Category: Wine Tasting Tips

Wine tasting can be a destination activity.  You travel to the capitals of the wine world – Bordeaux, Napa Valley, Tuscany, the Barossa Valley – for the purpose of tasting the wonderful wines they have to offer.  But in other cases, tasting wine is secondary if not incidental to the trip.  Perhaps you’re on vacation in a city that has wineries nearby and you’d like an afternoon away from the urban bustle.  Or you live in such a place and you wake up to find a day too beautiful to stay in town.  So you decide, let’s go to Wine Country, not for serious tasting but just for a pleasant day out.

Here are some tips for making the most of such a day.

Plan ahead.  We don’t mean that you should spend hours studying guides and maps.  But take a quick look on the Web for a locale that has all the things you need: a few wineries, a restaurant and a deli.  There was a time when you really needed to know where you were going.  Nowadays, Google knows and you only have to ask.

 Minimize your driving.  Select a destination that you can get to primarily on major roads and then go there only (and there only).  Don’t lose your time behind the wheel going from winery to winery.  If there are two or three in close proximity to one another, those are the ones to visit today.  Your tasting at Chateau Latour can wait for another day.

Have lunch.  Have a very good lunch.  Have wine with your lunch. If you dine in a restaurant, make it one that’s fun.  For example, when we go wine tasting in Long Island’s North Fork, we often have burgers and sandwiches at the Old Mill Inn in Mattituck.  The attraction is sitting on a dock watching the ducks come begging for French fries and seeing the pleasure boats head out into the Sound.  It’s not great food but it’s great fun.

Shop for something that isn’t wine.  Almost every winery has stuff for sale, from caps and shirts with the winery logo to truly beautiful, unique (often overpriced) products.  You don’t have to buy but the looking can be fun.  And since Wine Country is by definition farm country, you can often find a stand with fruit, vegetables, pies and candy.

Savor the beauty that’s all around you.  There may be exceptions, but in our experience grapes only grow in beautiful places.  The vines in serried rows, like soldiers marching in formation across a hillside, are going to look brilliant, any time of year.  At almost every winery they are aware of what they have and provide a bench or a porch where you can just sit and take in the glory of the scenery.  We both say it fills our hearts.  Fill yours.

Stay as late as you can.  Of course, it depends how much time you need to drive home.  But seeing the vines in the long, golden rays of a summer afternoon – or better yet, a sunset – makes for an unforgettable day in the country.

Taste, don’t drink.  It is so tempting to go to just one more winery and to swallow everything each one has to offer.  But don’t forget that it is alcohol and you have to drive to get back home.  Sip each wine and experience it with all your senses – the aroma, the color, the feel of the glass in your hand, the murmurs of other guests – and if you really like it, buy a bottle to take home with you.

In California and in many other wine-producing regions of the world, the typical experience of wine-tasting is to pull up to the winery, stand at a bar and sip selected wines, pay a fee and leave. If you have the time and interest, you might ask a few questions and learn a bit about the wines and the people who make them. There are certain wineries and certain occasions that call for more formality. You have to call for an appointment and show up at a specified time.

This is essentially the only way to taste the wines from the grands chateaux in Bordeaux. It is also necessary at the grandfather of all Brunellos, Biondi-Santi in Montalcino, Italy. There are a growing number of wineries in Napa and Sonoma counties that require an appointment. From the wineries’ points of view, there may be a number of reasons for this policy. Often it’s because the winery is so small that there are not enough people to support having a tasting room staff. One such that we have enjoyed in the past is Acorn winery in Russian River, a mom and pop operation with a real mom and pop, Betsy and Bill Nachbaur, offering you tastes of their wines.

Others just don’t want to deal with crowds and so limit the number of visitors. Everything is usually very informal and you get a lot of personal attention. We recently visited A. Raffanelli in Dry Creek where we tasted Zinfandel, Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon in their barrel room, with the wines served by a member of their production staff.

If you are interested to take a tour of a winery’s vineyards and production facilities, you usually need an appointment. This is only fair because they need to schedule workers to lead the tours and cannot accommodate too many people.

Finally, there are those who require appointments because they want to underscore their exclusivity. This may not be as snobbish as it sounds; they may sell extremely well-made wines at extremely high prices and see no reason to share their products with those who are unlikely to appreciate them. Yes, that’s snobbish. But when you are being asked to pay high prices for a tasting – $50 at Viader on Howell Mountain; $75 at Verité in Chalk Hill – you don’t want to be bellying up to the bar with the riff-raff. In other words, if you’re willing to pay that much, you become a bit of a snob as well. It is, in many cases, the only way you can have the opportunity to taste some very rare and pricy wines. However, you have to understand that you might be there for an hour or more listening to the whole story of the family, the building, the winemaker, the vineyard, and how great and beautiful their wines are plus dealing with the chit-chat of the person serving you. Too many of those in one day can be annoying.

