Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/29638
AWARDS L to R: Larry DiPietro (WFE Vice President of Sales, Western Division), Bobby Goodman (Brittany Sales Co.), Mark Halpern (Brittany Sales Co.) and Richard Booth (Southern Wine & Spirits of Florida). Welcome to the Blogosphere: Karl’s Corner L to R: Eric Wente (Fourth Generation Winegrower), Chris Churchill (Churchill Cellars, Toronto, ON) and Michael Parr (Wente Family Estates, VP International Sales). When you are a fifth-genera- tion winemaker at a label as well-respected as Wente Vineyards, paying homage to your family’s heritage is a no-brainer. Fifth Generation Winemaker Karl Wente honors the foundation laid by his grandfather (and name- sake), the first Karl Wente, in a recent blog entry. Check out this excerpt below, and for the full entry, visit www. wentevineyards.com/blog. My grandfather, the first The first Karl Wente. Karl Wente, was only 49 years old when he suddenly passed away in 1977. Even so, it was not before he could L to R: Larry DiPietro (WFE VP Sales, Western Division) with Richard Crossland (Southern Wine & Spirits of Colorado). 102 / the tasting panel / april 201 1 leave my father, aunt and uncle—Eric, Carolyn and Philip Wente—a truly great gift and legacy: an extremely productive 550-acre Monterey vineyard in the ultra-premium-quality sub-region now known as the Arroyo Seco AVA, which he first began planting in 1962. Today that property has grown to 800 acres, and I’m simply amazed, whenever I walk through it, to think what incredible prescience of mind grandfather must have had when he selected this particular site in the Salinas Valley. A vineyard steeped in extremely rocky, well-drained soil—something all the best wine grapes traditionally love—yet rich enough in silty loam for vines to thrive with naturally abundant quality, many of them to this day.