Hey all! Long time no post. Been getting back up to speed on work, celebrating birthdays, and developing photos! But I wanted to get down a few more details about SF and some pics!

The WINE! Michael and I spent two days in wine country, one day in Napa and the next in Sonoma.

NAPA
The first place we went to was Cakebread Cellars. It is a pristine place. Beautiful building and grounds. Good wine too. Especially the whites: Sauvignon Blanc and Chardonnay. While on the wine trails we met some folks who had done a food and wine pairing here and they said it was phenomenal. I trust them because we liked a lot of the same wines, and one of them is a winemaker himself! Do the tour at Cakebread just so you can look at the beams in the ceiling of their storage cellar, amazing architecture that is simultaneously rustic and sophisticated.

The storage cellar at Cakebread

Our second stop was Frog’s Leap Winery. If you only do one tour in Napa make it this one. The wines are made of organic grapes, and the tour makes you feel like you’re a real guest on a lovely family farm.

The garden at Frog’s Leap

They also grow organic vegetables in the garden that they let people on the tours take home with them.

Michael loved the Leapfrogmilch, a Reisling on the drier side, and I absolutely swooned while drinking the new Syrah. I thought it smelled like crème brulee. You get a chance to see the bottling facilities here too, which were the only ones we saw up close.

Bottling facilities at Frog’s Leap

We took a quick stop at St. Supery, actually like a super winery. It felt slightly impersonal and industrial, but they have these displays above the tasting room that include boxes that allow you to smell different things, like fresh mown hay or bell pepper, so that you can test how well your nose picks up specific scents that you might find in wine. But the real reason to go is that they have the absolute best Sauvignon Blanc I have ever tasted. It was like drinking a yummy guava juice drink. I loved it.

Our last vineyard of the day was Robert Sinskey. More beautiful grounds and more wines made of organic grapes. The lovely thing about the tasting here was the food they gave you with the tasting! There was a delicious spring onion soup cup you got with one of the whites, and the best olive tapenade I’ve ever had served with the merlot. Mrs. Sinskey is a chef, quite gifted too from what I can tell.

This is me tipsy by the fish pond at Robert Sinskey:

Our hotel provided a tasting in the evening by Steltzner. The Merlot tasted like pure chocolate.

SONOMA
We headed out to Benziger in the morning where we met up with my brother, Ravi. This is THE tour to do in Sonoma, if you only do one. It is actually a quite informative exploration into biodynamic farming and a chance to check out some real caves.

Here is the garden they grow amid the vines to attract good bugs to eat the bad bugs. Pretty, no?

The guide was truly knowledgeable, and the grounds are astonishingly beautiful.

The tasting room is quite commercial with a sizable shop. The wines weren’t my favorite, but they were good enough and the tour made Benziger well worth the stop.

We wandered into Arrowood a little lost and quickly tasted a number of wines. The place lacked personality and real charm, I thought, but the have a very good Viognier that tastes like honey to me.

Then we found what we were looking for at Imagery. This place shares a drive with Arrowood and is owned by the Benziger family. More lovely gardens. But the key here is some really cool merchandise and a LOT of really good wine. We liked almost everything we tasted quite a lot and I went nuts for these cute polka-dotted flutes they had in a range of colors. We couldn’t leave the place without the white burgundy and the syrah.

Last stop was Roshambo, a vineyard on the Russian River up by Healdsburg. It was quite hip and different from all our other stops. If it weren’t for the sweeping views of the vines and the river, I would have thought the tasting room was some hip spot in Manhattan. The building was very high modern with waved ceiling that mimicked the river outside. They had cool modern water fountain-sculpture walls in the courtyard. The wine was good. And nicely affordable. We highly recommend. We joined the wine club thanks to expert salesmanship of the staff and we will let you know how we like our shipments! Our favorite in the tasting room was the zinfandel.