It all started at Baci, a restaurant in Healdsburg. [If you visit Healdsburg, we recommend you dine at Baci. Ask for Lisbeth, the owner and the hostess, and by the time you finish dinner you’ll feel like you have a new friend.] We thought that Zinfandel would go well with our meal but didn’t recognize any on the list of locally made wines. When we asked the waiter for a recommendation, she immediately said, “Saini”. We ordered a bottle and loved it, so the next day we drove to the winery to see what else they had to offer.
The Saini tasting room.
We found an attractive wooden building, at once rustic and modern, a theme that is continued inside. The first two things we saw as we entered was a long granite bar, perched on wine barrels, above which was a huge, elegant chandelier. The other was a small brick shack, of which more later.
The chandelier above the bar has more than 1600 Swarovski crystals.
There is a high likelihood that you will meet a member of the Saini family when you visit. We got to meet the owner John Saini (pronounced SA-ini), his daughter-in-law Laura and his grandson Angelo. Three generations at one time! John is there often and sometimes leads tours of the vineyard. We had a chance to chat with him and his business manager, George Christie. We learned how his grandfather established the vineyard in 1917 and planted vines that are still producing. He had built a brick shed for storing his wines. When the current tasting room was built, it was hoped to incorporate the old shed, but it was structurally unsound. So they demolished it and rebuilt it into the entrance of the building out of the original bricks.
John Saini with his grandson Angelo.
It is evident that family means a lot at Saini. But it’s more than genealogical heritage. John Saini refers to George and Lisbeth of Baci as “family”. We happened to be there for a member event, and all those guests were family, too. We believe we are now, too. That sense of connectedness – to the soil, to the vines, even the trees and the Dry Creek neighbors – suffuses the Saini experience.
The sense of family is even there in the wines. The list includes Nonno’s Bianco and Rosso (Nonno being Italian for grandpa). There’s Valentina Marie’s Rosé and Angelo’s Paintbrush, a blend of just about every grape they grow. Even the trees get into the names: Apple Block and Olive Block Zinfandels, the latter being the one we tried at the restaurant and still our favorite. Overall, there is an Italianate tinge to the wines, one more connection to the Saini heritage. We can’t guarantee that anyone else will get to meet so many family members as we did, but it’s a high likelihood that every visitor will encounter the warm welcome we got at Saini. We at Power Tasting don’t review wines, although we can say we enjoyed what we tasted at this tasting room. We do write about the wine tasting experience, and all we have to say is that we left Saini Vineyards with big smiles on o