Category: Experiences

We love wining and dining.  We have found that around the world, where people make good wine, they like to eat well, too.  Robert Mondavi famously said that the good life includes wine, art and food.  So the meals we eat in Wine Country are as important as the wines we taste.  Well, almost as important.

When we go wine tasting in areas we’re familiar with, it’s difficult to try new places, because we just can’t bear to forego a meal in the places we’ve loved in the past.  In Napa Valley, for example, how could we not have a meal at Mustards?  We remember the quenelles de brochet and boeuf bourguignon at Bistro Jeanty and have to try them again.  We could skip a Thomas Keller restaurant, but why?  Unless we’re staying for a week – and we don’t take trips that long – we seem never to have time for a new restaurant.

It’s a little different when we visit regions we’ve never been to before.  We read up on what the best known restaurants are and make reservations online.  But then we’re in a little village where there’s a bistro that just screams out “Eat here!” in our minds.  So, since most of Europe closes for a few hours at midday, we eat a delicious lunch and don’t have the appetite for the famous places where we had reservations.

There are certain meals that we’ve eaten in this way that are so memorable that we frequently tease our taste buds with reminiscences.  The foie gras in Colombier in Languedoc.  The crêpe filled with mushrooms in Morgon in Beaujolais.  Salad on the beach in Marsala in Sicily.  Lamb shanks in Sainte-Cécile-les-Vignes in Provence.  And on and on.  We’re salivating just writing about these meals.  The lesson is: When faced with temptation to dine at a place you’re never been but looks like you want to, give in and eat.

But fine dining is only a part of the culinary adventure while wine tasting.  Prior shopping at a cheese shop in Burgundy or a salumeria in Tuscany, followed by a picnic at the edge of a vineyard is as great a way to dine as there is in the world.  A stop at Oakville Grocery can accomplish the same thing in Napa Valley.  We used to wash it all down with a bottle of the local wine, but we’ve become a little wiser about our consumption nowadays.  These days, it’s never more than a glass.

There is a time and a place for a burger at McDonald’s, but it’s not when we’re in Wine Country.  Way out in the countryside, it’s usually easier to find a café where the locals go than a fast-fooder.  Dining in the same place as the people who make the wine you’re tasting adds a little understanding of the place that goes along with knowledge of the terroir and the grapes.

So Mangia! Bon appétit! Eat up!

Some of our wine tasting trips are certain to be full of novelty.  That’s because we are visiting winemaking regions where we’ve never been before.  Most recently for us, that was our travel to Penedes in Spain, as reported in a previous issue of Power Tasting.  But mostly, we return year after year to certain areas in California, New York and France.  (Even the great Robert Parker specialized.)  Every time we go wine tasting, we face the same dilemma: Do we re-visit old favorites or do we find wineries that we’ve never been to before.

There are several attractions to going back where we have been before.  For one, we like to stop in at wineries where we are members of their clubs.  Tastings are free for us at these tasting rooms, which is appealing in these days of high-priced degustations.  But just as important, we know that we are going to have wines we enjoy.  How do we know?  Because those wines are waiting for us back at home.

Domaine Carneros in Napa Valley, known for its sparkling wines, but where we prefer their Pinot Noirs.

Then why go out of our way to taste those wines?  Because we never get to taste them side by side.  We recently visited a winery where we regularly buy Pinot Noir as club members.  Tasting each of the wines one after the other, sip at a time, we discovered nuances in wines we knew we liked that weren’t apparent to us before.  We also found a Pinot Noir on their list that we hadn’t previously tried and realized that we really liked it.

Beyond the wines, we know that as members of the club, we will receive an especially warm welcome.  In many instances, we have known the servers and staff for years.  Even those we don’t know seem to go out of their way to give a better explanation of what they pour and maybe find a little something that isn’t generally served to the general public.

On the other hand, we experience a special excitement when we discover a winery we hadn’t heard of before.  There’s a sense of “Where have you been all my wine tasting life?”  In areas we know well, we may have driven past that winery for years, only happening to stop by on one trip. Finding a wine or two that we truly enjoy is like getting a birthday present when it isn’t our birthday.