One of the best reasons to sign up for an appointment is to avoid the madness if you are visiting Napa and Sonoma on a weekend. Saturday and Sundays (and sometimes Friday afternoons) can find tasting rooms packed, noise levels high, and large groups preventing you from getting a little wine in your glass, much less having a conversation with a knowledgeable server. You may even have the unpleasant experience of sharing the space with an overserved bachelorette party. If nothing else, an appointment guarantees you some tranquility while you’re having your tasting.

In many cases, tastings that require appointments are sit-down affairs, with a server who really knows what he or she is pouring. Often they include a tour. (There are significant exceptions to sitting around a table. Chappelet on Pritchard Hill, for example, offers a walking tour, tasting as you go.) All are fairly lengthy; you won’t be able to sip one or two wines and then leave. As we said, you’re in for the long haul, often more than an hour. Some are worth it. For example, the tasting at Jordan in Alexander Valley is conducted in a lovely library and dining room in a faux French chateau. Alas, there have been occasions when we felt trapped in a room with ten strangers, counting the minutes until we could gracefully escape. No matter the quality of the wine, the experience can be claustrophobic. We’re afraid that Far Niente and Nickel & Nickel fall into that category.

Here’s a nice little secret. “By Appointment Only” doesn’t always mean what it says. If a tasting room has the capacity, they will probably accommodate walk-ins, especially if you ask nicely. We were welcomed in that manner at Passalacqua in Dry Creek recently and were rewarded with a splendid seated tasting on a veranda overlooking seemingly endless vineyards. The staff at Tamber Bey in Calistoga found room for us on a Saturday. That was kind of them, but even with an appointment-only policy, they were quite full with large groups of visitors and it was very noisy.

Our advice is to use appointments judiciously. They make sense if there’s a specific wine you’re dying to try. If your travel plans mean that you must be tasting on a weekend, they can alleviate a lot of the unpleasantness that is an unfortunate part of Saturdays and Sundays in Wine Country.

 

In the late 1970’s, when wine tasting in California first became popular (or at least when we first experienced wine tasting in Napa Valley) the pours were served in tiny glasses, about four inches high with a bowl the size of a small tangerine. They were thick and heavy for a small glass and the wineries gave them away. Those were the days when the winemakers were happy that anyone was paying serious attention to their products at all. Somewhat thereafter, the wineries would buy glasses with their logos inscribed on them and they would still give them away. The tastings were free in those days, too.

Over time, there was a charge for the tastings and the wine glasses became larger and thinner. Some wineries still give them away with the tasting but don’t expect it. In more recent years, the glass only came with the reserve tastings (i.e., expensive) until today there are only a handful of wineries that give away glasses at all. Among them are Caymus in Rutherford and Silver Oak and its sister winery, Twomey in both Napa and Sonoma. Tablas Creek in Paso Robles and Steele in Lake county still do so as well. There are a few others, but even the ones that gave glasses even a few years ago no longer offer them.

We would not recommend that anyone go to a winery just to collect stemware. The wineries mentioned here are well worth a visit for the quality of the wine, which of course is the prime reason for going wine tasting at all. Nonetheless, souvenir glasses are fun to collect for some people, and if you are one of them you can usually buy engraved glasses at the winery. This raises two questions: how do you get them home, especially if you are flying, and what do you do with them once you get home?

The glasses you get at wineries today are usually of fine quality, with large tulip shaped bowls made of fine, thin crystal. The glasses are often from some of the most famous crystal-makers, including Riedel and Schott Zweizel and have no beads. (The bead is the rounded edge at the rim of a wine glass. The finer the glass, the thinner the bead and the best have no bead at all.)

The problem, of course, is that fine crystal is very delicate. Many of the wineries will wrap the glasses in tissue paper and give each glass to you in a paper bag. We recommend that you bring bubble wrap or envelop the glasses in your clothing.  Still, there’s no guarantee that they will arrive intact. If you buy a set of glasses, the wineries will usually have a box for them, thereby avoiding the problem.

Over the years, we have collected many souvenir wine glasses. In our second home, we have enough that we can set a table for maybe as many as sixteen people, although we don’t have a table that big. In our New York home, we use the souvenir glasses for our everyday wines, reserving our finer crystal for our best wines. The engraved glasses are great for parties, since people can recognize their own glasses by the name of the vineyard. When we have two of a certain winery’s glasses, we give them to couples.

