Since much of my career involves writing about wine, I am inundated with invitations to visit wineries from San Diego to Santa Cruz, and to attend various tastings, dinners, conferences, and so forth. But because wine is only part of my job — and, more importantly, because I have a family that seems to enjoy my company with some regularity — I must turn down most of these invitations, whether they’re just brief visits to a nearby producer or multi-day excursions elsewhere.
But if the past two weeks are any indication, there’s one key to attracting my attention: Invite me to a vertical tasting, and I’ll take a sharper look at my schedule. On November 8, I tasted 18 vintages of Margerum Wine Company ’s flagship M5 red blend, and this past Tuesday — after watching the 49ers trounce the L.A. Rams with my mom in Santa Clara on Monday Night Football — I stopped by the Edna Valley to try 12 years of albariño produced by Tangent Wines .
For those not familiar with the term, a vertical involves tasting multiple vintages of the same wine in chronological order. Sometimes that is from old wines to young ones, as we did with the albariño, but usually, at least in my experience, it is younger to older, as we did with the M5.