If there is one public wine tasting event that rivals San Francisco’s yearly ZAP Zinfandel tasting for sheer size and chaos, it could only be the annual SF Chronicle Wine Competition Tasting. Every year the San Francisco Chronicle (with a lot of help) holds a wine competition, judged by more than 60 wine professionals, in which they award medals to their top choices from among over 4,700 wines from all across America. This competition has grown over the last nine years to be the largest competitive tasting of American wines in the world.

The judges hand out hundreds of medals and awards. Those awards are released to the public, and then about a month later, many of the award winning wines, plus a lot more are poured for the public in a four-hour event that takes over Fort Mason for a Saturday afternoon. There are usually cooking demonstrations and food booths, and various other diversions.

Regardless of how I feel about such wine competitions, this tasting, like all such public events, represents an incredible opportunity to educate your palate and discover new wines to enjoy. This tasting in particular offers a unique chance to taste wine from a lot of less well known wine regions (i.e. not California, Oregon, or Washington) in addition to hundreds of wines from the places that most people know and love.

So if you don’t have plans this Saturday and want to expand your oenological horizons, the experience is well worth the price of admission.

San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition Public Tasting
Saturday, February 19, 2009 2pm - 5pm
Festival Pavilion - Fort Mason Center
Marina Boulevard, San Francisco, CA 94123 (map)

Tickets are $60 if purchased in advance, $80 at the door. To purchase tickets visit www.winejudging.com or call 888.695.0888.

My usual tips for large public tastings: get a good night’s sleep; go with food in your belly; wear dark clothes; drink lots of water; and if you want to really enjoy yourself, SPIT!

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The wine industry is having a “Harry Potter Moment”– and it involves a heretofore-unheralded style of wine. Moscato d’Asti.

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Don’t judge a book by its cover. Don’t judge a wine by its label. You’ll eschew some memorable wine experiences if you do.

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Wine snobs drink dessert wines all the time, but the masses haven’t hugged the really sweet stuff… yet. Maybe it’s time we all drink together, writes Taylor, especially when it’s cold outside.

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With all the fanfare surrounding Cabernet and Pinot Noir coupled with the obsession this country seems to have with Chardonnay, it’s sometimes hard for people to remember that California produces a lot of other different kinds of wine. It’s even harder, it seems, to get people to drink some of it.

Enter what may be the most unique wine festival in California and perhaps the country. Some of the most under-appreciated and least consumed wines in the state are those made from grapes like Gewurztraminer, Pinot Blanc, Pinot Gris, and Riesling. There aren’t a lot of places in California where these grapes thrive, but the Anderson Valley, three hours north of San Francisco, is the de-facto home for growing and making wines from these varietals in the style common to the French border region of Alsace.

California-grown Alsatian-style wines are not plentiful, nor are they particularly well publicized, but that seems to suit both the winemakers of Anderson Valley, and the folks who have been happily buying their wines for years. But in the interest of spreading the word, and the love, a couple of years ago all the winemakers who produce these wines decided that they needed to get together to showcase and celebrate their shared passion.

2011 marks the 6th Annual Anderson Valley Alsace Varietals Festival. The event continues to draw a loyal following of wine lovers as well as those curious (and lucky) enough to make the trek into the idyllic green of Anderson Valley in February.

The events begin at 9:00 AM Saturday morning, February 12th, with a technical seminar on growing and making Alsatian style wines given by both local and visiting winemakers. The grand tasting begins afterwards at 1:00 and goes until 4:00 PM, after which attendees have a chance to relax before a winemaker dinner begins at 6:30 at Scharfenberger Cellars. Tickets are available for each event separately, or as a package. On Sunday the 21st, most wineries in the valley hold open houses with food and, of course, more wine to taste. If you can find a nice B&B to settle into on Friday and Saturday night, you can make quite a nice weekend of it. And if not, well, the drive is quite pretty.

6th Annual Anderson Valley Alsace Varietals Festival
Grand Tasting February 12, 1:00 PM
Mendocino County Fairgrounds
14400 Highway 128
Boonville, CA 95415 (map)

Tickets to the Grand Tasting are $65 and the seminar costs $45, or you can buy a joint ticket for $100. As a nice gesture to the long drive that some may make, you can also buy a designated driver ticket that gets you food only for $35. The winemaker dinner costs $125. Tickets should be purchased in advance online.

If you’re planning on making the drive, make sure to give yourself plenty of time, and if you get carsick, take something in advance, as the road is quite twisty. Here’s a site that has some lodging options if you need them.

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First of all, thank you to all of you who bothered to fill out my online survey. It was a huge help. Six of you won tickets to the ZAP Zinfandel festival. I’ve sent you e-mails individually, so please check your inboxes and your spam bins (the subject line that includes the words “won tickets” might not look so healthy to your e-mail server). For the rest of you, I hope you go to the festival anyway, as it’s a rollicking good time.

The results from the survey range from expected, to interesting, to fairly surprising. Here’s what I learned about all you readers, assuming those who answered are a representative sample of y’all.

The majority of you readers are over thirty.

You’re mostly male.

You tend to be married or divorced.

You tend to be pretty highly educated.

Your average household income is somewhere between $140,000 and $200,000 per year.

You generally consider yourselves to have an intermediate level of wine knowledge, though a good chunk of you are experts.

Overwhelmingly you characterize yourselves as wine geeks, wine addicts, or wine lovers, though almost half of you are also in the wine business or some related field like hospitality, marketing, or PR. That’s quite a high percentage of non-consumers.

When you’re not reading vinography, most of you (more than 60%) read other wine blogs, and you tend to favor the Wine Spectator when it comes to things written on dead trees:

I’m very pleased to see that you drink a LOT of wine:

I’m also surprised to see how much wine you buy a year (a hell of a lot more than me):

And you generally tend to own or store a lot of wine. On average, somewhere between 200 and 500 bottles of wine.

You tend to pay between $16 and $35 per bottle when you buy wine.

Some of the other interesting tidbits that emerged from the results include the fact that 65% of you go to wine blogs as one of your sources for advice on what wines to buy. 16% of you have some sort of certified wine education. 22% of you are on more than 5 winery mailing lists (to buy wine) and 28% of you participate in some sort of monthly wine club.

A full 40% of you read no other wine blogs except Vinography, which is sort of a shocking figure to me. 40% of you have also never bought a wine that I’ve reviewed or recommended.

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New Year’s Eve is well past us now. Do we have to put away the sparkling wine? Naah.

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Just for fun, Taylor assembled a thirsty crew of editorial-types (smokers, drinkers, etc.) to establish, once and for all, whether or not buzzes vary.

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