BEST VALUE: 2007 ZAP Tasting
The Wine Corner by Pierre du Mont
The Piedmont Post, Piedmont, CA
February 28, 2007
2004 TEIRA Sonoma County Zinfandel
This small winery with its no frills label and sensible price has produced one of the best values of the tasting. It is made in the medium-bodied Dry Creek style with great balance and a light supple touch on the palate.

"Every year I look forward to it with almost equal measures of anticipation and dread. The "it" I refer to is the ZAP tasting - one of the world's largest wine events and without a doubt the world's largest single varietal tasting. ZAP stands for Zinfandel Advocates and Producers and every January for the past 16 years they have been calling all Zinfandel fanatics to San Francisco to sample America's home grown favorite. I anticipate the ZAP tasting because I love Zinfandel and the dread only comes from the sheer size of the event - 300 wineries and 9,000 tasters. I bring my own set of rules to the event. I don't write about the big three: Ridge, Ravenswood and Rosenblum because everybody who loves Zin already knows how great they are. I search for very high quality, small production wines that many people may not be familiar with. This year I'm glad to report I came across some real gems. The 2004 TEIRA Sonoma County Zinfandel is selected as the best-valued wine from the jumbo San Francisco Zinfandel exposition." 		 
"In the Kitchen with Narsai David"
Narsai David
Food & Wine Editor: KCBS
Aired: January 15, 2007
2005 Teira Sonoma County Sauvignon Blanc
Delicate aromas of the freshest spring peaches with an herbaceous backnote, crisp and delicious on the palate. Really dry, and elegantly light, this would be perfect with oysters.
2004 Teira Sonoma County Zinfandel
Good, rich, red color. Lots of raspberry aromas follow right onto the palate. Really juicy fruitiness lingers on the palate. If you like lots of fruit, this is your wine.
Both wines sell for $14.99 and are made from grapes in the Dry Creek Valley and Russian River Valley. Very fair values. 		 
Connoisseur's Guide to California Wine
Volume 31, Issue 3, January 2007
87 points + one star
2004 Teira Sonoma County Zinfandel
Dry Creek and Russian River Valley Zin is blended here to create a ripe, fruity wine focused on blackberries with a touch of dry spice. The wine leans toward the tannic and well-muscled side, but its alcohol is kept in check and everything about this attractive offering says "table wine." Enjoy it now or let it age a couple of years to gain a bit of polish. GOOD VALUE. 		 
Backroom Wines, Napa, CA
After trying this Zin three times now, I'm more convinced as ever that the Teira Zinfandel Sonoma County 2003 is as good a value as "big" Cal red gets. Fruit from Dry Creek and Russian River Valleys, where the most smooth and velvety Zins are typically made. My notes read: nose of black cherry and currant, whiff of toasty oak, malt and cocoa. Big mulberry burst of fruit, medium to full body, good structure at the end (i.e. it's got some nice tannins). Very nice flavor, could see this selling for $18-$20/bottle easy. 		 
Connoisseur's Guide to California Wine
Volume 30, Issue 7: May 2006
"Best Buys in the Market"
2003 Teira Wines Zinfandel Sonoma County
88 points + one puff
Sporting a nice mix of ripe berries and creamy oak sweetness in its aromas, this nicely balanced wine firms up on the palate and carries its moderately rich, never pushy flavors with uncommon solidity for Zinfandel. It is a wine more likely to serve well with savory pork roasts than with red-sauced pastas and should hold up well for several years yet with bottle age. GOOD VALUE 		 
Oliver's Market, Sonoma County, CA
"Renay's Wine of the Week"
2003 Sonoma County Teira Zinfandel
A very well balanced Zinfandel. If I had to guess this wine blind, I would have assumed it was from the Napa Valley where typically you get a more elegant style. Lovely blackberries, plum and mocha fill the very well structured palate. One of the best values I have come across in quite some time. A must try. 		 
San Francisco Examiner
Good Life Grocery, San Francisco, CA
"A Great Bottle of Wine"
With a total production of just 600 cases, Teira 2003 Sonoma County Zinfandel is well worth searching out. With 96% Zinfandel and 4% Petite Sirah, it exhibits a fragrant blueberry, cherry nose. The palate is another berry burst of raspberry and boysenberry with a well-balanced Zin structure and acidity. A delightful, long-on-the-finish Zinfandel that will make you want more. In a word... seductive! 		 
PRIMA Ristorante & Negozio di Vini, Walnut Creek, CA
February/March Newsletter, 2006
Sweet jammy fruit and more than a whiff of Sonoma County bramble and rhubarb define this very tasty mid-weight, nicely made Zin. Good Zin is a good thing and good Zin at less than $15 a bottle is even better! This negociant wine is made by old friend Bill Knuttel (of Chalk Hill fame) and assembled by industry veterans Dan Donahoe and Alexis Woods. 		 
San Francisco Chronicle Wine Section - April 15, 2004
Instant vintners - Who needs a winery when you can buy finished wine and slap on your own label?
You know the dream. First you pick up a few acres of land in Napa Valley. Next you plant a vineyard, and then you build a winery. Pretty soon you're selling a few thousand cases of premium wine each year, enough to keep you in clover the rest of your life.

