Guild Winery News Today

“It’s the most horrific thing you’ve ever seen.” That’s what former Lodi resident Christiane Mello said on Sunday as she described the devastation from the recent fire that leveled the

FAIRFIELD-SUISUN, CALIFORNIA FTV: St. Amant Winery in Lodi carries on a family tradition with port-style wines [The Record, Stockton, Calif] Port likely isn’t the first wine style one associates with Lodi. But some of the best port-style wines in California have been crafted for decades by St. Amant, a family-owned-and-operated winery in Lodi. The story of how a wine named for the seaport city of Porto at the mouth of the Douro River in Portugal came to be made in the San Joaquin Valley and S...

Spencer developed a taste for port but expressions from California generally were one dimensional, in his opinion, made from international varieties such as zinfandel, petite sirah and cabernet sauvignon. So, Spencer grafted his vineyard over to five varieties native to Portugal’s Douro Valley with bud wood from the University of California, Davis, and sold the grapes to J.W. Morris Winery for its port program. In 1981, Spencer, who grew up on a dairy farm, found out J.W. Morris was going ba...