This was the day we were looking forward to the most. Nicole and I love to drink wine and what better place to visit than the wine capital of the US. We hired a driver to take the 4 of us from San Fran to Napa for the day. It is about 35 miles from San Fran to Napa, but it takes a little over 1 hour to get there. We were picked up at the hotel at 9 a.m. Our tour guide, Tom, is a wine aficionado. In his own words he is a complete “wine snob” and only will drink the best of the best. He has made it his life’s mission to weed out poor high priced wine and take his customers to places that have just great wine. He told us the history of Napa dating back to the early 1900’s and about his personal meetings with Robert Mondavi, a true pioneer in the wine business.
Our first stop was Trefethen. We were seated at a reserved tasting table and we drank nearly everything on their menu, 10 wines or more. We were all blown away by their Dry Riesling so we bought a case of that. All the wineries we visited in Napa were amazing, the properties are unbelievable, they range from early 1900 estates to brand new state of the art contemporary buildings. We loved them all. We didn’t love all the wines though, there were some that we found to be overpriced and not worth the money at all.
The 2nd winery we stopped at was called Silver Oak. This is a large winery and is very well known all over the world. I am not a big fan of their wines, but their winery was state of the art. Their old winery burned down 3 years ago and they rebuilt an unbelievable structure. The wine cellar below at Silver Oak is the coolest wine cellar I have ever seen.
3rd Stop Robert Mondavi
Need I say more. We drank some great wines here in their Reserve Tasting Room. Mondavi has the brand that sells in the wine business, but as our group discussed and agreed, people wouldn’t drink it if the wine was poor. We loved the wines at Robert Mondavi.
4th Stop Rubicon Estates
This was probably the best winery we visited. The wines were unbelievable (we knew this before we arrived as it is our favorite wine, we just can’t afford to drink it very often).
Francis Ford Coppola (the famous movie director) owns this winery now. He bought part of the winery with his money from The Godfather, and he bought the rest of the winery with money from Bram Strokers’ Dracula. It is not uncommon for their wines to be $150/bottle, they call it Rubicon. They have some lower level wines that they sell to the mass market and they don’t even make those wines at this property, they are made in Sonoma at their other property. We drink those wines more often. We bought 6 bottles here and joined their wine club, which means we will get 3 shipments/year when they release a new wine. If you buy wine and collect wine (something we just started doing), this is the cheapest way to buy wine, direct from the winery before it is handled and marked up by everyone else. Some of the wines that are sent to members of the wine club are never sold to the public, which we thought was pretty neat.
5th Stop Lunch
You really have to BE CAREFUL when you visit as many wineries as we did. You drink A LOT of wine and you become very familiar with what the Napa folks call "The Bucket Of Common Sense". This is the spit bucket that each table has so you don't drink all the wine, you just taste it and spit it back out. It's quite disgusting actually. Personally, I couldn't justify spitting out $150/bottle wine, and I didn't. I spit out 2 wines and it wasn't because I consumed too much, it was because the wines weren't good. We had lunch at a great place, a staple in Napa called Dean & Deluca. It was an upscale deli with sandwiches and cheeses. We ate on the road as we were now headed up Howell Mountain to our next appoitment, which was Ladera.
6th Stop Ladera
This property was beautiful. It sat up on Howell Mountain overlooking the Napa Valley. The winery was built in 1886. This was the 1st winery where we "saw the process". The other wineries up to this point we just saw some barrels and sat in their wine tasting rooms. At Ladera we were in the caves underground where they make/store the wines. We saw the vats of grapes being crushed, we saw the barrels stored in long hallways, cool and dark (A good Cabernet is barreled for 22-30 months). This is why the 2006 Cabs are just being released. So, as far as wineries go, Ladera was very nice, we just didn't like their wines. In their defense, we had drank some of the best wines California has to offer up to this point, and we were getting tired. You can't buy Ladera outside California, their production is too small. They produce 3500 cases/year. We bought 2 bottles to bring home, but they need to sit in the cellar and age for 10 years or so.
Our last stop was at Bell Wine Cellars. This is another small production wine cellar. The wines were much better here and we all tried a wine that we had never had. It was a typical blending grape called Petit Verdot. It was very good and worth a couple bottles.
On our way back to San Francisco we stopped and they packed and shipped our wines home for us. It was BY FAR the best part of our trip to San Francisco.
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