Wine Industry

Most wine regions are beautiful, but Oregon's Willamette Valley is exceptional. Dramatically situated between two mountain ranges, the Coast Range to the west and the Cascades to the east, the valley is a lush rural area, gently curvaceous landscape shaped by volcanic events, then polished by abundant Pacific moisture. The result is a sensuous terrain of smooth-shouldered, voluptuous hills and languorous green valleys lined with fragrant forests of spruce, fir and pine.

Last summer, local winemaker David "Merf" Merfeld, of Northstar Winery threw a party at his home here in the southeastern quadrant of Washington state.

Let's agree to set aside the grim recessionary landscape for the moment: The time has come for bubbles. There is simply nothing like a glass of sparkling wine to set this season apart. Welcoming, smile-inducing, instantly festive, bubbles give every holiday occasion a lift. Of course, not every occasion is the same: The wine for the office party, the New Year's party and the family toast aren't necessarily going to come from the same bottle. Nor should they.

LA RIOJA, a breathtaking, mountainous area in northern Spain, produces some of the best wines in Europe. But a part of it -- Rioja Alavesa -- is now producing something else, too: architecture. Rioja Alavesa is in the country's Basque region, south of Bilbao, the home of Frank Gehry's curvaceous stone, glass and titanium Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. Gehry's creation helped drive urban renewal in Bilbao, regenerating the city with innovative architecture.

IMAGINE a world in which the best sparkling wines come from Surrey in southern England, not Champagne. A world where Monterey Bay is home to California's best Cabernet Sauvignons and Sweden produces world-class Rieslings. It's not science fiction. A growing number of climatologists are warning that by the turn of the next century, such a radically altered wine map could be the new reality.

A large harvest this fall has left wineries loaded with the top-selling red varieties just when they are trying to move large surpluses left over from 2005's record grape crush -- to the benefit of wine aficionados. Winemakers squeezed almost 1.9 million tons of red wine grapes last year, according to a joint state and federal agricultural report released Friday. Although that's 16% less than the previous year, it is still the second-largest on record.

A Colorado wine merchant was sentenced Monday to two years' house arrest and five years' probation after pleading guilty to federal fraud charges for bilking clients out of millions of dollars for wine futures that he never delivered. Prosecutors asked for a sentence of seven to nine years in federal prison. But attorneys for Ronald Wallace, 49, who has Crohn's disease, argued that he was too sick to be treated in prison. U.S. District Judge Consuelo Marshall agreed. She ordered him to pay $11.

UNLESS you've been living under an air-conditioned rock for the last couple of decades, you may have noticed signs that the world seems to be getting warmer. It's been widely reported that the trend is likely to wreak some interesting havoc upon California's wine regions in the not-too-distant future, leaving Napa and parts of Sonoma with conditions that resemble the Central Valley.

A castle is rising south of this small resort town that promises to be Napa Valley's most lavish tourist draw. Or a vintner's fortune-busting folly. In April, Daryl Sattui, whose winery and deli a few miles away in St. Helena are a popular picnic stop, plans to open to the public a sprawling, medieval-style castle and second winery that he has been building for 12 years.

A colorful wine industry entrepreneur has been accused of setting a $200-million fire at a Vallejo wine storage warehouse to cover up a scheme to steal and then sell his clients' wine, federal authorities announced Monday. The October 2005 blaze at Wines Central, which rocked Northern California's wine industry, destroyed millions of bottles of premium wine, obliterating entire wine libraries as well as some highly rated blends that had not yet been tasted by the public.