It is also a unique experience when we visit a famous winery in the US or abroad that we had only read about before.  There is a feeling we get when tasting wine made by a French aristocrat in his château, that can’t be replicated elsewhere.  That’s a real château, not a faked-up Napa palace!  And if the wine has been known to be great since 1855, so much the better.

There is an old expression, “New friends are like silver; old friends are like gold.”  This applies to wine tasting as well.  We’ll keep our old favorites and visit them again and again.  But we’ll continue to seek out new wines and tasting experiences as well.

The pandemic is in the rearview mirror in Sonoma County.  So are the fires of 2017 and 2020.  There are some landmarks that will never be replaced but there is plenty of building and expansion, especially regarding tourism.  Which is to say, wine-tasting tourism.  There are new restaurants in the obvious places, such as Healdsburg and Santa Rosa, but also in tiny Geyserville.  All in all, times are good.

Healdsburg Plaza.  Photo courtesy of Sonoma County Tourism.

But there are a few cracks in that pretty picture.  Wine consumption is in decline in the United States and worldwide, according to reports in Decanter magazine and the Guardian.  As a result, some wineries are feeling a financial pinch.  One winery that we know and enjoy is letting fruit rot on the vines, because the cost of picking them wasn’t justified by the wine they couldn’t sell.

Mature grapes rotting on the vine.

The crackdown on immigration is also having an effect.  It is no secret that California’s agricultural industries are built on the backs of immigrant laborers.  The inbound flow of workers has ceased and many already here are afraid to show up for work.  Raids on vineyards have left many people afraid to come to work.

For the most part, none of this is evident to the average wine taster.  There appear to be more wineries opening their doors (or are we just noticing more that we used to drive past?).  Restaurants are crowded, even off-season, although there seem to be more locals dining there than in summer.  As an overall statement based on an admittedly limited sample, Sonoma County is maintaining and even expanding its place in the world of fine winemaking.

Almost without exception, Sonoma County wineries have adopted the seated-tasting-by-reservation model that appeared after the pandemic.  This does enable the wineries to gauge the amount of staff they need on any given day, although we did enter quite a few where two servers were chatting with each other because we were the only visitors at the time.  To be fair, the ones that have always been tourist favorites, such as Domaine Carneros (in Napa Valley, just over the county line) or Dry Creek Vineyard are as crowded as ever.  And we were able to simply walk into almost all tasting rooms without a reservation.

Certain things haven’t changed and probably won’t.  Dry Creek still is the place to go for Zinfandel; Russian River for Chardonnay and Pinot Noir; and Alexander Valley for Cabernet Sauvignon.  The rolling hills are gorgeous in every season and expansive fields of vines will always tug at our heartstrings.

And one thing seems even more pronounced.  The people we meet at the wineries are so friendly!  They seem equally appreciative of the life they lead amidst the vines and of the visitors who enjoy the wines they produce.  We encountered none of the snobbism that typifies other (not to be named) regions in California.  From temporarily employed servers to winery owners whom we met, they all seemed genuinely pleased to see us and share their wines with us.  That alone is sufficient reason to visit Sonoma County in these troubled times.

Our earliest wine drinking experiences were with (inexpensive) French wines.  We don’t remember for sure whether our parents knew about these first sips.  By the time we got to California wines, they were in big jugs, mostly opened at parties.  We have moved up a bit from those days, but still our table usually features wines from France, Italy and the United States. 

Photo courtesy of 8Wines.

We came to Spanish wines much later in life.  In one way, that was too bad, since we missed out on some fine drinking.  On the other hand, we were able to appreciate quality when we tasted it.  Even so, most of our experience was in Spanish restaurants, where the wine lists were not too deep.  Mostly, we ordered Montecillo and Torres Sangre de Toro; nothing wrong with them but not a real introduction to what the Spaniards are capable of.

