Hartford Family Winery (http://www.hartfordwines.com/) actually has two tasting rooms, one at the winery itself in the Russian River area and another on the plaza in the center of Healdsburg in Sonoma County. In keeping with the theme of this issue, we are reporting here on the in-town tasting room. It is on the corner next to the Healdsburg Hotel (specifically the Dry Creek Kitchen restaurant in the hotel) and catty-corner from the park. The interior is bright and sunny, with a bar area up front and large room in the back that would appear to be a graceful dining room in a country house. Except it’s not a dining room and you’re not in the country; you’re in a bustling town. Indoors or at their tables outside, all tastings are seated ones.
Here a server will bring you taste after taste from their list, which is actually a pretty concise one: Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Zinfandel. 90% of their wines are from estate-grown grapes and while the winery is in Forrestville in the Russian River AVA, the vineyards are there, in Carneros, Sonoma Coast and other places as far afield as Oregon. So although they only deal in wine from three grapes, the choice of Hartford Family wines is actually quite a wide one.
(Just to confuse matters, many of the Hartford Family wines are marketed with the label of Hartford Court. For many years we thought they were two different wineries.)
We actually think the wines are very good, and we suppose we wouldn’t enjoy visiting Hartford Family so much if we didn’t think so. But to be honest, that’s not the reason we love this wine tasting experience. Taste indoors if you’d like, but the real joy of visiting Hartford Family is sitting at one of the tables that run along the pedestrian walkway between the tasting room and the hotel, facing the park. If it’s raining or very cold (which does happen occasionally), indoor tasting is your only option. But we were there recently on a sunny afternoon in February and found that a visit to Hartford Family’s Healdsburg location leads to the most relaxing wine tasting experience we have ever had.
There you are, looking up at the century-old trees in the town square, being served exquisite wines, not being rushed, people-watching the tourists and the locals alike. The thought that crossed our minds was simple: Life is good.
Since the service staff isn’t large and they need to keep going from table to table, there’s not a lot of time for questions and conversation with your servers. They seemed knowledgeable about their wines and were amazingly able to remember what wine came next for each table. But we found that the wine spoke for itself and that we were so busy not being busy at all that the time just passed away. Somehow we learned just about everything we wanted to know about the family, the winery and the wines.
The Healdsburg tasting room does take appointments for reserve tastings, but most of the visitors are walk-ins, tourists come to walk around a principal town in Sonoma’s Wine Country. If we were locals living in the Healdsburg area, we’d be there every weekend.