California Wine Country

Ludor Wines winemaker Sal de la Cruz

Sal de la Cruz from Ludor Wines [https://www.ludorwines.com/] joins Dan Berger and Daedalus Howell in the studio on California Wine Country today. This is the first time on the show for Sal and for the winery. All of the wines that Sal has brought come from the Weiler vineyard in the Sonoma Valley AVA. They begin by tasting a red wine blend called Yuma, named after their beloved nine-year-old dog [https://ludorwines.withwine.com/wine/2025-sonoma-valley-yuma-red-wine/62174], who is on the label. It’s a very casual wine, delicious and fruity. Dan says that this is the modern era of red wine. “Drink it soon,” but it is authentic to the fruit. It is similar to Beaujolais but with better grapes. The Merlot character is right up front, and it has beautiful other nuances of black fruit. It is in a clear bottle. They wanted to show the color and break the boundaries of a traditionally dark glass. Since it isn’t meant for long aging, the clear glass is fine. It was just bottled three months ago. This is a great picnic wine, declares Daedalus. It got no wood, all made in stainless steel and unfiltered. “It feels like the French countryside,” says Daedalus and Dan agrees. THE LUDOR WINES 2024 MERLOT Next they taste the 2024 Merlot. “This is serious stuff,” says Dan. Their vineyard has two kinds of soil, a clay loam and a sandy rocky soil. They planted it in the mid-’90s and they have been farming it for the last 25 years. Sal has been working there since he was a kid. They know the land very well. Sal says they do all the touches on all of their wines, meaning they farm it, they make it and they bottle it. Then they try to educate people about it. The name Ludor comes from his mother’s great grandmother. The family has a history in farming, mostly corn, beans and squash. (Those are the “three sisters” of native American agriculture.) ***** CWC is brought to you by Deodora Estate Vineyards. Visit Deodora [https://deodorawine.com/] to discover 72 acres in the Petaluma Gap that are producing exceptional Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Riesling. Sip the difference!  ***** THE LUDOR WINES 2024 CABERNET SAUVIGNON The next wine to taste is a 2024 Cabernet Sauvignon from the same property, the Weiler vineyard in the Sonoma Valley AVA. The vineyard is on the valley floor. It spent about 17 months in French oak before bottling. Dan says you can tell it was made classically and will age well. He suggests leaving a wine open for a few hours and if it improves, that means it will also improve with some years in the bottle. Five more years would be great for this wine but at least you should aerate it with a decanter. Cabernet Sauvignon is quite tannic so have a steak or something with it. About 30 years ago Napa and Sonoma wineries would release Cabernets for sale when they were roughly four and a half years old. Before tasting the fourth wine today, at minute 16, listen to Daedalus riff on the Yuma wine, for 20 seconds it’s a brainstorm the captures and expresses that wine’s character with just words. THE LUDOR WINES 2024 CABERNET FRANC Sal explains how they pay careful attention to the ripening of this wine. They have to sacrifice some grapes, since a big crop load doesn’t produce the ripening that they want. It responds to air faster than Cabernet Sauvignon.