Little by little, the restaurants we frequented featured more robust wine lists.  By then, we knew that the better wines (or more accurately, the better wines we had heard of) came from Rioja and were made of Tempranillo grapes.  (We didn’t drink much Spanish white wine.)  And indeed Rioja makes some fine wines, but then we discovered that off to the west, there were excellent wines being made in the Ribiero de Duero.  And there were other grapes, such as Garnacha and Monastrell.  (Only much later did we learn that those grapes were the same as – and maybe the predecessors of – what the French know as Grenache and Mourvèdre.)

Little by little, we started drinking wines from Zaragoza (made of Cariñena, the same as Carignan), Catalunya and the Priorat (made of Mencia grapes, the same as nothing else).  For the most part, these were still consumed in restaurants, though there were a few we found in local wine stores.  We still stayed with inexpensive Spanish wines, since we didn’t know much about what to buy.  And some of those less pricey wines, such as Borsao’s Tres Picos from Aragon were pretty good.

Then we began to travel in Spain and our wine tasting adventures went in both directions.  At tapas bars, we would order a tinto (occasionally a blanco) and got a glass of whatever and a little bit to eat.  We certainly didn’t expand our understanding of quality Spanish wines. 

But we did eat in better Spanish restaurants and, ignorant as we were of their wines, let the sommeliers help us.  Now our eyes were opened, along with our noses and mouths.  For one thing, we found out that mass producers such as Torres and Marques de Riscal made some top end wines we couldn’t find back home.  For another, we discovered wine makers such as Muga, Pesquera and Vega Sicilia that made excellent wines that we could find in North American stores.

We still drink more wines from other regions than we do from Spain, but we have a greater appreciation of the quality of Spanish wines.  We are also impressed by the variety of wines made there.  We enjoy the wines we have with paella at local Spanish restaurants and we have much better knowledge of what’s in the bottles.

We get to meet many people on the wine trade, including wine makers and vineyard representatives.  In recent years, these people have all expressed a consistent worry: Climate change is changing the conditions in which wine is made and, in some cases, the wine itself.

Wine grapes love warm, sunny weather.  They detest frosts once the vines begin to bud.  Of course, they want to be watered by gentle rainfall, but only at certain times of the year, in spring and summer.  But not at harvest time!  Yes, changing climate changes are making for hotter days over longer periods.  But it is also resulting in unexpected cold in the spring months and long-lasting deluges at, so it seems, all the wrong times.

Photo courtesy of AccuWeather.

Hotter summers lead to greater sugar content in the grapes, which in turn can be harvested sooner.  These sugar-laden grapes produce wines with higher (and ever higher) alcohol levels, but without the acidity slower ripening would produce.  When tasting wines in the year or two after scorching summers, visitors to wineries should be alert to power-hitting wines that seem to lack any liveliness on the tongue.

We are not yet seeing great wines coming from northern-most climes.  There’s no reason to expect great Norwegian wine anytime soon.  But the temperatures are changing the grapes used in some familiar wines.  For example, Merlot is becoming more prevalent in Left Bank Bordeaux wines, where Cabernet Sauvignon has reigned for centuries.  Moreover, the Bordelais are now allowing the use of new grapes such as Marselan and Touriga Nacional in addition to the traditional five (Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Cabernet Franc, Petit Verdot and Malbec).  So what winery visitors will get in the glasses in coming years may be significantly different than the Bordeaux wines as they have been, even in recent years.

And it’s not just heat.  Earlier springs lead to bud break in months that can still experience cold snaps and frost.  As recently as 2022, there have been damaging frosts in California’s most famed grape growing areas, to say nothing of those affecting Oregon, Washington and British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley.  Add to that the flooding that occurs when sudden spring warmth melts the mountains’ snow pack.  Russian River suffers from these floods often; January of 2019 saw a record crest in that river as well as floods almost as high in 2023.  Wine tasters should plan their travels accordingly.

All of this is to say that for those of us who love well-made wine and visiting wineries for tasting had better be aware of what changing weather patterns are doing to vineyards and wines.  It is possible that there will be better wines in the future from places that are unanticipated at present.  But there is more to great wine than great grapes.  It took generations and fortunes to make Bordeaux, Tuscany, Rioja and Napa Valley wines and wineries what they are today.  Speaking for ourselves at Power Tasting and, we’re sure, for our readers as well, we don’t have the time to wait for superb wines to come from Trondheim.

