Because we put so much energy into it, it's easy to forget that the Nopa beverage program is not immediately understood by many of our guests. Internally, words like Feature, Insert and Spiritual are commonly used. They are important words in the vocabulary of our restaurant, but more importantly, an essential part of our identity. The Spiritual an...

Bosco Agostino is a winery in the region of Alba, a town in the famed Piedmont wine region in northwest Italy. For oenophiles and gourmands (the town is also revered for their white truffles) the Alba brand is an impeccable one. Last month, Arron, one of our managers, took a trip to Italy, and predictably, allotted some time for the sacred gastrono...

I like watching a winemaker evolve and mature.  There has been a movement over the past number of years wherein a number of young winemakers have started to push the boundaries of wine in California.  I suppose it is a natural shift – a swinging back of the pendulum – because whereas 15 years ago people where pushing the bound...

  Click Here to Listen to the CUESA Podcast CUESA, the Center for Urban Education about Sustainable Agriculture is undergoing a rebranding of sorts. They want to focus more on CUESA, the word (pronounced,   kway-sa) rather than the entire proper name. That was the first thing I learned on last Friday morning, June 22nd, when I met their E...

  You wanna be like Al? Or for that matter, Merrell? You gotta start getting ready for work at noon. Maybe sooner. If-and only if- you can cook like them (though, let's be honest..), then you must do it all day. Chopping, supreming, paring, sorting, picking, plucking. Washing. Then work starts. You surf waves of food for eight hours. Perhaps a...

In Hermitage, the name Chave is as important as any other, and is perhaps held in the highest esteem. Since 1481, the family has made wines in the famed Northern Rhone Appellation. Hermitage is the hill on the eastern side of the Rhone River, where inky, ageworthy Syrah has dominated for centuries. Chave owns about half of the vineyards on that hil...

For some reason, Oregon Pinot Noir has endured a surprisingly tenuous relationship among buyers in California. To be fair, California wines aren't exactly pervasive in Oregon, but for a region that has staked its reputation on wines that are made in a European fashion--that is to say (typically) low in alcohol and with a sense of pla...

  The story of Mas de Daumas Gassac reads like a fairy tale. A newlywed couple, upon learning that the farmland they have purchased happens to have the unique soil structure and microclimate of a grand cru vineyard site, sets out to produce a wine to prove it.  The resulting wines have few, if any, direct comparisons.  The red is pr...

  Finally! Our first published (but not recorded) podcast of 2012. Appropriately, our first podcast of the year is with Tomatero Farm. Next month (April 17th to be exact), they'll be selling produce in front of Nopa. The podcast was with co-owner Adriana Silva. Despite the changing faces of farmers, when you close your eyes, Ad...

  Foremost, a disclaimer: You should listen to this audiocast if one of the following statements pertains to you: 1. You like Little Dragon 2. You've never heard of Little Dragon 3. You've heard of Little Dragon, but think you don't like them 4. You like awesome music Awesomeness Personified. Click here to listen to the podcast Wow ...

The Muse What a fantastic name for a cocktail! The Muse is the second of three visits to Cognac from French Trinity. When bartenders take inspiration from a cocktail, its sometimes referred to "a nod" or "a wink" to the forefather. With that, The Muse owes some gesture to Charles H. Baker's, Remember the Maine. The Rem...

The Monarch as a Manhattan replacement is easy to conceptualize. Sub cognac for bourbon (or better still, rye). The vermouth role is played by Bonal Quinquina. Bitters, orange bitters. Yanni Goes in With Bonal When guests survey our cocktail list, one of the most common questions is, "What is Quinquina?" Except they pronounce it phonetically, and ...

* This post also contains audio podcast. If you would like to listen to the podcast, you can simply click here. Please enjoy! Though its almost over, October is, and was, Salmon Month. On the 13th of this month, Nopa participated in an inaugural citywide benefit, “Dine Out for Wild Salmon”. The night was organized by the Salmon Aid Fou...

