About
ABOUT
Visiting Montesecano. Photo by Julio Denoso.
Many years (too many to get specific) I was a student at U.C. Berkeley. I might have been nineteen or twenty, but I looked far less and trying to get served alcohol was out of the question. The only way I could drink in public peacefully was to drive forty-five minutes up the road to Highway 29 in Napa Valley and float from winery to winery (and there were only a handful then) where nobody particularly cared that I looked about as old as Mickey Rooney in his early films. Also, the tastings then were free.
Nothing I’ve done since has dampened the heat of that passion. I studied at Oxford and bought wines from the purser of my college normally reserved for the dons at High Table. Afterwards I constantly found ways back to Europe and drove all over France and Germany and Italy (and later Spain and Portugal) tasting my way through the wine lands. I married a French woman and lived in France for fourteen years, not only writing screenplays and a novel or two but a fictional wine tour of France, then led an American TV team around numerous distinguished wine properties throughout France. Nothing could calm the rage for wine travel, but at no point did I think about devoting myself full-time to wine. I considered myself what the French called an “amateur,” an incurable lover of wine, not a pro.
With Markus Kunstz-Reidlin at Sybille Kuntz Estate
But…as these things happen, about five years ago, while touring the Mosel Valley in Germany, our hotelier in Bernkastel arranged a tasting with local winemakers whose wines he said were exceptional. He was too right. They suggested perhaps we might like to help them distribute their wines in California? The answer was “yes.” And we created The Winewright to do so.
I subsequently travelled to South America and found some of the most talented winemakers in Chile to add to our German source. Late last year I explored some less well known areas of the Loire Valley, and identified some remarkable hilltop sites in the Beaujolais and am exploring others the Southern Rhone…and in late February-early March I’ll be in the Western Cape in South Africa...while The Winewright writes.