Often as we travel in Europe, we visit towns that are central (or at least near) to the area’s winemaking.  The one thing they all have in common is that they are heavily visited by tourists.  These have included Taormina in Sicily, Beaune in France and Dubrovnik in Croatia.  Often, as we walk around the towns, we see signs that say, “Dégustation” or the equivalent in the local language.  Degustation is an English word that means “tasting”, so the shops that the signs are in front of could be bakeries or delis, but they’re always in front of wine shops.

A scene from the film, La Dégustation.

There are always bars that we could go to – and have gone to – where we could sample the local wines.  We well remember such a bar in Épernay, France with four glasses of Champagne lined up on our table.  But that’s not what a Dégustation is.  Nor is it a bistro with a good list of wines by the glass.  It’s a store, where people can go in and buy bottles.

When talking about wine, a Dégustation is, as the word implies, a wine tasting.  It’s not at a winery and in fact it usually consists of a selection of wines from the vendor’s stock.  They are meant to show off the best, or at least typical, wines of the region where the shop is located.  A good one really does highlight top wines.  Others are more likely to feature bottles that the shop is trying to get rid of.  (You can almost hear the shop owner saying, “Heck, they’re only tourists.  They won’t know the difference and I’ll never see them again.”) 

We’ve run into both types.  How can we tell the difference?  In most instances, we’ve never been to that town before and are unlikely to go there again.  And we don’t know the wines on offer.  So all we could do is try our luck, winning sometimes and not in other cases.

As said, Dégustations are not bars.  Customers pay a flat fee for four or five tastes.  In this way they differ from Italian enotecas, where we could also buy wines by the bottle, for consumption on-site or back home.  But in enotecas, we could buy wines by the glass.

One virtue of Dégustations is that the vendor often acts not only as a seller of his own wines but as an educator on the wines of the region.  For example, there are plenty of Degustaziones in Montalcino.  We know in advance that the shop will be serving Brunellos, because that’s what they make in that Tuscan village and its environs.  Ah, but which ones?  We are familiar with a few and we enjoy a good Brunello, but we’re hardly expert enough to know which are the best and which are just ordinary.  So we listen as the shopkeeper explains the climate and soil conditions around the village and how they affect the aromas and tastes of each wine.  If we show a little interest – even better, buy a bottle or two – the server is likely to open some extra wines, to tempt us further. 

Dégustations are not better than visiting wineries, but if we are on a trip where we don’t have wheels, they’re a great opportunity to become acquainted with the wines made where we happen to be.

Our very first wine tasting trip occurred in 1977, when we visited Napa Valley for the first time.  By this point in our lives, we were wine enjoyers, not yet enthusiasts.  Almost everything we drank was either French or Italian.  Sure, we had some California wine, but it came in jugs and we served it at parties.  We were too classy (meaning snobbish and uninformed) to drink American wine.

The iconic Robert Mondavi winery.

But then the newspapers became full of articles about a wine tasting in France that has come to be known as The Judgment of Paris.  In May, 1976 California wines, mostly from Napa Valley, had competed side-by-side with the top tier of French wines and (amazing!) the American wines came out on top.  So we started to buy some wines from California that came in regular wine bottles.  But we didn’t know what to buy and even if we did, the distribution networks that exist today weren’t there in those days, so better California wines weren’t in our stores.

So the next year, when as luck would have it, we attended a conference in San Francisco, we took an extra day to voyage across the Bay Bridge and see what Napa Valley was all about.  There were nowhere as many wineries in the valley as there are today.  By this time, we had learned about a few of them and made sure to try the ones we’d heard of.

Memory is a bit foggy nearly a half century later.  We know we went to Chandon.  The bubbly wine that we tasted – we were warned not to call it Champagne – was wonderful!  So much better than the plonk we were used to back home.  And we went to Robert Mondavi, which was a revelation.  It wasn’t just the wines, though they were amazing.  It was the beauty of the architecture, the grounds and the vineyards that blew us away (and made us into wine tasters to this day).

