Wine Bar • Small Plates

PAULINE'S WINE BAR

The rumors are true! Pauline's wine bar is open, inspired by the wine, food and feel of Pauline's Pizza. We've been growing grapes and making our own Pauline's Pizza Reds for a decade now. In the wine bar, we're offering these and other favorite wines, with a featured list of Calaveras County Mourvedres.

Small plates in the wine bar incorporate produce from our Berkeley Garden and Star Canyon Ranch, as well as Pauline's pizza dough and speciality items.

Currently the menu includes braised Tuscan black kale, violin squash puree with chestnuts, a few select baby pizzas and Merguez sausage paired with peach chutney. Apertifs are available, pairing favorite wines with sodas, housemade lemonades and syrups.

The wine bar is also available on Tuesday and Wednesday evenings for private events, accommodating up to 40 guests. Please call us for details.

WINEMAKER NIGHTS
Second Thursdays

Next Winemaker Night
Thursday, February 11, 6-10 p.m.

Check back here for details on our first Winemaker Night of 2010. We'll be hosting one of our favorites in our wine bar and offering a unique educational experience as well as tastes of some great vintages.

Our recent winemaker night in early December featured Pauline's own Randy Nathan, who has been crafting Pauline's Pizza Reds for almost a decade. Randy brought barrel samples of our Mourvedres 2007-2009 and we offered tastes of this wine in development, before the bottling.

PAULINE'S PIZZA REDS

We've had such great success with tomatoes and chilies at our Star Canyon Ranch, we decided to try our hand at organic grapes!

In 1997, we put in our first plantings of Zinfandel and Syrah grapes, and over the next several years added additional varieties and honed the techniques of crushing and fermenting. We were lucky to have as advisors some of our favorite winemakers, including Doug Nalle, whose Zinfandel is a long-standing favorite at Pauline's.

California statute requires that all wines produced be made from juices of grapevines at least four years old, and in 2001, our vines were of "legal age" and we became a bonded winery. We grow six varieties on 15 acres spread over a South-facing hillside sloping from 1,000 to 1,500 feet. Hot summer days and cool nights favor the development of rich, complex sugars in the grape varieties we have chosen to cultivate. 2006 saw our best harvest yet with well-controlled yields (about 20 tons) and great quality amongst varieties.

This picture of our vineyards shows plantings of all six varietes we grow: Zinfandel, Merlot, Syrah, Mourvedre, Grenache and Cabernet Franc. Many of our wines are blends of these varieties. We also provide our organically grown grapes for the use of neighboring wineries, and in 2007, both Lavender Ridge Vineyards and Hatcher Winery won Gold medals for their 2005 Mourvedres in the professional division at the Calaveras County Fair wine tasting.

We price our wines reasonably and always offer two choices by the glass as well as half bottles (375 mL) of select varieties. Cases of our wines are available at a 10% discount.

CURRENTLY FEATURED ON PAULINE'S WINE LIST...

We are featuring a number vintages of Pauline's "Pizza Reds" on our wine list (amongst a number of other wines from California, France, Italy, Argentina, New Zealand and Australia):

• 2006 Mourvedre, Available by the bottle and by the glass. Many wineries in the Sierra Foothills are growing Mourvedre, one of the Rhone Varietals, which takes well to the mineral soils and fairly intense heat.

• House Reds: In the full bottle, our 2006 Merlin, a Merlot-Zinfandel blend with bright berry notes and a touch of white pepper on the finish, blended with a pizza dinner in mind. Also, we've got the 2004 Meritage in the half-bottle--a bold Grenache blend with distinctive flavors of wild blueberries