Wine tasting in Napa

SAN FRANCISCO — One of the nice perks of living in San Francisco is that it’s an easy drive to wine country — the city is surrounded by vineyards and many wineries have offices in Fog City.

Another nice perk of San Francisco is that friends seem to cycle through at a nice clip whether that be for work trips or just because they love the place.

So before I took off for Washington, we experienced an amazing one day Napa Valley wine tour with an old friend.

It was a beautiful but long day. We left the city shortly before 8 am and returned home nearer to 11 pm. (A lot of people would stay in Napa but I find that to be cost prohibitive. I’d much rather have a designated driver and make that hour drive to the city and save Napa Valley weekends for special occasions.)

Our Napa adventure included stops at three wineries, lunch at Redd Restaurant in Yountville and dinner at The Grill at Meadowood in St. Helena. (I’m going to write about the food separately).

Wine Tasting

Let me pause here to give a bit of a background on wine tasting as we’ve come to know it. After we’d arrived in California, it didn’t take us long to realize that wine tasting can be as complicated and as pricey as you make it.

Rarely do wineries provide tastings for free these days. (There are a few and you can find them but it is rarer).

Apparently years ago they were all free but as the tradition gained popularity the majority of vineyards began charging tasting fees and it feels like just as many require advance reservations.

Some people treat wine tasting like a giant daylong tailgate or — more accurately — a bar crawl. Only they rent limousines and dress up while they chug their wine. The most telling example of what ensues was depicted to me when a friend posted a picture on Facebook showing a limo door covered in. … Well, you get the picture. It wasn’t pretty.

At many places, the winemaker will waive the cost of a tasting if you buy a bottle or sometimes two of their wine. We’ve seen tastings cost as much as $90 (we have yet to visit that vineyard). And, we’ve seen— mostly at the corporate owned vineyards — the tasting fee never waived, which sometimes feels like a slap in the face.

If you really like a wine and opt to join the wine club, which sometimes requires the purchase of as few as one or two bottles of wine a year, that often comes with free tastings.  An additional bonus to that route is that in some cases other vineyards welcome you and your party for free tastings because of your connection to X vineyard. (So if you are living in the area for a year or even just visiting for a weekend and want to experience what Napa has to offer without a hefty tasting price tag this is an excellent thing to investigate.

Tastings can be relatively simple — an offering of a single vintage — or as we experienced that Saturday a marathon event of eight very different wines.

The time frame can also be very different. At some wineries, people walk in and stand at a high counter — err, really a bar without the stools — drink the wine at their own pace and then leave. At our eight different wines marathon event, it took us over two hours and we learned about the recent renovation to the historic building, the plots of land where the various grapes are grown and about the winemaking process for each wine.

And I have to say some of our best experiences have been the more intimate ones where we’ve gotten to sit down— just us and the winemakers— and talk about winemaking and how they’ve come to make wine.

Back to Our Napa Valley Day. 

Our visitor had gotten to know many smaller wineries when he was here a bunch of years ago and so he wanted to stop by one of his favorites.

I’d emailed weeks ahead and set up our first tasting of the day at William Cole Vineyards in St. Helena not to be confused with the other William Cole, which is a Chilean wine.

We arrived and sat at a large old table and were joined a short time later by another group of people.

We all tasted a 2008 cabernet sauvignon and then had a brief tour and discussion of the winemaker’s process.

We were then given a taste of a second year of wine, a 2007 cabernet sauvignon. This vertical tasting — which just means wines of the same varietal from different years or in this case one wine from a different year  — was poured so that we could compare and contrast how the wine might age.

William Cole Vineyards is an all natural, small producer where the winemaker does much of the work himself from the picking of the grapes to the bottling and the labeling.

After getting a run through of all that he does and listening to his schedule during the bottling process, It would be impossible not to be impressed by the amount of work that the owner does personally to ensure he produces the best tasting most natural wine.

We then drove down to Yountville where we enjoyed a wonderful meal at Redd Restaurant. (I’ll get into that meal later but my little gems salad with shrimp, avocado, bacon and caesar dressing was so tasty. I’ve never had such a light caesar dressing before, which made the rest of the extremely fresh ingredients sing.)

After lunch we turned right around and headed back up to St. Helena. (I guess I should pay more attention when making reservations.)

Morlet Family Vineyards, our second winery of the day is a relatively new producer, who happens to be located right next door to William Cole Vineyards.  (Clearly, I need to pay more attention when booking visits.)

We’d come to Morlet after I asked the Somm for a few more off-the-beaten path recommendations.

We lucked out because Luc Morlet had given a presentation the previous day to some of his distributors and therefore had eight different bottles open. We went through the wines going in succession from the lighter chardonnays to the heavier pinot noirs and then cabernet sauvignons.

At Morlet, we were also joined by a father and son from Colorado, who were out spending the day wandering around wine country. (They were so much fun, they ended up joining us at our next stop.)

Morlet has a very different winemaking philosophy from his next door neighbor.

While William Cole Vineyards concentrates on one wine, Morlet is already offering 12 different wines. Additionally, Morlet gathers grapes from his own property and also has long-term contracts for grapes grown at other vineyards.

Both winemakers are from winemaking families but their similarities end there. Their methods couldn’t be more different. But at the same time, each produces wines that I personally enjoy and that are highly rated by the experts.

I guess I say this to demonstrate that winemaking like wine appreciation is varied and personal and that thought was driven home to me by these two neighbors so I thought I’d share.

Finally we finished our day’s wine tasting by going to a vineyard that I already knew I enjoyed.

We went to Crocker & Starr also in St. Helena and also highly rated. We tasted four different wines, their sauvignon blanc, cabernet sauvignon, cabernet franc and malbec.

I’m a huge fan of the cab franc, a wine that I’ve only recently come to know. Their blend consists of 97 percent cab franc grapes, 2 percent malbec and 1 percent petit verdot. It has this lovely dark fruity tobacco flavor that I just adore. My descriptions won’t do any of owner and winemaker Pam Starr’s wines justice so you can read the tasting notes here.

As to what to pair with a cab franc? People seem to love to pair it with pizza and I’ve got to confess that’s how I’ve had it on more than one occasion but I’ve also successfully paired it with heavier dishes like my lamb and prosciutto bolognese.

Our visit to Crocker & Starr was the most relaxed tasting of the day. (Or maybe it just felt that way to me because I already knew and additionally really like and admire Starr).

We began our tasting on the front porch and then with glass in hand wandered over to the official tasting room after a brief walk through the fields. Starr came in after a winery event and chatted with us about her process and winemaking in general.

Our day created so many memories. We bought a few bottles and learned a great deal about the wines. And I know that as we drink them over the years, we’ll remember all of that.

I guess that is the biggest thing I take from these wine tastings — memories of great days spent with friends, which only enhances each bottle of wine when we open it.

We ended our evening with an amazing dinner at the Grill at Meadowood in St. Helena but I’ll tell you about it later.

 

You can find a link to Sarah’s last story about her introduction to wine here.