Category: Places to Visit

The city of Siena in Tuscany has a particular  advantage for wine tasters.  It is in a central location with Chianti to the North, Montalcino and Montepulciano to the east, Bolgheri to the west and Maremma to the south.  Of course, it has the drawback of not being close to any of these famous winemaking areas, so visiting any of them entails a bit of a drive.  But beyond access to vineyards, Siena is a special place to visit if you are going to go wine tasting in Tuscany.

The city has three great attractions that should not be missed: the Piazza del Campo and the Duomo or cathedral.  The famous horse race, the Palio is run in the piazza, with the winner gaining local renown for the rest of his life.  But it is very crowded and doesn’t give you the real sense of Siena.

We said three attractions; the third one is everything else.  By all means, have yourself an apertivo in the piazza at sunset and admire the warm color of the campanile.  Stand in awe of the richness of the cathedral, not only above you but at your feet.  And then walk around the town.

A good starting point would be the Shrine of Santa Caterina (or Saint Catherine), Italy’s patron saint.  This is the house she grew up in, today decorated by murals of her life and works.  Even non-Catholics should be impressed.  Then, when you walk out, turn left and then left again up the step-street called Costa Sant’Antonio.  You’ll pass – or better yet, you won’t pass – a tiny restaurant called Osteria La Chiacchera – perched on the stairs.  It is so steep that front legs of the tables are six inches longer than the back ones.   At La Chiacchera they are dedicated to keeping the rustic cuisine of Tuscany alive, so you can have rabbit with olives or pork riblets and potatoes that you won’t find elsewhere.

If you turn left down an alleyway called the Vicolo Campaccio from the Costa Sant’Antonio, you’ll come to the Basilica San Domenico, which is the repository for relics of Santa Catarina.  Frankly, we think it has much more to admire from the outside than in the interior.  Now turn around and admire the view of Siena stretched before you.  There’s a row of restaurants straight ahead, all pretty popular.  Among them is Pomodorino, our favorite pizzeria in Siena (in fact, in all of Italy).  We’ll leave the quality of the pizza to you, but it has unquestionably one of the best view of any pizzeria in the world.  (Other opinions are welcome.)

The view from Pomodorino

Siena’s main drag is the Via di Citta, which runs behind the Piazza del Campo and can be reached from it up a little staircase to the Piazza del Campo.  At that intersection is a gelateria called La Costarella that Steve liked better than any other in Tuscany. Then turn right onto the Via di Citta and you’ll come to the massive and forbidding but nonetheless inspiring Banca Monte dei Paschi.  The recent financial crisis has not been kind to the bank, which is now endangered.  It would be sad if it doesn’t make it because it has been there since the Renaissance.  As pretty as it is by day, it is magnificent at night.

Banca Monte dei Paschi at night

The antiquity of Siena is evident in the fact that it is still a walled city, perhaps still awaiting another barbarian invasion.  What amazes us is the countryside comes right up to the walls.  More so than in our other travels, it gives us a sense of what it must have been like to live in a great medieval city.  And as with so many Italian cities, there is art everywhere, on piazettas, on the sides of buildings, on any random street corner.  The trick for the visitor is not to get jaded, to realize that ancestors from another age so loved their city that they adorned it everywhere.

A Sienese street by night

Because Siena, like many Tuscan towns, is built on a hilltop, many of the streets are very steep which by night makes them very romantic or a bit scary, depending on your mood.  Either way, you know while you are there that you are amidst something very ancient and very rare.

 

 

Healdsburg is the gateway to the Dry Creek Valley in Sonoma County and a backdoor into the Russian River area as well.  We think it’s fair to say it’s Sonoma’s culinary capital and it’s quite full of tourists at all times of the year.  These days it’s also the home of many in-town tasting rooms of some distinction.

There is some controversy over how to pronounce the town’s name.  Is it HELDS-burg or HEELDS-burg?  For a long time we said the former but now some locals tell us that the latter is correct.

We remember when the town, however you pronounce it, was a sleepy, almost dusty farmers’ village.  The first time that we visited Healdsburg together, in 2000, there was only one restaurant open where we could find lunch served at tables, as opposed a sandwich shop with fare to eat in the park.  If you went wine tasting in those days, it was a good idea to pack a picnic.  For the most part, we avoided going into Healdsburg when we tasted wines in Sonoma County.

