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!

The tasting continues!

Heather and I both like pinot noir wines and a couple of people at the Raymond Winery had told us that we needed to head to Sonoma for some of the really good ones and we figured pinot noirs or not, we should head there anyway just cause it's there.

So head we did and our first stop Monday (according to the numerical order of my photos - I certainly can't keep track of them all!) was the Ravenswood Winery  We decided we liked the looks of the Sonoma area more than the Napa Valley area (at least what we had seen of it by then) because it was much more country and fewer little towns with many, many shops to lure tourists.  Lots of wineries though - no lack there!  The Ravenswood Winery's logo is three ravens forming an interlocking circle with all their feet filling in the center and I really liked it.  Also, they had Edward Gorey gift cards and a book of letters between Edward Gorey and a friend (I forget his name) and since I really enjoy Edward Gorey's books and artwork, that gave me a reason besides wine to like the winery.  But the wine was good too.  In fact I think this may be the one winery where I joined one of the club plans although whichever winery it was, the main reason I joined the one I did was because their cost to ship a case of wine was about half what all the other wineries we visited charged.

 This is Ravenswood's nifty logo.  Heather had to tell me those were feet in the center - I was trying to have them be forks or something!

And this was just a neat tree which the picture numbers tell me was either at Ravenswood or the next winery we visited which was a quick stop on the way back to Napa and I have no idea what the name was at this point.  But it was in a lovely setting so here are some pictures - too bad I didn't take one of their sign.
I took the first picture just because we were so tickled at someone decorating their property with little Roman or Greek ruins.  It was a neighboring property of the winery.  The winery itself had a lovely little pond out back and a beautiful view of the mountains rising in the back with a man-made waterfall (dry at this time of year) and a tiny little chapel they had built up above that.

 Didn't realize how blurry that picture was but I'll leave it cause it's just kind of cute.  The one below is a cropped view of the view from the backyard of a winery we stopped at on our way back to Napa.  The tiny little white dot up on the hill is the chapel.  Notice how different the light is here - it was close to 6:00 p.m. and it really makes a difference in the colors of the hills when the sun is low.  This whole area - Napa and Sonoma - really reminded me of Italy.  I was there in October each time and it was very much the same kind of light.  One of the vintners told us that the longitude or latitude or whatever of the Napa/Sonoma reason is like within 1 degree of Tuscany.

If I remember rightly, we had dinner Monday evening in the hotel.  I  can't remember what we had but I know it was much more enjoyable than the one time we ate food at the San Francisco Hilton!

The next batch of pictures are from our Tuesday morning wine tasting - late Tuesday morning mind you.  This was the V. Sattui winery and it was really something.  Very much for tourists but I would imagine a lot of locals would shop there too because they had an incredible deli with artisanal cheeses, their own cured meets, pates, etc., prepared foods, beautiful sourdough baguettes (I've yet to have any ho-hum bread in California) and so on.  Made me think I should drive to California sometime just so I could come here, pack up a cooler and drive back home!  Just really hated leaving all that deliciousness behind.  They also had good wines and we had a delightful lady take care of our tasting.  She had the energy of about 10 people and just jumped from wine to another.  We were supposed to try 6 wines and I have no idea how many we actually tried - more than 6 that's for sure!  I think at this winery I may have added a 2-bottle order to Heather's ever growing selection of wines which will be winging their way to her house.  Or maybe this is where I joined the club - I am so far behind and it was such a whirlwind of winery visits that I really have no idea and will just have to be pleasantly surprised whenever I get whatever I get.  Anyway it was a fun visit and I kind of wish we had bought some cheese, meat and bread there and then sat outside to eat it for lunch.  Here are the pics:

If Heather ever has time and reads these posts, she will probably have to straighten me out.  I seem to have really lost track of when we did what and where!  I do know that after agonizing where to have our last dinner in Napa and calling various places for reservations and not getting them, we ended up going back to Cindy's Backstreet Kitchen for another very nice dinner where we split a half bottle of a wine called Charbono (that's the type name, not the winery name).  Neither one of us had ever heard of it and the waiter told us that it's not too well known and very little of it is made.  It was so good that when we got back to the hotel, Heather started a search for where we might be able to find some and changed her flight time!!! so we could go Wednesday morning before heading back to the airport to a winery she found that produces it!

And I should be asleep by now, so good night from my "hear the ocean" apartment.  I love it!