So in sum, don’t go wine tasting just to collect glassware, but if they give you glasses, enjoy them. And if you particularly like a glass and want a souvenir where they don’t give them away, buy them.

 

When you go wine tasting, keep in mind that the vineyards are in the country, which means there are not a lot of restaurants, cafés or grocery stores around.  So we recommend that you plan your day with your lunch in mind.

We usually begin our day wine tasting around 10:30.  We make sure to have something in our stomachs; it’s not a good idea to drink with an empty one.  By lunch time we have some alcohol in our bodies and we know we’d better have something to eat.  While planning our day as to which sector and wineries we will visit, i.e. Oakville, St. Helena, Russian River, Dry Creek, we always determine beforehand where we’re going to have lunch.

In Napa and Sonoma, some of the best chefs in the U.S. have one or more restaurants.  There is no lack of great restaurants there.  Also, most of the large hotels or resorts have dining rooms.  The choice is yours to spend a few hours having lunch or take that time to visit a winery Power Tasting. That’s why you’re in wine country, right?  You’ll have plenty of time at night to enjoy a dinner in one of those restaurants.  We prefer to have a quick lunch and spend our time visiting wineries and discovering wines.

Some hotels will sell you a picnic box that you can order the day before and pick-up in the morning.  Or, if there is a little deli that you have seen while driving around, make it your first stop in the morning and buy your lunch.  If it’s warm outside, bring a bag of ice from the hotel ice machine and buy a small styrofoam cooler (most of the delis sell that), you’ll have it for the rest of your stay

Very few wineries now have picnic areas but some do, and if you have a wine tasting or buy a bottle of their wine, you can use their picnic grounds.  Some sell charcuterie, cheese, bread sticks, crackers, etc.  On a beautiful warm day, it’s pleasant to sit outside looking at the vineyard while you’re having your lunch.  It adds pleasure to your wine tasting experience.

V. Sattui Winery in St. Helena has a Marketplace, Deli and Gift Shop where you can get a warm meal, chicken, sandwiches, salads and cheeses. You can buy your lunch, a bottle of wine and use their picnic grounds, something we have done quite a few times. Outside food and wine are not allowed on their property; it’s only fair.

Most of the wineries are far from a deli, or do not sell any food, and you could lose a lot of time driving around to find one.  This is why you have to plan your lunch.  In upcoming posts, we’ll write about our favorite delis and cafés with seating areas and restaurants where lunch is fast and inexpensive.

As we’ve said before, children and bars are not a good fit. However, some wineries are kid-friendly and we will mention a few here that we’ve been to in the past where both parents and children can have a good time.

If you’re planning to take your kids, it might be a good idea to make a few phone calls to the wineries you’re thinking of visiting and ask if kids are welcome, or even allowed. In nice weather, some will invite you to sit outside for the tasting so the children can play. Some will offer crayons and paper; some will give the children juice. Paraduxx welcomes kids and even dogs in their large garden behind the winery where kids have games to play with, while their parents have their tasting sitting in lawn chairs. At Plumpjack Winery they give lollipops and Chardonnay-grape sodas to the little ones and invite them to play outside on their grounds.

Picnics are fun for the whole family but very few wineries now have picnic areas. Those that do got their permits before the law restricting them was enacted. It is fun to buy a bottle of wine and bring it outside to have a picnic with your kids. Of course you have to buy from that winery if you want to use their picnic area; it’s only fair.

The winery V. Sattui in Saint Helena makes picnicking a particular attraction. In addition to winetasting, you can buy your meal in their Italian Market Place and Deli where they have a great selection of cheeses, sandwiches, salads, chicken, breads, pizza, etc. Of course, you can pick up a bottle of wine in their huge shop, buy your food and walk outside, choose a table on their picnic grounds and have a great time with your kids. We have done it a few times (but without kids) and always enjoyed it. Do remember that bringing food from outside is not allowed. Honestly there’s no need for that; they have everything you want in their deli.

 

Some wineries, such as Château St. Jean, sell charcuterie, cheese, bread sticks, crackers, etc. On a beautiful warm day, what a pleasant thing it is to stop at one of those wineries with your family, have a wine tasting and/or buy a bottle of wine and some of their food and sit outside looking at the vineyard while you’re having your lunch. We do that as often as we can (weather permitting). It adds so much pleasure to your wine tasting experience

Over the years that we have been in California tasting wine, one of our favorite places to stop for a tasting and a picnic has been Preston of Dry Creek, now called Preston Farm & Winery. They have a large picnic ground and welcome you to have a picnic there, as long as you buy a bottle of their wines. You’ll enjoy being there and so will your children. If you’re visiting on a week-day, you can have fun playing bocce with your kids.   We’ve seen families having picnics there and kids running around and playing with the many cats that run free. Yes, at Preston Winery they are cat lovers and there are cats everywhere that will come to you to beg for food and let you pet them. They used to make beautiful posters featuring a cat sipping their wine. Being a cat lover herself, of course Lucie bought one of those and had it framed.