Carol Shelton Gold Medal Winners

Carol Shelton brings her latest Gold Medal winners to California Wine Country with Dan Berger and Daedalus Howell. She produces Zinfandel and other varietals under her own label, Carol Shelton Wines [https://www.carolshelton.com/]. She has been on the show several times and her very first episode was this one in December of 2017 [https://calwinecountry.com/carol-shelton/]. Dan explains that Carol always does extremely well in wine competitions. “Gold medal, gold medal…” says Dan, and he says it’s because she uses fruit that she knows and elevates it every single vintage. The Wild Thing Zinfandel is the wine she is most known for. She started making it back when she was at Windsor Vineyards. It is a wild yeast fermentation, and it is organically grown. Without pesticides, the wild yeast grow on the skins of the grapes without any damage or weakness, so she can count on them to do the fermentation all the way through. The wine is “smooth and polished and long and slurpy,” she says. CWC is brought to you by Deodora Estate Vineyards. Visit Deodora [https://deodorawine.com/] to discover 72 acres in the Petaluma Gap that are producing exceptional Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Riesling. Sip the difference!  WILD THING ZINFANDEL Dan calls it silky and elegant, with good acidity and perfectly balanced. It has a little Carignane (14%) blended in, and a little Petit Syrah (7 or 8 %). This wine just got 94 points and a Gold Medal at the North Coast Wine Challenge. She won a total of 8 gold medals and two double golds, and one was a best in class. The half bottles are 375 ml. During the first decades of Carol’s career she worked for Windsor Winery and produced a lot of excellent wines. Dan got to know here when he was writing about the winery’s direct-to-consumer program, which was a new process then. She produced 200,000 cases a year of 48 different wines. “Everything was exemplary,” says Dan. Carol is one of the first women to get an Enology degree at UC Davis. In the early years she remembers there were about ten or fifteen women winemakers. She noticed more and more until today there are about sixty or eighty. She belongs to a roundtable of women in wine that meets monthly. ALBINI ZINFANDEL The second wine they taste is the 2023 Albini Zin, grown in Windsor. The vineyard is not old vines, it is only about 35 years old. She and her assistant winemaker taste every barrel. The first year they got that fruit, they both agreed that “the new Albini” was the best. Dan explains why Russian River Zinfandel is hard to find, because a lot of vineyards were converted to Pinot Noir. She also makes some other Zins from old vines and both styles are in demand. There is an undefinable spice component in Russian River Zin that you don’t find anywhere else, says Dan. This wine got 97 points and a double gold medal. Dan explains that a lot of Zinfandel suffers from having too much alcohol. He actually put a small amount of water in the glass to balance it and free the flavors. All of Carol’s wines are under 15% alcohol, usually about 14.5. She used to use Clark Smith’s process for removing some alcohol from wine. Dan remembers a clinical tasting session with Clark Smith. The “sweet spot” for flavor was more apparent at different alcohol levels, and his favorite was the lowest. Then they taste the third and fourth wines. Third is an old vine Carignane called Wireless because the vines are not growing on trellis wires. Fourth is an Alicante Bouschet. That is a grape named after the botanist who created it. For a consumer looking for something “off the beaten path” this is a good choice. It has a dark red color. It is unusual and makes a great gift. Dan would give it 10 years but with really good storage.

Martinelli Winery with Chris Sawyer and Courtney Wagner

Chris Sawyer is here as Melissa Galliani’s special guest, along with Courtney Wagner the winemaker at Martinelli Winery [https://martinelliwinery.com/]. Chris is getting ready for the Sonoma County Vintners Pour and Explore [https://sonomawine.com/pour-explore/] event on April 23. They will be tasting the best Pinot Noir in Sonoma County. He has been in the wine business locally since the 1970s and has seen its growth. Courtney Wagner is the winemaker for Martinelli Winery. They specialize in wines from the old vines on their property. Giuseppe and Luisa Martinelli settled in Forestville in the late 1880s. When they arrived and got the property, the Jackass Vineyard was already there. It is on a 60% slope which makes it maybe the steepest grade of a vineyard in the country. The Martinelli website [https://martinelliwinery.com/] has lots of images and videos of the vineyard. DRY FARMED FOR DECADES The vines have been dry-farmed for decades. They start to get good after 40 years. That’s quite different than Cabernet vines that only last about 40 years. Courtney Wagner followed a path into winemaking that began with studying music in high school. Then she thought of studying nutrition. Food science at Cal Poly led to wine. Chris Sawyer remembers the farmers market in San Luis Obispo on Thursdays. Courtney had a professor who suggested she work a harvest, to see if she really wanted to do that. She stayed with her grandparents in Napa and was able to work at Artesa. Chris thinks that they are making the best sparking wines in California now. Courtney has made Pinot Noir and Chardonnay everywhere she has been a winemaker. She did 32 different varietals at Wild Horse. Chris Sawyer remembers Sonoma County in the late ’70s and ’80s. Some of the innovators were starting Pinot Noir then, but Zinfandel was already well-established. Conditions can vary a lot from year to year, and so does the wine. 2022 was a hot year, and their last day of picking in 2022 was the first day of picking in 2023. They were worried that their foreign interns’ visas would expire before harvest was done. Because of that cold weather, these wines will age very well. The 2023 Bondi Pinot Noir is nice now, but it has the potential to be great up to 15 years in the future.

