We take on Napa Valley!

I will say right here at the start, Saturday and Sunday involved a LOT of wine!  We all agreed Monday morning that we had to admit we probably wouldn't have any wine for a night or two.  But we had a wonderful time with lots of laughter, reminiscence, good wine and fun tastings.

We did the same thing Heather and I did on our first visit to Napa which was to go to Raymond Winery (at 10:30 a.m. Saturday morning!) and make our own bottle of wine.  They give you four little bottles of four different wines (all Cabs) and you taste all of those and get told about what you're supposed to be tasting and then you start mixing your three tries at getting a wine you like.  You keep track of how many milliliters you use of each one each time so that when you've done all three you have the percentages to give to the blending room.  You go in there and while the blender is making your wine, you work with another person who takes the photo you want to use for the label, uploads it and works with it and various fonts (you choose) to add a winery name, a wine name, dates, whatever you want on the label.  Then you cork it in a gizmo that if you're strong enough you bring down to push the fat cork into the skinny bottle, you then go to the next equipment which puts that foil top on the bottle and shrinks it to fit with no air pockets.  Then you apply your label and - Bob's your uncle - there's your wine.  So here is a picture of OUR wine.

January is on the left with her May King - a picture of one of her several green men plaques.  I'm in the middle with Lazy River - a picture I forgot I had taken on one of Peggy's and my outings.  We drove out to see the covered bridge in Milton and you can see just a bit of it in the picture (which I've shown the flat photo below.  And the third one is Heather's - to appreciate hers you need to have the bottle in hand so you can turn it a little to see the brown alpacas rear.  It's a delightful photo and she named her wine Heads or Tails with a sub-heading of "A flipping good wine" which seems pretty perfect to me.

I took this in color of course, but have been enjoying some of Chris's black and white treatments that I decided to do the same to this photo.

So that was our blending.  Then, of course, we went to their shop and had to taste some other wines there.  After all, wine tasting was our mission and responsibility!  We also wandered around outside for a while - such a beautiful day.  They have really interesting grounds with little beds of this and that growing in different types of soil and compost and have little signs telling about it.  I enjoyed the chickens and tried to get a video of two of the roosters fighting over (ahem) a hen.  But I'm not quick enough for videos.  I got a photo of them though with their neck feathers puffed out before they lunged at each other.  I had to reduce it so much it's gone a little fuzzy but you can get the idea.  Finally one of them just sort of sheepishly walked away with a "shoot, I didn't want her anyway" saunter.

We'll leave them to it and move on to just some scenery.

 Pretty much every piece of land that doesn't have a structure on it is a vineyard - small or large.  These will be in full leaf I suppose in the next month or two.

 This was so pretty - I knew the photo wouldn't do it justice but one has to try.

Another very pretty bush behind their dog kennel which is done up in grand style but I have a photo of it in my 2013 post about Raymond's so didn't take another one.

I will have to admit here that I don't have any pictures from the other two wineries we visited for tastings on Saturday.  They were the Markham and Trinitias which is the tasting room at the very large resort/hotel where we stayed.  Markham was such a fun experience.  Always at the tasting, there is a sommelier who takes you through it and I've not had a bad one yet but some of them are more fun than others and Sophia, our sommelier at Markham, was really wonderful.  When that happens, you tend to just keep tasting to keep the fun going so we ingested a lot of wine there.  We had lunch between Raymond's and Markham so we were prepared.  And even though I can't seem to remember where we had our lunch, it and the wine were enough that we just ended up getting a couple of pizzas fairly late Saturday night.

Then Sunday, our morning tasting (we told ourselves both days it was 1:30 p.m. where we live) was again at with Trinitias but in what they call their tasting library.  That's where they bring out the big guns and give you their older reserve type wines.  And at that one we each had a nice little plate of three very good cheeses, a small bunch of grapes, couple of strawberries, walnuts and maybe that's all.  So it was quite nice.

Then it was on to V. Sattui winery - Heather's favorite.  We visited there in 2013 and it's really a big business.  They have everything - stuff to eat, a deli or gourmet style "grocery", and of course lots and LOTS of wine.  It was a nice tasting session although our sommelier, although quite pleasant, had me feeling a little sorry for him.  I think he probably spent a lot of his adulthood trying to break into acting and as we did our tasting and chatting he started telling us more and more stories about bit parts, commercials, etc., that he had done and the big name stars, etc.  It was just a little sad somehow.  

We bought sandwiches there and some "groceries" to take home and I'm really looking forward to the cheeses I bought.  When we left, it was finally raining - the first rain we had since we got to California (it rained all one night in San Diego I think but no rain during daylight hours).  So we were really lucky and couldn't complain.

Our last stop was Judd's Hill and I had a hilariously fun time there although mostly because it was probably finally more wine than I really needed.  If I remember right, they had a couple of wines I liked pretty well...

And then back to the hotel.  We did end up going out fairly late for some dinner.  None of us were all that hungry but I seemed to end up feeling hungry around 11:00 pm if I didn't have something to eat before that.  We found a nice little restaurant, Napkins, I guess in Napa.  The wonderful, wonderful dinner Heather and I had at Cindy's Kitchen on our first visit did not come to pass again this time.  I looked them up and I don't know if they got a new chef or a new owner or what but nothing on the menu appealed to me - nothing!