And we’re sure we had a tasting at Louis M. Martini.  Memory may be playing tricks, but we think we got to meet Mr. Martini himself on that occasion.  It was definitely a simple operation, unlike the elegant tasting facilities at Martini today.  Here were hearty, accessible wines that we could afford to buy.  Their wines became a mainstay of our cellar (that was actually the bottom of the linen closet).

Without getting into a comparison of French, Italian and Californian wines, it is fair to say that in those early years of our wine-drinking lives, the quality difference at the price point we could afford in those days – five dollars was a lot – was pretty great.  Decades of inflation and some improvement in our tastes make wine rather more expensive nowadays, and our cellar contains wine from more places.  There will always be a place for California wines.  Their power is unmistakable, both in terms of flavors and the amount of alcohol (although climate change is forcing the Europeans to bottle wines that are catching up to California in that regard).  But in the 1970’s all we knew was we had discovered something new that opened taste vistas for us.

Let’s say you’re going out with some friends for a few drinks.  Wine lover that you are, you tell your friends that you’d like to go somewhere where they have some nice wines by the glass, rather than to one of the cocktail bars that seem to be springing up everywhere.  So where should you go?

Photo courtesy of Time Out New York.

For the most part, neighborhood bars have two kinds of wine: red and white.  These wines come in large bottles or jugs and are often the cheapest of the cheap, although the bartender will still charge a premium price.  Fortunately, there are some bars – even some old-time Irish saloons like the ones we have around our home – that are adding a few interesting wines by the glass.  This may be because they have come to realize that there is customer demand for better wines or because they can get an even higher premium price for them.

If you want a broad selection of wines to try, a wine bar is the place for you.  For you, yes, but maybe some of your friends would prefer a beer or a glass of whiskey.  They would be left out at a spot that only serves wine. 

But let’s assume that they’re okay with a wine bar as the destination for the evening, or one of them.  Instead of having too few choices at your local tavern, you can find yourself with too many at a wine bar.  There are many that offer flights of several small pours of a variety of wines, usually stylistically similar.  That turns a drinking evening into a wine tasting one.  If four people, say, choose four different flights and you don’t mind sharing glasses, you will have quite the wine tasting experience.

Some restaurants have a good selection of wines by the glass.  If it’s a restaurant with an extensive wine list, there should be quite a few to choose among.  “Should be” is the operative term.  Restaurants make their money selling bottles of wine to accompany meals.  It’s rare that the wines you’d really like to have just a glass of is available.   All too often, the wines that can be bought a glass at a time are limited in number and are taken from the bottom of the restaurant’s list.

There are some exceptions to this pattern.  The bars at steak houses, for example, often feature big red wines that go well with the food they serve.  They often sell good-quality Cabernet Sauvignons or Merlots by the glass.  If you’re in the mood for some delicate Chablis, you’ll probably be out of luck.  Of course, the reverse is true at a seafood restaurant. The point is that you can experience an interesting selection of wines at a variety of locations…if you know what they serve.  This is where the internet comes into play.  Take a look at the wines they offer before you go out for the evening and you’re less likely to be dis

There are many sparkling wines made around the various corners of Wine Country.  Unquestionably the best and the best known is Champagne, which must be made in a particular section of northern France.  There are some nice bubbly wines made in Napa Valley.  The Germans and Austrians make Sekt.  Italians produce Prosecco.  And in Spain, not far from Barcelona, they grow grapes and make Cava from them.  Among the best known Cavas in the United State was – and is – Freixenet.

Back in the day, far off in the past, we didn’t know about any of that.  If it had bubbles, it was champagne.  In fact, despite the fact that the French owned the name, there were (and still are, in a few instances) American sparkling wines that were called champagne, right there on the label.  There was even something that had bubbles called Cold Duck; even then we knew that this stuff was awful.

Photo courtesy of Grupo Freixinet.

