rloomis
Posts: 93
Joined: 1/29/2007
From: San Diego, CA
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Wineries Visited:
Burgess Cellars: beautiful view from the winery, liked the vintage cabs and the Enveiere
Duckhorn Vinyards: beautiful winery, good tour followed by sit-down tasting with hors d'ourves. liked the 3 palms merlot, but pricey.
Revana Family Vinyard: at least there was no charge for the tasting
David Fulton Winery: small family winery that makes a killer Petite Sirah
Del Dotto Vineyards: very, very fun tour; very, very bad wine
Quintessa: good tour and very impressive facility; got a good private laugh as the tourguide was explaining their all natural biodynamic viticultural practices, while off in the distance behind him, a vinyard worker was running up and down rows of vines on a quadrunner checking drip irrigation lines. followed by tasting 2 vintages of quintessa.
Seavey Vinyard: very small out of the way winery and a complete working farm: saw a few of their cattle which were absolutely magnificent looking animals. Not too impressed with the wine, but since we weren't Robert Parker or industry journalists doing a pice on Philippe Melka, I think they only brought out the 3rd string stuff for we lowly plebes to taste. Would have been more interested in a cow tasting, but this wasn't available to us.
Opus One: great tour, beautiful and impressive facility (except maybe, architecturally speaking, the wooden section atop the main building: like they ran out of stone and went over budget before the top story was completed). Apart from that, everything you'd expect a great winery to be. Too bad just about every other winery in Napa thinks that they too are a great winery just for being there and can also charge ultra-premium prices for their plonk. Unfortunately, this consequently gives Opus One license to charge super-ultra-premium prices for their stuff. I hear a lot of snobbery about Opus One not being "all that", but I gotta disagree. Great winery, great wine. The tannin particles in the Opus One I tasted were like 800 super fine emery cloth compared to an 80 grit coarse sandpaper found in most every other wine in the valley (that is, among those other wines where any tannin structure at all was even present; being recognised as a necessary element in contrast to the parkerized "heddonistic fruit bomb") . In the Opus One, it was as if each tannin particle had been individually trained so that they all arrive simultaneously and uniformly spread across all surfaces of my tongue so as to give the impression that it is being majestically enveloped in a silk-satin robe of viniferous bliss. Ahhhh!
Vinyard29: You go through a gate and up a private road to this big, round, silicon valley campus looking building. The main room at the front of the upper entrance level looks like a corporate boardroom with windows looking over a chrome steel railed balcony whose shape suggests perhaps the bow of a powerful steamship plowing its way like an ice-breaker through the unsuspecting, tranquil and idyllic landscape below. What a shock to learn this monstrosity belongs to a cashed out silicon valley CEO. Our tour-guide paraphrased the owner as saying "I don't want to make a 'cult wine'". I'm not sure exactly what this means except that I take a cult wine to be a wine that's very expensive, of very limited production, and of a quality which creates a very passionate following who regularly purchases all available production. Well, the wine is very expensive and the production is rather limited. I guess this left them with no other choice but to adjust the quality to insure it does not fall into some dreaded "cult status". This perhaps explains why a blooming bouquet of green garlic sprout mecaptans is to be found in their $195/bottle, 550 case production of flagship Cab Sauv.
Alpha Omega: a down to earth wine and winery, a little closer to down-to-earth than napa boutique prices. This winery has just opened and is currently offering their first year of production. I picked up a signed bottle of their Proprietary Red.
Trinchero Family: Owners of Sutter Home, some really nice, no nonsense QPR wines here. Really liked the $12 Pinot Noir, bought some at Bevmo when I got home. Also tasting a 100% Petite Verdot was interesting.
Robert Mondavi: wine club members -- Headed straight for the spotlight room to escape the maddening crowds. Enjoyed some nice reserve and library wines while sitting in the comfy leather chairs and learning many little known facts concerning the Bear Flag Revolt and other bits of local California history from our host, who also happened to be a CA history professor.
Benessere: small family winery, relax at the patio umbrella table, meet a very, very large dog, and drink some sangiovese and zinfandel. really liked the black glass vnyd zin.
Storybook Mountain: heard they make great zin, tried to go, but couldn't get an appt. Maybe next time.
Sterling Vinyards: went to front entrance. You must buy a $20 ticket to ride a tram up the hill to the tasting room. The regular tasting was a flight of 5 of the same sterling wines you'd find at the grocery store or costco. At $40 for 2 of us, we figured we could probably just buy 2 or 3 bottles at costco if we really wanted to try the wine. The wines we were interested in tasting were only in the "reserve tasting" which would have set us back $90 for 2. We figured for that price, we'd be better off to just buy a bottle and take our chances. We passed on visiting this winery. Since I got back, I've seen the 3 palms merlot at bevmo for about $55. Maybe I'll get one some payday and figure that I'm actually still saving $35 by having not visited the winery. (Wine logic!)
ZD: thought it was an average winery, with average wine.
Raymond: a mostly unpretentious winery. wine club members, so we dropped in for some freebees and get some more Generations cab. Their wines can vary quite a bit from very good, outstanding for the price, or not too good at any price. picked up some more generations to keep the vertical going, the 02 I liked so much when I first tasted at a pre-release event -- and they wouldn't sell any to me -- was now only available in the 1.5L. They do both a St Helena and a Rutherford reserve cab. In the past, I liked them both about the same, but this year, only the Rutherford made it in the purchasing lineup. You can maybe still find the 02 Reserve Merlot in stores on closeout for about $20 that's drinking really good right now.
Clos Pegase: large winery building with lots of art on display, worth a look. The regular tasting lineup features very approachable wines: simple, fairly fruit forward, but pretty well executed with each variety showing its varietal character without any flaws or unusual features (but also not a whole lot of complexity). Good place to start a wine tasting trip with a beginner and give them a beginning reference for how each varietal should more or less present itself. On the reserve tastings, liked the Hommage and graveyard hill.
Might have missed 1 or 2, but I think that's the list. Fun trip -- next time, we do Sonoma!
< Message edited by rloomis -- 4/5/2007 2:30:19 AM >
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