Southampton - I spent the end of January tromping around Northern California going to wine conferences and wineries. Along with my tour through the California wine industry Symposiums I visited a few wineries including Seghesio Family Vineyards in Sonoma. The winery visits were part fun with a touch of business mixed in, all three visits were vastly different experiences, all family owned but of different sizes and renown.

The family has a sausage maker that cures sausage. (Miller)

The two conferences were held in Santa Rosa, so my winery visits began there, the closest being Seghesio Family Vineyards. The Seghesio's have been farming vineyards in the Alexander and Dry Creek Valley for more than a hundred years. Their tasting room and wine making facility are just on the outskirts of Healdsburg and give the visitor a feeling of a small yet beautifully appointed winery.

Yet much is hidden behind the tasting room in terms of capacity and serious tanks, barrels, pallets of wine and sausage. That's right - sausage. Though we came for the experience and the wine, the family has a sausage maker that cures sausage in a little room off the main tasting room. Along with the wine we were offered house made salami, if there had been some local cheese, I would have thought I was in Italy for the day.

Seghesio is heralded for their Zinfandels, and some of their best efforts come from small lots in Alexander Valley and Dry Creek Valley. My favorites are the Home Ranch and San Lorenzo, though the Old Vines and Cortina are very special as well. As usual my favorite wine from the Seghesio's is their 'tuscan' blend, Omaggio. Omaggio is 60 percent Cabernet Sauvignon blended with Sangiovese, both are from their Home Ranch vineyard that is adjacent to Rattlesnake Hill (a site famed for Zinfandel). The Seghesio wines come from regions and grapes that are known for making rich, high alcohol wines, and while the wines are, they have incredible finesse for such big wines. I believe this is a cultural phenomenon, as the whole Seghesio experience has a very Italian and European feel. They are food wines with plenty of acidity to balance a meal.

Seghesio is a fairly small winery in comparison to the producers commonly found on store shelves, but it is surprisingly large for what some people might call an allocated winery. Their flagship wine is the Sonoma County Zinfandel and that has a production of about 60,000 cases a year! The other wines are closer to 2,000 cases per year and then the small single vineyards are about a 300 case production. These are numbers that would make local Long Island winemakers either drool with envy or shudder with fear. Remember though, Zinfandel is big wine, ripe with plenty of wild-berry aromas and some spicy inflections and the palate will be deep and rich, perfect wines for the winter weather we are currently enjoying but watch that alcohol level. The wines can sneak up on you.