But we also knew that we couldn’t afford real Champagne.  A bottle of Moet & Chandon might have cost $10, but that was a lot of money when we were just starting out on adult life.  That was when we discovered Freixenet.  In the beginning, it came in a frosted bottle.  The bottle alone and a difficult-to-pronounce name made it seem so chic and, well, European.  Later Freixenet offered their Cordon Negro in a black bottle, which added elegance to its appeal.

The fact that it cost about two dollars made it accessible even for our pocketbooks in those days.  And so we opened it whenever there was something to celebrate:  The end of the semester.  Our team winning a championship.  Friday.  We had no idea how to open a bottle, what kind of glasses to pour it in or how to sip it.  We just knew that it had bubbles and that we liked it.

Not that long ago, we had the opportunity to try it once again.  By that point, we had been drinking real Champagne for many years and the Freixinet was a disappointment.  Did we really drink that stuff?  

Yes we did and it introduced us to sparkling wine, in itself and as a part of being grown-up.  There was mystery and romance in a bottle of Freixenet, a sense that someday we could be sophisticated if we tried, if only we knew how.  The idea of Freixenet was in many ways more important than what was in the bottle (or on the floor because we thought the right way to enjoy it was to spray some when we opened a bottle).

These days we only drink French Champagne and occasionally a top-end California sparkling wine.  We know a great deal more about wine and wine tasting than we did in our youth, which we guess makes us more sophisticated.  But do we really enjoy it any more than we did when we were drinking Freixenet back then?  We’re not sure; alas, we can’t remember. 

Once we hosted a blind tasting of Champagnes.  Just for fun we included a bottle of Freixenet.  One of our guests actually chose the Freixenet as her favorite.  De gustibus non disputandem est as the Romans used to say (there’s no arguing with taste), nor with good memories.

In our first forays into wine tasting, way back when, finding our way was simple if not easy.  We would fly to San Francisco, rent a car and drive up to the Route 29 exit from I-80.  Then it was a good 45 minutes until we reached the winemaking area of Napa Valley, which was the only part of Wine Country in the United States we’d ever heard of.  We would continue up Route 29 until we saw a sign indicating a winery.  We would go in, have a sip, take a glass and proceed to the next one.  There weren’t that many wineries then, so it was easy to just keep going north until it was time to go to our hotel.

As more wineries opened and as we spread out to other American winemaking areas, we learned that the best plan was to stop at the first winery we encountered, regardless of our interest in that one, and pick up a tourist magazine.  There would be (and still are) lots of ads for wine and wineries to visit, plus restaurants and hotels.  That was all helpful in its way, but most important was the centerfold that contained a map showing where all the wineries were.  At first, we’d pick a few wineries we wanted to visit and would drive from one to the other, without regard to the amount of time we’d be behind the wheel instead of in front of the bar.

There were a few problems with that approach.  Wineries that paid for big advertisements in the magazine were highlighted on the map and smaller ones that couldn’t afford to advertise were omitted.  If we knew of one of those and wanted to taste their wines, we’d have to call and get driving instructions, which we had to write down on whatever scrap of paper we had.  That approach might have worked, but cell phones were new and coverage was spotty in rural areas.

Then came MapQuest.  Before our trip, we would use that app to plot out the routes from one winery to another.  This process was a bit difficult, because if we didn’t know where the wineries were, we would have to figure out in which order to plan the drive, which often necessitated repeated searches.  And all these maps and instructions had to be printed out and taken with us.  We well remember thick manilla folders of maps that the navigator had to fumble through once we arrived.

When GPS applications such as Google Maps replaced MapQuest as our go-to app, it solved a lot of problems, but it created a few others.  Sometimes it simply got the instructions wrong.  We well remember driving miles too far because Google sent us way off the route.  Also, in some cases we remember from a trip to France, if there was a route that was two meters shorter than another, the GPS systems would take us along tiny paths, through farms and vineyards rather than on the main road that would have gotten us where we were going far faster.

Isn’t technology wonderful?  We still think it’s fun to just wander a bit and find whatever we happen to find.  Still, getting the tourist magazine still helps. This way we can figure out the location of all the wineries at one glance.