault was our favorite Nouvelle Vague film director. With the benefit of hindsight, I’m thinking we hit it just right.
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- Our Rose selection
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- Chloe the "truckette"
Current Releases
Get 'em while you can!
2009 Bennett Valley Pinot Noir (Gold)
2009 Dry Creek Valley Sauvignon Blanc (Silver)
2008 Dry Creek Valley Zinfandel (Gold)
2008 Windsor Oaks Vineyard Zinfandel (Gold)
2007 Madder Lake Zinfandel (Bronze)
2007 Windsor Oaks Vineyard Syrah (Gold)
Ordering
Featured Case: Precious Medals case. Don't overthink it, you can't go wrong here.
- Three 2009 Bennett Valley Pinot Noir
- Three 2008 Dry Creek Valley Zinfandel
- Two 2009 Dry Creek Valley Sauvignon Blanc
- Two 2008 Windsor Oaks Vineyard Zinfandel
- Two 2007 Windsor Oaks Vineyard Syrah
Then fax it to us at
(707) 833-2263
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And whatever you do, don't miss this picture of Tom dancing or this one of Jesse stuck inside a barrel. Just kidding. We do have a picture of a giant armadillo smoker though.