So not many pictures but lots of wine and fun, fun, fun.

I'm typing this at the airport at 8:10p.m. California time.  I've been here since around 10:30 a.m. or so this morning because both January and Heather's planes left a little after 11:00 a.m. and mine leaves at 10:39 a.m.  I think I can hang in there till boarding time. :)

G'night!

Napa Valley - a winery on every street corner!

Well, not actually - they're out in the countryside, but WOW! what a lot of them!

Heather did an impressive job of getting us through the insanity of San Francisco’s traffic where almost every street is one way and the traffic is basically in grid-lock mode always. We arrived at our hotel in Napa just in time for a free wine-tasting and discovered that since she is a rewards member with the hotel group, we were also invited to a free happy hour with wine and hors d’oeuvres – how great was that?!  So with that and unpacking and getting settled in, we pretty well took care of the remainder of Saturday. The wine tasting was provided by Raymond Vineyards – one of the oldest in Napa – and the woman conducting was one of their sommeliers who told us she was conducting a blending event at the winery the next day. That sounded like pretty much fun so we said “sign us up! We had to be there by 10:30 so after our (also) free breakfast off we went. The winery is owned now by a French vintner who also has a winery in France. He is apparently quite a character and his winery reflects that. Many different tasting rooms and most of them quite over the top. (Note:  There's a real hoot of a video on the vineyards website).

Frenchie is a mascot I guess and there were five kennels in this domicile.  I never did see any dogs but there must be some.  But this is a little taste of what awaits in the winery itself.

They have a "theater" that explains their biodynamic apparoach to the vineyard and farming.  It's outdoors and you walk around the various stations observing miniature versions of the practices they employ throughout their acreage.  Interesting and attractive too.  Well, the chicken/goat yard may not be attractive, but it's all part of the process and they had some fancy chickens.

This and the next picture were taken in the Crystal Cave - the walls are brushed aluminum, the tables are mirror-topped, there's a huge crystal chandelier (or maybe more than one?) hanging above everything...

 and these scantily clad mannequins scattered here and there throughout.  Fantastic!

This was my station in the blending room where a lot of wine went down my gullet. Between Heather's and myt station were four small bottles of "pure" wines - a new oak Cabernet Sauvignon, a neutral Cab, a Merlot, and a Cabernet Franc.  Our assignment was to make three different blends using these wines, tasting as we went and keeping track of the amounts of each wine in each blend (hence the beaker, pipette, etc.) and then decide on our favorite.  The formula for that favorite was then used in the next room to make an entire bottle of "my" wine and - having sent them a picture I selected from photos I had available in my netbook the night before - it was labeled with my winery name and the wine's name.  Pretty darned nifty and pretty darned fun!  But before we even started that, we had tasted one wine in the tasting room and then Rebecca (the sommelier who assisted us with the blending) gave us a lesson in wine tasting and we tasted all four of the wines in the small bottles.  That's what the four glasses on the left were for.  As we mixed our three blends, we, of course, had to taste those also - that's what the three glasses on the right were for.  But with great courage and gusto, we worked our way through it all and ended up with a bottle of our very own wine as seen here in the Red Room (with our poor frazzled sommelier who had a rambunctious crew to deal with!)  Mine is a Foggy River Cabernet Sauvignon (to be called a Cabernet Sauvignon, a wine must have at least 75% of cabernet grapes which I didn't know when blending but the blend I chose when I was finished just happened to be the only one in which I had put exactly 75 percent of the two cab wines)

These last two pictures are also from the Red Room.  I don't know why, but we were the only two invited in to the room and here we sampled yet more wine.  We were obviously feeling very mellow when we finally tore ourselves away.  I'd highly recommend a blending experience for any wine afficianado!

By the time we left there, it was well past lunch time and we'd had nothing to eat since a fairly light breakfast.  We drove into the town of St. Helena and searched for parking - finally found a little lot behind some of the storefronts and the spaces were reserved for certain businesses, one of which was Cindy's Backstreet Kitchen.  So that pretty much helped us decide where we would eat and oh my goodness, was that a good decision.  It was and so far is the best meal I've had on this trip.  Absolutely, positively scrumptious!  It was a piece of grilled pork tenderloin served over a wonderful puree of I think pear and parsnips, sprinkled with toasted (almost to burnt stage) hazelnuts, drizzled with balsamic vinegar and pretty much swimming in a brown butter pool.  Oh my gosh!!!!  And, of course, a delicious glass of wine with that.  After all, it had been going on an hour since we had had any. :)

Did some window and browsing shopping after that - the main street of St. Helena is one neat shop after another and walked some of that wonderful lunch off.  This is one building that especially caught my eye.  It looks like it would have been a hotel back in the day, but the plaque at the top is a Mason's insignia so I'm not sure what it started out as.

Isn't it pretty?  And very unique on this street - all the rest of the buildings were fairly standard, old-timey buildings, attractive, but not especially decorative.  And all the stores were pretty high-end too!

I am now going to stop this even though I think we did another winery on Sunday.  I'm sitting in my internet friend's condo from which I see a snick of the Pacific Ocean (which I listened to last night as I fell asleep), I haven't had breakfast, and I'm going out and about.

I am really behind with this blog!