About us: Good Vitis is an effort to document and share our journey of finding great wine. The journey began when a neighbor introduced our editor-in-chief, Aaron Menenberg, to some very, very good stuff. The interest became a hobby and now a passion. Good Vitis is written by Aaron and designed by Emily Seifert, and often features the talent of photographer Amber Lee.
How we roll: Recently, we moved to a quarterly digital issue format. Each issue can be read on line or downloaded as a pdf, and runs tens of pages long and features a variety of articles. To help readers with finding great wine, we present our content in a variety of article formats:
- Try This Wine: A short-ish article about a specific bottle, region, or way to enjoy wine that includes an example bottle(s)
- Feature Article: A long profile of a winery or wine region, or a topic like wine tannins
- On Sustainable Wine: An exploration of a sustainability topic
- From The Archives: Pulling an oldie and goodie from the file cabinet
- Checking In: A short-ish report on something new about a winery which we’ve previously featured
- Shout Outs: The briefest of articles that offer a few wine recommendations with tasting notes
What is vitis? Vitis is the Latin word for “grape,” and most of the varietals of grapes used today to make wine are of the vitis vinifera family of grapes.
What is “good” vitis? It’s our slang for good wine, which is essentially a mission well-executed. We don’t believe that you need to spend $50 to get a good wine, though a good $50 wine will beat a good $20 bottle. Still, the reality is that there are a lot of bad $50 bottles and a lot of good $20 bottles, and the challenge is finding the good $50 and $20 bottles while avoiding the bad versions of both. The holy grail is when you open a bottle that overdelivers on what it is meant to be. And that grail is determined by the eye of the beholder: The best wine is the wine you like most.
Give me some examples: The $9 Borsao garnacha, a well-executed wine for mass production, global distribution, and real consistency year-to-year, qualifies as good vitis much as the $250 Ridge Monte Bello, a master class in the Bordeaux-style blend category that reflects its terroir and vintage and can improve over decades. Both of these are good vitis, and demonstrate the elements to look for when finding great wine: genuine, authentic products made by genuine, authentic people.
Review all our reviews: We try to cross-post the wine reviews we publish in Good Vitis on Cellar Tracker. You can read these reviews as well as reviews of wines we taste with our Good Vitis hat removed by visiting our Cellar Tracker Page.