Besides making great Rhône style wines (our favorite is called “L. Preston”), the barn-style winery itself is very rustic, surrounded by not only vineyards but olive trees. Preston is an organic farm and winery, with home-grown vegetables and fruits. They also make delicious olive oil. In the tasting room, they always display some freshly baked bread to sample with their olive oil. Outside, they have a farm store where you can buy some of their organic products or just stroll around and feel like you’re stepping back in time.

So please, if you absolutely want to take your children with you in Wine Country, make a few phone calls beforehand to make sure that the winery you want to visit is kid-friendly.

Have fun. Cheers!

It’s not news that 2011 was a terrible year for California wines. Don’t just take our word for it; Wine Spectator said that “the 2011 growing season was simply nasty for many California winegrowers.”   It was cold. It rained when it shouldn’t have and didn’t rain when it should have. This should be a warning to those who would like to visit Northern California’s Wine Country over the next year or so.

It’s not that you’ll only be served “lousy” wine. For one thing, it has long been said that there’s bad wine in good years and good wine in bad ones. We’ve tasted some pretty good wine from that troubled vintage. Turnbull’s Fortuna Vineyard wines and Caymus Special Selection are good examples. When we tasted the Caymus, it had just been released. It was pretty good and generally this wine improves with aging.

Some wineries decided not to make their top wines that year, so there is no 2011 Etude Heirloom Pinot Noir or Conn Creek Anthology available for tasting. Other vineyards tried to tough it out and, in our opinion, made wines that don’t live up to their heritages, although they still cost the same as in better years.

Visitors should approach each winery with informed caution. By all means, taste the 2011s if that’s what’s on offer. If you like them, so much the better. If you don’t, that’s a part of the educational experience as well. It’s as valuable to know what you don’t like as what you do like.

If you’re not happy with what you’re tasting, or you’re not sure, say so and ask if they have an earlier vintage to try, for comparison’s sake. Most wineries have older bottles and would rather open one than let you leave dissatisfied. We call our blog Power Tasting because we believe the visitor has a right to question and compare. In most tasting rooms, you pay a substantial amount to taste the better wines. You ought to get your money’s worth.

When you do compare two vintages of the same wine, ask for two glasses and taste them side by side. While it’s true that extra time in the bottle will improve many wines, you’ll still get a good idea how two different vintages are alike and how they vary.   Since they’re from the same vineyard and crafted by the same winemaker, the difference has to be in the conditions that come from the weather. The knowledge that comes from learning to distinguish these differences in your own mouth is one of the things that makes wine tasting so exciting.

Standing at a bar in a tasting room with children around?   Is it any different than standing at your favorite local bar having a glass of wine with children around?

Children and bars are not a good fit.  However, there are some wineries that are kid-friendly and this will be the subject of another blog post.   But let’s put it this way: here you are in Wine Country standing at a bar listening to the winery employee describing the wine that is being served.  Just as you’re going to taste you suddenly hear children screaming or crying.  Believe us, we have experienced this exact scenario and it’s very unpleasant.  It ruins the experience of going wine tasting.  Wine tasting is for adults, period.

We had a particularly unpleasant experience at Artesa Vineyards and Winery in Carneros.  We had been there a few times before and we loved the place, particularly the view of the valley and the architecture of the winery, both of which are spectacular. Artesa has redesigned the tasting room, which is very large, and put some little tables and chairs (though it now looks more like a bar than a tasting room).  The day we went it was crowded, extremely noisy and we were trying to make our way to the bar to get some wine to taste.  Besides having a problem getting the attention of the staff to taste some wine, there were little kids crawling on the floor around us.  Others were running around while their parents were drinking, not paying attention to the children.  We actually had to ask one mother to stop her toddler from crawling between our legs!    The winery personnel were not managing the crowd; those at the bar were so busy pouring wine that they had no time to talk about the wine they were pouring.  So between the kids and the servers, it ended up as two bad experiences. It spoiled the entire visit for us.

Here’s another example.  Once we were in Paso Robles in Central Coast and we are driving in front of Grey Wolf Cellars. It looks more like a private house than a winery. Just from curiosity we stopped to see what they had to offer.  The tiny tasting room was full of beautiful antiques.  Then a couple with their two children came in.  The kids began to touch everything they could reach and trying to play with a guitar that was displayed there.  The woman who was pouring wine was paying more attention to the kids than the customers in front of her.  She stepped out of the bar to stop the children touching the antiques.  It wasn’t surprising that the parents did not see it, because they were busy tasting wine and not paying attention to what their children were doing.  Tasting rooms are for adults, not for children.

