PhotoJournal: One day in California

I’ve been working on this entry on and off for the last week, as I’ve had time. I did most of the writing of it at 30 000 feet on a United Airways flight from San Francisco to Chicago, possibly the most uncomfortable flight I’ve ever been on.

I’ve been in San Francisco for Apple’s WWDC developers conference. Chris and I arrived on Saturday around noon (to get a reasonable airplane fare you have to stay over a Saturday night, so we arrived early).

We had the entire day on Sunday to ourselves. A quick check of the interweb revealed that we could rent a car for about US$45 for the day. So we had a car. What to do with a car in the bay area? Well, the Napa valley (see also here) is about 90 minutes from San Francisco by car… and Chris and I do like drinking wine… so that became the plan for the day.

In the morning we decided to walk up to Market Street to get some breakfast at a greasy spoon that Chris ate at on a previous trip. And what was there but the 2004 San Francisco Pride Parade. There were thousands of people out, and quite a huge parade. We couldn’t stay for too long, but we did see a large number of roadhog motorcycles, and I did take a few pictures of the event while we were there. It was cool.

After picking up the car we pretty much hit the road. A few random stops on the way, but we basically drove directly to the Robert Mondavi winery in the Napa Valley. We decided to go there first not only because they are likely the best known Napa winery, but also because Chris and I have sort of specialized in the consumption of their Fume Blanc wine over the years.

The Mondavis have a beautiful vineyard, with a picturesque low wide building featuring a great tower. (I don’t know what the style of this building is, but if someone else does then feel free to post a comment.) We decided to do the one hour wine tour.

The tour was quite good. It started with a bit of geography. Of course, I had heard of the Napa Valley, but these places are always much smaller than you picture them… Napa itself is divided into districts, and it’s just a few miles over a small mountain range to the Sonoma valley, which is also a big californian name. Mondavi’s winery is in the Oakville district of the Napa Valley

After the map reading, we moved out into the vineyard itself. We learned that each vine plant produces roughly one bottle of wine. At first you think the vineyards are infinite: It seemed as though you could make boatloads of wine in their vineyard, but, when you really stop to think about how much space each plant takes it’s remarkable that they can actually be a world leader in winemaking!

The weird fans in the vineyards (you can see one in the first vineyard picture below) are to circulate the air in the valley to prevent frost. This is because cool air gathers in the bottom of the valley. Stirring up the air a little prevents this and protects the crop. All the vineyards in the valley have these.

In a theme that will return, this valley is right up there on the food list for me. See, they have great wine there, and also olives! Yes, they make olive oil. No I didn’t get to try an olive. But here’s a photo of some.

At this point the tour moved inside into their processing facility. Giant story-high barrels (perhaps I should say coopered vats) lined the walls of the room and we entered at the top level where grapes go in.

Down the ramp and we’re at the lower level where juice and spent grapes come out.

Every barrel in this place is handmade by a cooper, and in a tradition imported from France, the barrels for red grapes have a strip around the middle stained red with wine. Mondavi uses only new barrels which get “hand-me-downed” after a few years to smaller wineries.

This is their underground storage facility where wines age in French oak. It was kind of like a wine crypt.

The conclusion of the tour was a tasty tasting. Actually the tour guide was very informative even during the tasting portion of the event. He took the opportunity to demonstrate some different types of corkscrews, and explained the basics of how to do the restaurant ritual and what to look for when tasting wine. Actually, this discussion wasn’t too helpful, because I already learned all of that in Wine for Dummies. (This is not a joke… it’s a good book!)

On offer at the tasting was our old favorite, the Fume Blanc. Chris and I learned that it actually is a Sauvignion Blanc (probably one reason that I like it, because I like most wines of that variety). Anyway, the story is that some years ago many of these wines were quite sweet. In order to not get boo-ed off the stage Mondavi decided to use a new name. Of course, now, the sauvignions are all like Mondavi’s, so there you go. The guide also served us Cabernet Sauvignion (excellent) and a dessert wine of some type that I wasn’t crazy about.

On to the retain portion of the tour (of course it ends in the store) and basically we hit the motherload… We were confronted with volumes of that lovely Fume Blanc… very tempting.

Actually, it was a bit too tempting. I need to backtrack in the story a bit here, back into the vineyard. It turns out that vintners generally put in a plant, wait about 5 years, then harvest from it for 5-7 years after that. After that time the grapes are fantastic and the wines are fantastic, but the plant produces fewer grapes (as if it was concentrating the grapey goodness into fewer and fewer grapes). Generally the vintners can’t justify keeping the plants at this point, although Mondavi has kept one single “block” (section) of their vineyard with 55 year old plants. It’s called I-Block and the wines they make from those grapes are considered their absolute best.

Well, to return to the temptation part of the story, it just turns out that they were selling some Fume Blanc made in this part of the vineyard. I couldn’t resist, and I bought a bottle of their 2001 I-Block Fume Blanc.

After this purchase we asked our tour guide if he’d mind recommending his comptetition. He was almost eager to do so. He said there were three axes on which to rate a winery: wine, view, and fun. Then he took us over to a map, and, in a flurry of ratings and rankings, traversed the entire napa valley in about 5 minutes. Based on his spiel, though, Chris and I immediately focussed on one winery: V. Sattui. You see, V. Sattui runs a large public deli with thousands of cheeses and deli meats for sale, along with their wines (which are exclusively available onsite… and nowhere else in the world). You may ask yourself, “how could Chris and Colin pass up the opportunity to eat cheese, wine and (a few slices of) deli meat?” Of course we could not. And it was a good thing we didn’t as the food was amazing.

Two parts of the lunch bear particular mention. First, they had Feuilles de Vigne for sale. Also called Dolmas by the greeks these are stuffed grape leaves. And they were phenomenal… probably fresh off the plants in the very recent past. The second special mention is that we bought a bottle of wine to share with lunch, their 2001 Merlot. Funnily enough, the actual bottle we bought wasn’t one of their Napa wines, but let me assure you that it was absolutely fantastic. It’s won gold medals at international wine competitions, and here’s a review:

There are intense, complex herb and olive aromas in this small bottling of Merlot from the Columbia Valley in Washington state, known for its excellent Merlots. Pomegranate and black cherry flavors appear as the firm, dry, cedary tannins invite drinking between 2001-2009.

By this time it was actually getting fairly late in the day. We were going to stop at Francis Ford-Coppola’s winery, but there was a special event there so we could not. We opted to drive on a side road over the mountains to go back to the city, and I stopped to take a photo at Diamond Oaks Winery, and one of the valley below.

In the end, our time in the Napa Valley was a great way to spend a day relaxing in California. I’d recommend it to anyone who likes great wine or beautiful countryside.

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› food     2004-07-04 14:12   ...0