Erica Stancliffe, Deodora Estate Vineyards winemaker

Erica Stancliff, Deodora Estate Vineyards [https://deodorawine.com/] winemaker, joins Dan Berger and Daedalus Howell on California Wine Country. This is her fifth time as a guest on the show. Her very first time was this episode on February 20, 2019 [https://calwinecountry.com/trombetta-family-wines/] and her last time was May 23, 2025 with Doug Mryglod and Judy Phillips [https://calwinecountry.com/deodora-wine/], the owners of Deodora Estate Vineyards. The Artemis II crew just splashed down off the coast of San Diego just this minute, as the show is being recorded live, so we toast with some great Riesling. The wine they are tasting is the 2019 made by her friend Ashley Holland who was the first winemaker at Deodora, and who taught her that Riesling from Petaluma Gap could be gorgeous, aromatic, age-worthy and not sweet. Dan explains that you have to pick the fruit early enough to get the structure that will age well. The 2023 vintage represents Ashley passing the torch to Erica, who took over as winemaker that year at Deodora. 2023 WAS A COLD YEAR. 2023 was very cold on the Sonoma Coast, which made it a great vintage. Erica explains that the colder growing season is longer and that favors greater phenolic ripeness. Things need time to develop and if it is not so hot that you have to pick to keep the sugars from taking over, you have a chance for more interesting flavors. As the sugar comes in with ripeness, the acid drops. You don’t want too much of either one. But the phenolic compounds will provide flavors that may fall into balance. You can add a small amount of water to manage the alcohol content at the right time. Erica compares that to putting a little bit of water in the sauce while you’re cooking it. There are other additives in the winemaker’s toolkit, like yeast, which some winemakers need, especially in a wet year. They actually use grape skins to feed the yeast. After the two Rieslings, they will taste the 2018 early cask Pinot Noir. Erica was president of the Petaluma Gap wine growers’ alliance for a few years. In Petaluma Gap it is all about the wind. Dan explains that the Pacific Ocean has a wall of cold that is different than the Atlantic. The Petaluma Gap’s winds are persistent and not as strong as other places where geologic features increase the wind. The wind is regular but slow enough. PRIMORDIAL BUDS David Ramey believes that the Carneros is cool because of this same wind. Erica agrees. Every year, there are two vintages on the vines, the current year and the primordial buds of the next vintage. This causes some overlap in the influence of vintage years. Dan tells a story from the book Wine and War that he read years ago. In 1939 the wine was very poor but then the Germans demanded all the wine so they sent the swill. Erica knows the story, they hid all the good wine and the caves under Dijon are still there. They grow 5 clones of Pinot Noir. She compares clones to different color coats of the same breed of dog. They produce two Pinots, one they call early cask and another late cask. One is aged in wood for about 10 months. A late cask gets 14-16 months in the barrel. They can decide which direction the wines from the same vineyard can take. This late cask Pinot is also called over-vintage. Erica explains why crystal glasses raise the aromatics, more than glass. The surface of crystal is more jagged, and this is believed to raise more aromatics when you swirl the wine in the glass. They are tasting the 2018 early cask Pinot Noir. Daedalus suggests it is like opening a cigar box and finding a blood orange with cloves stuck in it.

Clark Smith Double Gold Again

clark smith 12 [https://calwinecountry.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/dan-and-clark-smith-150x150.jpg]https://calwinecountry.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/dan-and-clark-smith.jpgThis episode marks another Clark Smith [https://winesmithwines.com/] Double Gold win, on California Wine Country with Dan Berger and Daedalus Howell. This is also Clark’s 12th time as a guest on the show. Clark Smith’s first CWC episode was this one in 2017 [https://calwinecountry.com/clark-smith-winesmith/] . It was one of our very first shows! Today we can say he has filled the case, with his 12th guest appearance. No other guest has been on the show as often as Clark Smith, and few of them have won as many awards. One of the wines they will taste today is a recent Double-Gold medal winner. Clark begins by saying that he cut his teeth on European wine. That means wines that are balanced, that don’t have too much alcohol and will age well. “I don’t like to release them until they are ready and that means sometimes waiting 6 or 8 years in the barrel.” He doesn’t like woody wines. The barrels he owns are over 20 years old. deodora [https://calwinecountry.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/deodora-riesling-horiz-360p-blkt.jpg]https://deodorawine.com/ CWC is brought to you by Deodora Estate Vineyards. Visit Deodora [https://deodorawine.com/] to discover 72 acres in the Petaluma Gap that are producing exceptional Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Riesling. Sip the difference!  DOUBLE GOLD FOR THE PETIT VERDOT Clark is one of the only winemakers who makes wine from Norton, a grape that was discovered in Virginia in the 1920s. Hardly anyone grows Norton. Clark also makes a lot of uncommon wines, “goofy stuff.” His Petit Verdot just won a Double Gold from the American Institute of Wine. It is a 2018 that he just bottled, after six and a half years in the bottle. The problem with Zinfandel is that too many people buy it to drink right away. Some are ridiculously high in alcohol. The higher alcohol, the less the variety shows its signature. 17% alcohol is the equivalent of adding two tablespoons of vodka to your wine. Don’t do that. All of the flavor components are soluble in alcohol so the heat from the alcohol masks the aromas. Dan says that this is a problem for the heavy Napa Cabernets. They will be prune juice in 20 years and undrinkable, unlike this wine which is below 14% ABV.