All wineries have gift shops. Many sell fragile merchandise such as glasses or chinaware. So imagine kids playing around while their parents are tasting wine.  Many times we’ve experienced children running around in the tasting rooms and gift shops like it was a Toys ‘R’ Us.

So please, if you absolutely want to take your kids in Wine Country, make a few phone calls beforehand to make sure that the winery you want to visit is kid-friendly.  Or read our upcoming post on the subject!

Lucie is writing this blog post.  Steve can smell all the aromas in a glass of wine but can’t smell perfume!

We are both very strong on the following advice: please everyone, guys and gals, do not travel with your bottle of perfume, cologne or after-shave when you go wine tasting.   Leave it at home when you go to Wine Country.  Perfume detracts from your tasting experience as well as that of those around you.

The idea of going wine tasting is to taste and smell the wines.  Perfume blocks all the wonderful aromas of what has been poured in your glass.  And since most of what we humans taste comes from our sense of smell, you don’t get the true flavor of the wine either.

Recently, we were at Joseph Phelps Vineyards in St. Helena.  While they are undergoing renovations at the winery, they were offering tastings under a marquee, outside besides the vineyard, below the winery.  Phelps is one of our favorite wineries in Napa Valley   When we reserved for our wine tasting, we were not told that the tasting room and patio where we had been many times before was being renovated. It was a surprise but not a good one.

Worst of all, there was a woman standing beside us at the bar wearing such a powdery perfume, I had to move away from her.  Unfortunately the scent of her perfume was all around, even if we were outside; imagine what it would have been like indoors.   Some smaller wineries have very small tasting rooms; her perfume would have been totally overwhelming.

Smelling that perfume made our tasting experience so unpleasant that it completely ruined Lucie’s visit, unable to get the bouquet and the taste of the wines being served… because of that perfume!

We insist that it is not only women we’re talking about, but men also.    Leave the Old Spice at home, guys.  When you taste wine, what you smell is as important as what you have in your mouth, so let’s all enjoy it to the maximum.

Cheers!

You are standing at a bar in a beautiful tasting room and a nice person pours you a glass of wine. You taste it, maybe you like it…and then you get rid of it!!??!! Yes, that is exactly what you should do, for a number of reasons. Maybe you didn’t like it. Maybe you were more interested in the reds than the whites. Most important if you want to taste a variety of wines at several vineyards, you can’t drink all the wine that will be served because you’ll get drunk. Every taster should know his or her limitations and getting to the bottom of every glass is going to hurry you along to your limit more quickly than you probably want.

For that reason, wineries leave buckets on the counter. Known unglamorously as spit buckets, their purpose is for discarding unwanted wine. If the wineries didn’t think they would be used, they wouldn’t put them there. Or looking at it the other way around, they put spit buckets there just so that you will use them. You don’t want to be drunk, and the wineries even more so don’t want you getting drunk on their premises.

People who taste wine for a living, such as wine makers and shop owners, taste a lot of wine at one time and have little choice but to discard most of it. They drink some wine, slosh it around their mouths and spit it into the bucket. We’ve seen it; we’ve done it once or twice; and believe us, it’s not an edifying spectacle. Try to imagine if everyone…on second thought, don’t try to imagine it.

In most cases, we share a tasting. So one of us breathes in the aroma, takes a sip and passes it to the other. The second one does the same thing and asks the first, “Would you like a little more?” If the answer is no, that one unobtrusively pours the remainder into the waiting bucket. Even if the glass was generously filled, we get rid of it, feeling no obligation to drink it all.

And the wineries don’t care. Don’t be embarrassed or feel that you’re insulting either the server or the winemaker by pouring away perfectly good wine. They want you to taste their wine, and once you’ve tasted it, it’s okay if you don’t taste it all.

Sometimes we just don’t like the wine they poured. So we pour it away, without ceremony or commentary, exactly as we would do if we really liked it. We pace ourselves for the one or two wines that we do want to drink all of. We sometimes ask servers not to pour us too much, precisely because we know we will use the bucket. Almost invariably, the server will say, “Oh, don’t worry about it”. They want us to get the full effect of their products, the look, the aroma, the aeration we achieve by swirling it in our glass. That’s not really possible with three millimeters at the bottom.

A healthy pour doesn’t have to be a healthy swig. That’s what the bucket is for. So use it.