Swig Coach On Tour

I haven’t been to Hilton Head in over 20 years so this is a shot in the dark. If you want to offer a strong wine program in a destination with significant seasonal peaks you need the financial strength to “weather” the off-season, hopefully through a dedicated core of locals.

I spent about two hours researching the wine scene in and around Augusta National for Masters Week. While I’ve heard that the Club itself has a fabulous wine program that I hope to profile one day (got about as much chance of that as I do playing there), the rest of the area seems to be devoid of good wine with two noteworthy exceptions.

San Antonio finds itself at the center of the sporting universe this weekend, hosting both The Final Four and The Valero Texas Open. We know a lot of alcohol will be consumed but “steer” yourself to our selections if you care about wine.

I wouldn’t have necessarily guessed but turns out Houston has the best restaurant wine scene of anyplace in the entire South. But it’s Texas after all, so first you gotta wade through the herd of national and regional steakhouse chains.

You can paint the town red, white, and rose at the Valspar with these recommendations.

The 17th gets all the love on the golf course, but the 19th at Sawgrass is pretty, pretty good as well…

Wine is not the first thing that springs to mind when considering a trip to Orlando. A recent article I read suggested it’s the home of “fighting varietals:” inexpensive wines prominently labeled cab or chardonnay. Our own research came to a similar conclusion.

With a few exceptions, the big name restaurants in the Palm Beach area tend not to post their wine lists online. The glittering exception is La Sirena, so kudos to them…

San Diego is a fabulous destination for wine as is the case with just about everything else you can do there. Within a half-hour of Torrey Pines, not accounting for any tournament-related traffic, you have an overload of great-sounding options.

It feels somewhat sacrilegious to be writing about wine at the WM Phoenix Open, the PGA Tour’s homage to Oktoberfest. After all, I never see anyone showering the pros on 16 with pinot grigio.

After writing about wine lists in 40+ cities near PGA Tour stops, I’ve stumbled into Wine Nirvana, namely the compact area between Carmel and Monterey.

San Diego is a fabulous destination for wine as is the case with just about everything else you can do there. Within a half-hour of Torrey Pines, not accounting for any tournament-related traffic, you have an overload of great-sounding options.

Like a desert mirage a lot of high end restaurants in the Palm Springs area don’t post their lists online. So we went looking under the desert rocks to see what we could find for you.

After just covering Maui for the Sentry TOC I reset my expectations to the upside for Oahu and the Sony Open in Honolulu.

The 2025 Sentry takes place in a sobered climate a year-and-a-half after the devastating and heartbreaking Lahaina wildfires. It’s no longer the Tournament of Champions, but there’s still a clear wine champion in Maui at Merriman’s. How do they do it?

Our review of the wine scene in the so-called Golden Isles has been immeasurably enhanced through conversations with three accomplished local sommeliers. Sneak peak for golfers: Sea Island Resort (above) still rules.

If you’ve been following me at all through the PGA season, you know I do my homework, which typically involves googling an entire city’s collection of restaurants and stores in search of the best wine.

If going to Jackson is good enough for Johnny Cash, it’s good enough for us. And judging from the restaurants in Jackson we surveyed, not going would be a mistake.

As noted elsewhere in these pages, California cab is the American golfer’s wine of choice. So when the Tour visits Napa, you better believe there’s great golf-appropriate wine everywhere you turn.

It’s fitting for our mission that the culmination of the PGA Tour and FedEx Cup seasons happens in Atlanta.

I have one word for you regarding the wine scene in Memphis…corkage.

I was surprised by the seeming plethora of wine options in Greensboro. Maybe it’s the presence of multiple colleges or the way it sits in a belt between Winston-Salem and Durham, or maybe it’s just a happening place.

There is no shortage of options in the Twin Cities for a good wine experience. And while it’s hard to comment on an entire metro area, I always felt as if greatness remained just out of reach. I’ll just go sulk in the corner at i Nonni, assuming I can find the wine list…

What comes first, supply or demand? The question occurred to me as I googled the wine scene in the Quad Cities early in the week of the John Deere Classic.

I wouldn’t guess from afar that Detroit would be a strong wine town. Maybe it is, but you’d never know it from what you can see online…

Hartford frankly should be a better wine destination than it actually is. Still, there’s one strong list downtown and a sprinkling of decent options clustered in West Hartford.