Saturday, October 25, 2008

Our Vacation in Wine Country - part 2

OK, so it's been about a month, but here's a synopsis of our California trip (better late then never, eh?).

On Thursday (9/25) we flew out of Indy to Sacramento. We had a short layover in Vegas so we passed the time by doing a little gambling. Here I am playing the slots.... Alright, I'm just pretending. The machines only took dollar bills and we didn't have any. It still amuses me that there were slot machines in the airport. I had been wondering if there would be and lo and behold as we got off the plane there they were. We mostly relaxed for the rest of the day, but my aunt took us out to dinner at a new Italian restaurant in downtown Vacaville called Fuso, which was very good.

Justin and I spent the afternoon in Napa on Friday. My aunt and uncle were kind enough to let us use their GPS while we were there so we told the GPS to use the least amount of freeways and we got to take the scenic route there on some very twisty roads. We were amazed to see how dried out all the grasses were - everything was kind of brownish - the last time we were in Cali it was at the end of the
rainy season so everything was green. My aunt told us they hadn't had any rain since February. Once we made our way into the Napa Valley, we drove to Beringer Vineyards and did a wine tasting in their reserve wine tasting room (they had another room to taste their non-reserve wines, but we decided to just try the reserves). We had lunch at Mustard's Grill, which to our surprise did not feature mustard in their food, although it was a very good lunch. Then we went to Opus One because it has a cool looking building. Little did we know it was a rather snooty winery that only puts out one very expensive wine a year. Apparently Opus One is a collaboration between Robert Mondavi, who basically put Napa on the map in terms of wines, and some other big wine guy who also owns a lot of wineries. There was a concierge that you had to check in with before you could even go to the tasting room - she had to call to make sure there was still some wine for us to taste. The wine was good, but I don't think it was $200 a bottle good. Later that night, as a special treat for Justin's birthday, we went to the Wine Spectator Greystone Restaurant which is at the Culinary Institute of America. Of course, we didn't really need an excuse to go - the food is always amazing! Happy birthday, Justin!

Saturday we went to Merryvale (one of my favorite wineries) for a Wine & Food Pairing seminar.
This was one of my favorite things that we did on our trip. Since it was harvest time, we got to see grapes being brought in to be sorted and put in fermenters before they go into the oak barrels to age. After the winery tour we went to the cask room to learn about wine and food pairings. I liked how the instructor emphasized that pairing wine and food is really about your own tastes and what you think goes together well...he also gave some pointers throughout the seminar as well as teaching us how to do a wine tasting properly (so now we can look like we know what we're doing). He also told us that he thought that Opus One makes a very good $50 bottle of cabernet....hehe.... Justin and I liked that comment. After the seminar we did a vertical Cabernet tasting at Merryvale and signed up for their wine club. It was cool to taste different years of the same type of wine and see how they were different. I had never done that before. So now that we were a bit tipsy, it was time for lunch. My aunt and uncle and my cousin Jenny met us a Merryvale and we all went across the street for hamburgers and hot dogs at Taylor's Refresher, which apparently has been on the Food Network. Then we all made our way to Sterling vineyards, which is a winery that is up on a hill and you take a gondola to get up to the actual winery. That was pretty cool and they had some good wines. We tried going to this one castle winery just because it was a castle, but when we got inside we decided that it wasn't worth it to pay $15 before even getting to the tasting room.

Sunday was spent in Sonoma with my aunt and uncle.
We went to Vernias, which is kind of on the outskirts of Sonoma. They had some great dipping sauces that you could taste. We didn't bother tasting the wine there since my aunt said it wasn't that good. I've noticed that the places that have good deli type stuff generally don't have that great of wine. As we made our way into the valley, we saw there was a festival going on in downtown Sonoma so we stopped to check it out. Turns out they had a bunch of wineries there all set up to do some tastings. We traveled to 3 more Sonoma Valley wineries after perusing the festival. We went to Sebastiani, Ravenswood, and St. Francis.

Justin and I spent the whole day in Napa again on Monday. We did a tasting at Heitz Cellars, another one of my favorite wineries - they have an awesome port (and I'm not much of a port fan). We walked around in downtown St. Helena to get chocolates from the fancy chocolate shop as a little surprise for my aunt and we also stopped at an olive oil shop where we tasted different olive oils and got some white truffle oil - yum. Then we had lunch at Tra Vigne and then it was off to more wineries. Our waiter at Tra Vigne suggested we try some places on the Silverado trail since they are not on the main road through Napa and tend to. So we went to Robert Sinskey, Miner Family Winery, ZD, and Mumm Napa. We really liked Robert Sinskey. They gave us a little bit of food to taste with the wines so that was fun.

We traveled back home on Tuesday. We were sad to leave, but hopefully we'll be able to get back out there again. Go here for more pictures.

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