Guide to 'doing' wine country

Yesterday I said that we had geeked out on data to figure out where to go, which is true for the rest of the trip. But today, we started out without a plan. I thought this post might be a time to outline what we’ve learned about visiting wine country in case you’re looking to plan a trip and aren’t sure where to start.

1)      Have a plan, especially on the weekends. Particularly in Napa, it’s tough any more to just walk into anything that isn’t humongous without an appointment. If you don’t have a plan, you can end up spending the better part of your day driving north to south and not tasting wine. Bummer!

2)    Go during the week – avoid weekends like the plague. Weekends are crazy out here! Wall to wall limo buses, hen/stag parties, wedding (heh,) and traffic jams. I’m not saying it can’t be fun, but especially if you’re going to ignore rule #1, it can be tough.

3)      Go to a place you know and love and go somewhere you’ve never heard of. This is the place to branch out. You can drink all of Kendall-Jackson or Nickle & Nickle or Opus One’s portfolio in Ohio, and there’s nothing wrong with that! But you won’t get the chance to meet the winemaker or grower or owner in Ohio and have her explain why she chose the blend she did for that bottle, or why he chose to harvest those grapes a little later than everyone else for that vintage, etc. Have the experiences you can only have here at least a couple of times.

4)      Ask the locals what they like. Especially during the week and before noon (Oh…yeah, rule 2.1 is take those 10am tasting slots during the week. First, they are usually available, even at the last minute and second you usually get the place to yourself. You’re on vacation! What’s a little day drinking!?!) when the tasting room is quiet. Like the wines you’re tasting? Ask the person doing the pouring who’s doing something similar and interesting. Don’t like the wines they’re pouring? Tell the person ‘These are great, but we’re looking for something more (fruity, drier, funkier, accessible, etc) or less (arid, pricey, vanilla, buttery, etc.) Where would you go?’ We’ve found some great places this way and occasionally get reduced or waived tasting fees.

5)      Have a code. So, getting away from the big famous houses is hard, but really rewarding. Dirty secret? It’s a bit intimidating the first time you do it, especially when you realize that you’re sitting down with someone intimately involved in making the wine. Why would that be intimidating you ask? Okay, picture not being in LOOOOOOVE with that wine. And sitting across from the person who poured their blood, sweat, and tears into the bottle. Right? Hard. So, Kris and I have a system to share our opinions with each other but still maintain face when we don’t like something. I’d suggest using something that speaks to you, but ours is as follows:

                                                               i.      ‘That’s nice or Oh, that’s good’ = firm pass. Could be anything from I hate it to meh, but we’re definitely not buying any of it and it’s not open for discussion.

                                                             ii.      ‘I like that!’ – I would be open to buying a bottle of that, but it’s up to you.

                                                           iii.      ‘I really like that!’ – At least one bottle of that IS coming home with us.

                                                           iv.      ‘I think we should buy a bottle or two.’ – Negotiations have started on how much we’re going to buy.

Today we had no plan, so the plan became to head up to Sonoma to a winery we had been to before and use rule #4 to get some recos. We headed to Stryker only to find that it had been purchased by the guy who owns the Las Vegas Knights, Bill Foley (No relation to Robert Foley.) A bit bummed, but already there, we head in. ‘Super’ Mario ran a great tasting at Foley Sonoma even though we weren’t super impressed with the new direction their headed. From there, we headed up the road to deLorimier, a sister to the Rockpile Vineyards that we tasted at last night. Again, not super excited about their wines, but they did a nice tasting.

We decided to head into Geyserville because we were running out of road and it was lunch time. I highly recommend Diavola for lunch. It’s still cool enough here that we were able to sit out on their back patio to eat. Yummy ‘za and a series of house cured salumi makes for a nice repast.

Based on Mario’s reco, we hit up Pech Merle. We were fortunate enough to meet the winemaker for this vineyard while we were tasting. From here we walked a couple of doors down to a great little tasting room called Locals. This is actually a tasting collective repping 8-10 small vineyards/winemakers. The gentleman behind the bar helped us set up a bunch of side by side comparisons and gave us some really cool compare and contrasts. Locals has a really chill vibe and some great wines. It’s a great way to learn more about Sonoma. Oh! And did I mention no tasting fees?

We decided to head back towards the hotel; today we moved from the weird place out in Windsor to a cute little boutique place in downtown St. Helena called the Wydown. As we worked through Calistoga, we stopped by Summers Winery, based on the recommendation from Locals. Summers has an excellent Charbono. We headed into St. Helena and checked in to clean up for dinner.

Kris booked us in at Press. We brought a bottle from Pech with us for dinner (Okay, maybe a bit more wine!) Press has a beautiful space and a tidy menu. We opted to split a salad, a strip, and a trio of sides. The salad was delightful. 

The steak was good; the sides stole the show. Next time around, I’d skip dinner and sit at the bar with an order of fries. They are amazing! We decided to wrap up dinner with a chocolate soufflé. The soufflé was good, but the rosemary/thyme ice cream with it was divine. When I told the waiter I though the gelato was sublime, he quickly apologized and offered to bring me something I might like better. We’ll blame it on the wine and proffer that perhaps I had mumbled a bit.

Geeking on the data to plan a trip

Data Geeking and an old friend

First stop today was at Flying Goats in Healdsburg. Great little coffee shop with pretty decent pastries. Downtown Healdsburg is super cute, especially in the morning when there aren’t as many people here. After our coffee, we made the long trek down the to the bottom of Sonoma and over to Napa for our first stop of the day.