See full article >		  
Connoisseur's Guide to California Wine
88 pts - THEA Joaquin 2000 Zinfandel
If admittedly suggesting a distant note of Ruby Port in both its very ripe, decidedly chocolatey aromas and deep, solidly stuffed flavors, this mouthfilling wine shows surpringly good fruit and its interesting mix of creamy oak, berries, orange rind and cocoa tags it as one of the better high-ripeness/high-alcohol Zinfandels around. It is low in tanin but kept in balance by nicely placed acidity, and it never assumes the heavy, half-syrupy style that its initial aromas foretell.		  
7 x 7 Magazine, San Francisco - April 2003
21st Century Wine - No Vineyard Necessary
With a glut of grapes, Thea Wine Company is embracing the French tradition of the negociant

In the summer of 2002, Dan Donahoe decided to take on two of California's most deeply entrenched, and painfully stunting, wine myths: That varietal wines are superior to blended ones, and that a producer needs to own a winery or vineyard to be creditable. Blending varietals of grapes or even grapes from different regions has long been a proven way to make better wines more cheaply.

This way of making wine is nothing new. There's already a term to describe someone who makes wine without a winery or vineyard: Negociant. A time-honored and respected profession in France, negociants in Burgundy and the Rhone Valley often produce some of those regions' best wines. Familiar names such as Guigal as well as Jadot and Duboeuf have become standards of reliability in places where wine quality can be spotty.

The advantage to being a negociant in wine is flexibility and mobility. If it was a bad year in Napa, negociants can get their juice from Paso Robles, where the weather was better. Or they can blend Sonoma and Mendocino fruit. Light on their feet, they don't have to worry about the burden of owning a winery, a vineyard or full-time employees - all financial savings that get passed on to the customer.

Due to over planting in California and around the world during the high-flying '90's, bulk wine has poured into the market, driving down prices. "Now's a perfect time for a negociant to enter the market," says Bill Turrentine, one of the state's largest bulk wine brokers. "When most people talk to me about getting into the wine business, they talk about spending millions on building a winery and planting a vineyard," he says. "I tell them to start out this way. Check it out and see if they can make a good wine and sell it."

That's precisely the route that some emerging smaller labels, such as Thea Wine Company, are taking. After his daughter, Thea, was born in March 2001, Dan Donahoe quit his tech job to return part-time to the John Walker & Company wine shop on Sutter Street, where he'd worked almost a decade before. In between jobs, he devised a business plan to create his own wine, a project bolstered by his scrupulous maintenance of his wine contacts and the fact that his wife's parents were the founders of Clos du Bois. A year later, he received a call from a winemaker he knew and was offered several barrels of exceptional wine from the 2000 harvest that the winemaker wasn't going to bottle himself. Donahoe snapped it up and six months later, he had a lush and complex Zinfandel available for $24 a bottle, named Thea. Have no doubt of its quality; the wine can be found on the wine lists at Gary Danko, Rubicon, Elisabeth Daniel, Farallon, Bacar and Indigo.

"Thea will be different from vintage to vintage," says Donahoe. "I'm going to be looking for wines from Dry Creek, Napa, Paso Robles, wherever I can find the best juice that year." The key to his success, he says, is his network of winemaking contacts. "I meet winemakers every day. I taste their wine, tell them my plan, and ask if they may have any wine they'd like to sell. Frequently, they do. The strategy is to taste the barrel sample before it ever gets to the bulk brokers."

And that, says Bill Turrentine, is the reality of the grape glut. While it's a hospitable time for a young enthusiast to make their way into the wine business as a negociant, it's also the most competitive marketplace in the history of the American wine industry. "Wine is always either easy to source and hard to sell, or hard to source and easy to sell," says Turrentine. "As a negociant, you have to be a good blender, a good businessman and a good marketer. Fail at any one of those and you're going to have a tough time."

  
Teira™ Wines  ::  415.613.8399  ::  daniel@teirawines.com