Yesterday, I waxed on about the earthy delights of pu-erh tea. You can read about it here. In this post, I take the easy route, making analogies between wine and pu-erh, and also offer tasting notes. As we tasted, at some point the dialog predictably shifted to wine--not surprising as pu-erh is undoubtedly the wine of the tea world. It improves wi...

Yesterday was pretty awesome. I popped in to Nopa to upload video from the Flipcam to our hard drive. I was making space for our tasting with Tom Bulleit on Thursday. I was surprised to see Xandre there too since it was his day off. I soon discovered he had an appointment with our tea purveyor to taste tea along with Brooke and Chris. The discussi...

Scheurebe Podcast: Click Here One of my favorite parts about working at Nopa is the opportunity to work with and learn from immensely intelligent people who are dedicated to their craft. For us, that often means the study of artisan food and beverages. Among the top of the list, I would name Wine Director, Chris Deegan. For those that are familiar ...

Welcome to Part 2 of the 2009 Beaujolais retrospective. Below is a profile of three of the wines from this vintage that have granted me a new respect for the year, and offered yet another reminder on the importance of bottle maturation. If you need a primer, check out Part 1 here. Enjoy! 2009 Thévenet Grain & Granite Régnié...

2009 Beaujolais. People couldn't get enough of it. Jancis Robinson, whose wine opinion I value more than any other on the planet, called 2009 "The Year of Beaujolais". Countless other writers and critics were early adopters compounding the fervor of the vintage. If the title of this post makes no sense to you, I will quickly provide a diatribe on p...

For self proclaimed activists or at least participants in the local food movement, this was very cool. Xandre was giddy. I was too, actually. It was a weird feeling to be in awe of someone in the same way you'd be in awe of a favorite athlete or musician, only to realize the subject is a soft spoken (though outspoken) academic in their mid fifties....

Last Friday, I had the pleasure of interviewing Brian Barneclo. I've wanted this interview for sometime now as I've been a fan of his long before we ever met. Like many of you, my first introduction to his work was the vibrant mural he did for Nopa. And since half of my waking hours are in the presence of his work, this affinity is a good thing. I...

55-65 Million years. That’s an estimate on the age of vitis vinifera, the grape vine that produces wine. My friend Greg Mu once told me that all plants aspire to be grape vines. It is not an intuitive thought, but the more I considered it, I think he was right. They are a resourceful, beautiful and resilient force of nature. Their roots g...

This year, Chez Panisse turns 40. It is an unbelievable milestone for any business, but especially a restaurant, whose lifespan should be judged in dog years. Chez Panisse is embracing their long strange trip by hosting a series of celebrations. Naturally, these events are to benefit the Edible Schoolyard, which celebrates its own 15-year milestone...

One of the great things about the wine world, or the world surrounding any artistic endeavor, is the countless talented individuals toiling away at a personal vision out of sight of the general public. Because the production levels are usually miniscule for such people, it is possible to overlook their work, even if one happens to be studying the ...

"Do you know where your food comes from?" If a nopa guest had posed this question to me a few weeks ago, I would have answered an enthusiastic, confident "yes." As a server at nopa, I can tell you where we get our blood oranges in the winter and our tomatoes in the summer. I know what our pigs eat and how our chickens are raised. Of course I know w...

I recently watched Les Blank's engrossing documentary, All In This Tea, which follows importer David Lee Hoffman into China in pursuit of fine teas. Shot in the late 1990s into the mid 2000s, it's clear that David was a pioneer, scouring the mountains of Anxi County. Throughout, he determinedly seeks direct relationship with farmers as well as focu...

We have just rolled out a new set of featured wines on the wine list here at Nopa. We are offering four wines of Rocche dei Manzoni by the glass. Rocche dei Manzoni is located in Monforte d'Alba within the Barolo DOCG of Piedmont in Northwest Italy. The wines of Piedmont are notoriously age worthy. They are often consumed young before they have a c...