For this trip, we got a little data happy. It turns out that the counties of Napa and Sonoma have databases of all (well, most) of their wineries and they capture things like annual production and annual visitors. So, Kris and I got a little nuts and started scraping and organizing said data into spreadsheet that allowed us to slice and dice on things like annual production and number of visitors. We’ve found that we usually like places with small to medium production and not a ton of annual visitors.

It’s from this list that we found our first stop of the day, Tulocay. Tulocay is run by Bill Cadman and his daughter Brie recently started stepping up as the winemaker. Bill doesn’t grow much if any of the grapes he uses on-site. Instead, he buys from various vineyards in the area. The tasting takes place in Bill’s dining room. Bill can spin a pretty good yarn while he’s pouring his wines. The hit of the day was his non-vintage Syrah. Very tasty!

From there we headed to visit an old favorite, James Cole Winery. We stumbled upon James Cole a bunch of years ago and revisit them from time to time. They have a very rock n roll feel and make some mighty fine wine. We slotted them in on this trip because they were doing an Alice in Wonderland party, complete with taco trucks and a magician. They switched wine makers a few years back and we didn’t love the direction that they were headed. This trip, however, everything was delicious. All in all, the new winemaker is settling in and the wines are steadily evolving.

After escaping the clutches of the magician, we headed north again to catch a tasting room in Healdsburg that had closed just as we had gotten there yesterday. Rockpile Vineyards had just opened 3 month prior. They are sourcing exclusively from the Rockpile area and are doing some really interesting stuff. We ended up with two of their Zinfandels before we had to duck out to get to our dinner reservations.

We managed to score early seats at Valette. This ambitious joint is doing some very pretty and very ambitious food. The bread is made in house and reminded me of a cross between a Parker house roll and biscuit. We ended up ‘Trusting the chef’ and had a 4 course meal. The food was very French in that sauces were the star of many of the best dishes. All in all good, but I’m not certain I’d go back. Too many other, wonderful places to go here!

Napa/Sonoma Day 1: We're going back to Cali, back to Cali

We didn’t intend to come to Napa this year. Originally this was supposed to be a trip to Peru, but in the Fall. But through a series of negotiations during our annual New Year’s Eve planning meeting, we agreed that a spring trip to the Valley with the trip to Peru coming next year was a better idea. We’ve really go to start taking better notes at that meeting.

Anywho, today’s entry is short because it’s a travel day. Directly flight from CVG to SFO at the butt-crack of dawn. Our Lyft driver was super chatty and we had an interesting conversation about his work in the car repo business. I was reminded that I hate flying on the weekends, especially when the Orlando flight is leaving out of the same little gate area…Amateur day galore!

After an uneventful flight, we arrived at SFO. We ended up on the train with a group from Cincinnati on their first trip to San Fran. We helped them find the rental car building (Pro tip: Get on the train. Stay on the train.) I once again rented from SilverCar and while their off-site location adds a bit of delay to the process, I think the total time spent is actually less. The hassle and aggro factor is definitely less! I texted them while we were still on the train, the van picked us up for a two minute ride to the lot, the confirmed my driver’s license (It had expired since I last rented from them,) I scanned our car, loaded our bags and we were gone. Note to AudiUSA – Since you own SilverCar, figure out a way that A4 owners can port their seat, radio, and car config settings between vehicles. It was nice to not have to figure out a new car when we arrived, but it would have been AMAZING to have my seat exactly where I like it and the radio tuned to my favorite XM channel when we rolled down the road.

We took the Golden Gate up to Sonoma and on a while decided to stop at Ram’s Gate. We had passed this winery many times on our way in and out of Sonoma but I didn’t really know anything about it. They have a fantastic ‘board’ with a selection of 3 local cheeses, a couple of bread/toasts, 2 meats (we had chicken liver pate and a smoked trout dip of sorts,) a dried fruit (in our case apricot mustardo that was devine!) and a couple of sweet bites (candied almonds and an amazing salted chocolate toffee.) This was our lunch and I would totally stop there for this again. The wines were less than memorable, although the Blanc du Noirs they splashed us with (which is technically a ‘members only’ pour) was the best thing we tasted. They do two tasting menus that are nearly identical; the vineyard select has two additional pours and subs out their base pinot for a single vineyard. Fairly small production w/~13000 cases.

We wanted to stop by our usual ‘first stop’ in the valley, Domaine Carneros. Apparently they are everyone else’s favorite first stop as well though because they were not only slammed, they were reservation only! Do they not know who we are!?! As we trudged back to the car, I was actually secretly relieved though because the lack of sleep from a late night/early start and travel hit me like a ton of bricks. So, up to Windsor we headed to check into the hotel.

After checking into our weird timeshare/resort/condo/hotel community thing, we crashed out for an hour. We then go cleaned up and headed into Sebastopol for, what else, ramen! We hit up a place called Ramen Gaijin. Holy crow! This place had the best Japanese food we’ve had since we left Japan. We started with grilled chicken thighs and a grilled rabbit sausage. The thighs were good and the sausage was amazing! We ended up ordering another round of rabbit and a slab of pork belly, which was also fantastic (Tip: put some of the super hot mustard from the rabbit sausage on the pork belly. We also had the smoked potatoes pictured below.

 While tasty, they were missing the smoke flavor implied by the name. For the main event, we had two different types of ramen. Kris went non-traditional with a Chinese influenced dan-dan ramen, while I had a more traditional version topped with a chicken roulade. 

Both had that unctuous depth of flavor of a true ramen, but if I’m honest, Kris’ was better because the spicy notes really punctuated the broth to make something special.

Full and happy, we wandered back to the hotel to crash and hopefully get a full night’s sleep for tomorrow’s adventures. Fingers crossed that there’s no 3am wakeup call due to time zone confusion!