COVID restrictions are lifting in the Bay Area. It’s time to go wine tasting – San Francisco Chronicle

But with vaccinations ramping up and restrictions gradually lifting, it feels like a hopeful moment. Plus, the glorious weather we’ve had lately makes me long for a cold glass of rosé with a vineyard view. I can think of few better ways to celebrate the arrival of spring than with a day trip to Wine Country.

There are several things I want to tell you about our Top 25 Wineries to Visit list.

First, this is a collection of producers of delicious wines, but don’t mistake it for a conclusive ranking. People visit wineries for more than just the wine, and in creating this list we took into account ambiance, service, safety precautions and other factors that make a place fun to visit. These are destinations I’d recommend to my friends, wine geeks and novices alike.

Also, the list is not static; we’ll update it throughout the year, just as my colleague Soleil Ho will update her Top 25 Restaurants list. It’s an evolution of the 52 Wineries to Visit franchise that we used to publish every January, and we believe that keeping it alive and changing with the seasons will be a better service to you. Besides, many wineries have still not reopened, and others are open in such a limited capacity (for example, open only to wine club members) that we felt it would have been unfair to readers to include them.

Finally, you may note that outstanding California wine regions like the Sierra foothills and Paso Robles are missing from the Top 25 Wineries list. That’s because we’re limiting our geographic focus to the nine-county Bay Area, where our core readership lives. We’ll continue to provide coverage of wines made in all corners of the state, but for this list we’re keeping it close to home.

For those of us who live here, it’s easy to forget how lucky we are to live so close to some of the world’s greatest wine regions, a true rarity among U.S. metro areas. The shutdown over the past year has been a powerful reminder to not take it for granted.

I hope you’ll check it out. Cheers!

Wine of the Week

This week’s pick is a $15 white blend from Santa Barbara winemaker Graham Tatomer, a specialist in Austrian-inspired wines. Because Tatomer’s business depended so heavily on restaurant sales, he had to pull off a major pivot last spring when the pandemic hit and restaurants closed. The result of that pivot is a multi-vineyard blend of Gruner Veltliner and Riesling that he calls Hinter de Mauer, an exceedingly affordable wine that he calls his “COVID cuvee.” Read my full review.

What I’m reading

• Scientists are learning more about the way that COVID-19 affects people’s sense of smell and taste, and I was fascinated to learn that the virus has afflicted some survivors with parosmia, which essentially sounds like it makes everything, including romantic partners, smell terrible. Alyson Krueger has the story in the New York Times.

• Krista Scruggs, the owner and winemaker of Zafa, writes a first-person account of her path to becoming one of the only Black farmers to ever own land in Vermont.

• Alder Yarrow, who has been blogging about wine since 2004, looks at the state of his vocation. He tallied up the number of wine blogs still regularly publishing content and finds that it’s dropped precipitously over the last several years. “The wine blogosphere is a graveyard littered with decaying corpses,” writes Yarrow, who lives in the East Bay. It made me sad to see the numbers, and grateful that some true believers like Yarrow are still blogging!

Drinking with Esther is a weekly newsletter from The Chronicle’s wine critic. Follow along on Twitter: @Esther_Mobley and Instagram: @esthermob