<!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:"Times New Roman"; panose-1:0 2 2 6 3 5 4 5 2 3; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:50331648 0 0 0 1 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt...

Stephen Tanzer has a new website called Winophilia. It is a more broadly focused sister to his International Wine Cellar publication and website. On the Winophilia site he has a section called Sommelier Roundtable in which he poses a question every few weeks to a number of sommeliers around the country. He recently sent out a question about the rel...

Natural wine week has arrived here in San Francisco, and it is definitely a brand new event as compared to last year. Last year the focus was on the intellectual - trying to define natural wine, deciding what qualified and what didn't, a symposium discussing the 'rules' of natural wine. There were a limited number of people trying to get a maximu...

Version:1.0 StartHTML:0000000188 EndHTML:0000006441 StartFragment:0000002379 EndFragment:0000006405 SourceURL:file://localhost/Users/chrisdeegan/Documents/wine%20writing/ vouette.doc <!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:"Times New Roman"; panose-1:0 2 2 6 3 5 4 5 2 3; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:aut...

For nearly two months now we have featured Chilean wines at both Nopa and Nopalito. Our goal was to remind our guests that many communities in Chile are still in need of help and also to raise money for the Levantando Chile Fund. Between the two restaurants we raised over 4000 dollars and spread the word about helping Chile to thousands of our fr...

For our purposes, White Dogs are clear spirits bottled at or near still strength. The benefit here, aside from more punch per ounce, is that there is nowhere for the distiller to hide. Any fault - from the malting, the brewing (especially brewing!) and on through the distilling - will be readily evident. We are currently offering two White Dogs fro...

From the Ampelography Reminder Department: You may have missed it, but a study published Mid-December in the online Biology Letters, revisited an earlier paper examining the varied offspring of Gouais Blanc and Pinot (usually and probably Noir, but sometimes the genetically equivalent Blanc and Gris). The 1999 study, published in Science and author...

The short story Scotch Whisky shelves are full of labels touting the used barrels that previously bore the whisky. 'Finished,' 'ACE'd,' 'Matured' - these words all used to imply luxury and added value. The story runs a quite a bit deeper than these talking points though, and is best couched in a little history lesson.Great Britain's relationship wi...

It started, as it often does, with a mention in a piece read on Eric Asimov‘s "The Pour" ; it ended, as it almost never does, with a bottle of Alain Brumont's Pacherenc du Vic-Bilh Sec. Suddenly, I was seeing Petit Corbu everywhere, or so it seemed to me. There it was again, being poured in a glossy, two page Saveur spread - at Joël Robu...

The featured producers for Natural Wine Week will be Unti Vineyards from the Dry Creek Valley and The Natural Process Alliance. From Unti Vineyards we will be pouring the Cuvee Foudre, Syrah and Zinfandel by the glass. Mick Unti will be here at Nopa on Tuesday, August 25th to discuss these wines (or any other topics covered in his famous newslette...

During the week of August 24th through August 30th, Nopa will be taking part in the first annual Natural Wine Week here in San Francisco. We will be featuring two California producers who we feel are adhering to the principals of natural wine making. (This is an officially undefined term, so one topic of discussion for the week will be: what is n...

There are so many factors to know and consider and learn about in wine these days. The variety, the vintage, the vineyard, the plot within the vineyard, the producer, the application or absence of oak and the type if used, the consultant, the enologist, the rootstock, the clonal or masal selection of the vine, the type of trellising, the level of ...

There are some exciting newcomers on the gin shelf behind the bar. We have been big supporters of the new American craft-distilling movement since we opened, featuring gins from Aviation, No. 209, Sarticious and Junipero next to the more traditional London Drys. The past few months though, have brought a new crop deserving some attention as well....

I love the northern end of the Napa Valley. I imagine it is more what the entire valley was like 20 years ago. It feels homegrown. Perhaps it is the geography – the way the valley narrows as the mountains close in on both sides, creating a more intimate feeling than the vast, flat fields of grapes farther south. Whatever the reason, I am ...