Our Private Wine Tasting Tour of Napa

Hi! We're finally back online, after a week of extremely frustrating attempts to post the blog. So this means that the dates on these entries are really, really out of whack. This blog should be dated September 26...

This morning we were picked up by Frank, our driver/guide, in his Cadillac Escalade. We had heard from various people that arranging a private wine tasting tour was the best way to see and taste our way around the wine country. Barb's cousin had done just that last year and recommended this company to us. Barb made arrangements for the car; our driver made the arrangements for the wineries.

Many of the older wineries in the Napa Valley will allow you to just drop in and purchase a tasting 'flight', usually four or five wines, two whites and two or three reds. With the number of wineries increasing almost exponentially in the past decade or so, the county government passed a law a few years ago that any new winery applying for a licence to hold tastings had to make them 'by appointment only', ostensibly to get some measure of control over the numbers of visitors drinking their way around the area. So now it is easier if you have an idea of where you want to go beforehand so you can call and arrange a time for your tasting. Many of the high end wineries, although some have been around for a long time, also insist on pre-arranging your visit. We had given Frank a short list of wineries for basing a route plan; of these, he made arrangements at Cakebread Cellars. The others we visited didn't require reservations.

 

We drove around a little, and visited one winery that comes with quite a history along with a very well-known ownership. The photo below is of the 'chateau' of the Inglenook Winery.

Anyone who has been around wines for a long time will wonder if we've already had too much to drink in saying that Inglenook is good wine. Well, we have to agree that in the 1960s and 1970s Inglenook was one of the biggest names in $5 plonk, but that's because the company that the original owners, the Niebaum family, sold it to just wanted to make money from the grapes and didn't care too much about the quality. Well, that changed a number of years ago when Francis Ford Coppola bought most of the original land from that company, put his own name on the label and teamed up with winemakers to produce some really high class stuff. (So if you go into a liquor store and find Coppola wine from the Niebaum-Coppola winery, this is precisely where those grapes came from). Just recently, he apparently purchased the last few acres of the original Niebaum holdings, and has now renamed the winery Inglenook, taking the long history of the house and the land around full circle, and expecting to revitalize the brand name to its original grandeur.

We didn't have more than a few minutes to stop to see the house and the vineyard - apparently Mr. Coppola has another house on the estate, out of sight of the visitors, and spends quite a bit of time there - before we headed off to another tasting.

These are actually table grapes growing on an
overhead canopy. They taste a lot different
than wine grapes.

 

Along the way, we passed a very interesting looking building that turned out to be the Opus One winery. Very high end - the cheapest bottle we've ever seen on a wine list is about $150 per bottle, and that's in the US where the taxes aren't anywhere near as high as they are at home!

Our next stop was the very small Elizabeth Spencer winery, only about 10 years old and owned by a husband and wife. They don't grow any of their own grapes, but buy from growers around the valley to make their offerings. Some of them were extremely tasty, but the bottles were too oddly shaped to be able to carry them for any distance - like onto a cruise ship...

 

 

 

And Larry says that if he was ever allowed to
have only ONE bottle of wine, this would
be it!!

One more stop before lunch - Caymus Vineyards. This is the winery that makes Conundrum, so called because it is almost impossible to guess just which varietals are in this proprietary blend. Now they have a red version as well as a white, so you can drink bottle after bottle of either one to try to figure out exactly what's in it.

And finally - food! Because we weren't sure where we would be stopping, and Frank had told us that he had a cooler on board for anything we wanted to bring along, AND Barb's cousin had recommended that we do so, we picked up sandwiches and fruit to go at the resort in the morning. Frank knew of a couple of wineries with nice gardens where visitors were allowed to 'picnic'. He took us to Sequoia Grove, another fairly small place. We bought a bottle of wine there (like we really needed more wine at that point) to have with our lunch, and spent a nice hour there.

Norm standing in the grove of Coast Redwoods
that he had wanted to see

Our final stop in the afternoon was at Silverado Winery. Some people we met in July had recommended it for the lovely view, and the wine was quite good, too! The only disappointment we had here was that, unlike the other wineries where we got some really good information on the individual wines we were tasting, the winemaking process and the history of the winery, at Silverado we were given a glass of wine and told that we could go out on the terrace if we wanted to. Nothing more. Oh, well; but as Norm said, by the time we got to the last glass it was getting hard to tell the difference between them. Not that we had had too much to drink, but our taste buds had been assailed constantly all day and were starting to wear out!

The view over Napa Valley from Silverado

Oh, yeah, can't forget to mention that all the wineries gave you your tasting glasses as souvenirs. There was no way we'd get them all home intact in our suitcases, so our final stop in Napa was at the local UPS office, where the very helpful gentleman helped us put together a box to ship home.

Our advice to anyone who wants to do a private tour like this: Map out your route. Figure out ahead of time which wineries you want to visit and see if they need reservations. Plan your reservations or your visits with enough time between wineries to be able to have a small snack, partly to cleanse your palate and partly to absorb the alcohol you've already taken in. Take the time to really taste each wine; you'll be amazed at the differences between them all. And most of all, just enjoy the scenery!

Of course, all that wine meant we needed dinner!! In our wanderings on the day before we found Morimoto Napa, one of the restaurants owned by 'Iron Chef' Morimoto. Since Norm has always been a fan of the show, and has already eaten in restaurants owned by Mario Batali and Bobby Flay, we had to add this one to his list. Here are a few photos from dinner:

The entrance and waiting area

At our table. The only problem we had here was that
it was so loud it reminded us of a cafeteria!

Monica's Crispy Whole Fish - branzino, or Mediterranean Snapper.
Only she would order a dinner that looked at her while she ate it!

 

Barb with her seafood soup. Looked delicious and Barb
said it tasted that way too.

Wow! What an amazing three days we had here! Tomorrow it will be back into San Francisco and onto Grand Princess for seven days of cruising back the way we came.