Then in 2006 the New York Times published an article entitled, “Healdsburg, Calif., Emerges as a  Dining Destination” http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/20/travel/20choicesideweb.html .  Was this the same place we knew?  Indeed not; Healdsburg had grown, flowered and become a destination in itself.  Of the restaurants mentioned in the article, Cyrus has decamped for Napa town, but Willi’s Seafood and Raw Bar is as good as ever and Charlie Palmer’s Dry Creek Kitchen is still sublime.  Alas, Bistro Ralph and its heavenly short ribs is now a memory but it has been replaced by an Italian bistro, Scopa.  Baci is another Italian choice down Healdsburg Avenue; Café Lucia serves nouveau Portuguese meals; and the Healdsburg Bar and Grill is there for a good, honest hamburger.  And if you still want that picnic, you can buy your gourmet victuals at the Oakville Grocery or Shelton’s.

Although the aforementioned tasting rooms and restaurants are a more than adequate reason to visit Healdsburg, one of the great pleasures of the town is just walking around the plaza at the center of town.  Okay, it’s touristy but it’s for a higher class of tourists, as snobbish as that may be.  There are galleries, ice cream shops, a kitchenware store, a few hotels and some bakeries.  No tee shirteries to be seen. In the center of all that is the plaza, a more than century-old park with towering trees and a bandstand in the middle.  Often the square hosts markets, antique shows and summer concerts.

Photo courtesy of the City of Healdsburg

A not-so-subtle change has occurred in tasting wine in Healdsburg.  There have been tasting rooms there for many years.  But in honesty and with no disrespect intended, the wines were not very good.  In the past few years, some excellent wineries have opened tasting rooms in town,  including La Crema, Siduri, Clos Pegase, Stonestreet and Hartford Family.  Each has its own personality, from relaxed to frenzied, but you can spend a day tasting great wine without driving between wineries.

There is a sort of cognitive dissonance about Healdsburg today.  It is very much a part of Wine Country and the tourism trade that has grown up around wine tasting.  But there is also more than a lingering memory of small-town America, especially in the plaza.  Instead of a town to bypass on the way to the vineyards, Healdsburg is now worthy of a visit for itself.

These days, it’s easy to find good, great and even exceptional wines in Wine Country.  The problem is how do you get the wine you like onto your dining room table?  If you live in the area of wineries you like, this really isn’t a problem at all.  You simply buy some wine, load it into your car and drive home.  But for those less fortunate and for those who like to include wine tasting in their travel plans, especially overseas, getting the wine home is tricky.

Wine clubs  Wine clubs are one way to solve the dilemma.  If you live in a state that allows out-of-state shipping (most of them, these days) joining a club means that wine will show up on your doorstep at regular intervals, usually four times a year.  This is, after all, the raison d’etre of these clubs in the first place.  It benefits the winery to be sure, but there’s a lot of benefit to the buyer as well, especially if you are a collector and are willing to let some of the wine age for a bit.

The problem – and this is a common theme – is the shipping cost.  Almost all clubs offer you a discount (20% is common) but the cost of getting the wine to you often cuts, if not wipes out, the discount.  Some wine clubs are becoming sensitive to this and are offering special deals and flat rate shipping, but this only benefits the individuals who buy in volume.  For example, a $15 shipping charge for three bottles adds five dollars to the price of every bottle.  That’s cost is not unusual.

Shipping services  The wine clubs are great if you want a case a year from one producer.  But if you are on a wine tasting trip, you are more likely to buy one bottle from each of twelve wineries than twelve bottle from just one.  Here’s where shipping services come into play.  Of course, there are UPS and FedEx and they are usually present in the towns of Wine Country.  But check first; not every common carrier has a license to ship alcohol and those that do don’t have it in every office.

Another alternative is specialized shippers whose primary business is to send wine home to people just like you.  They specialize in packing and shipping delicate freight, i.e., wine bottles.  A few that we have used are Fitch Mountain in Healdsburg, Buffalo’s Shipping Post in Napa and Safe Haven Wine Services in Paso Robles.  A quick Google search will help you find more shippers wherever you may be going.

A variant on these services is to let your hotel take care of it for you.  Many have arrangements with shipping services that allow you to bring your bottles to the front desk, fill out some inventory forms and they take care of the rest.  It’s very convenient and we’ve never had any troubles using the service from hotels we have stayed in.  But it is a bit nerve-wracking to leave your precious cargo in the hands of a hotel clerk.

The process of these services runs around $60 per case.  In other words, you’re back to adding five bucks to each bottle.  If you are proud of a fabulous little low-priced gem you found somewhere, an additional $5 takes away much of the bargain.

Lug it yourself  There is the option of carrying your wine home yourself.  The economics make sense.  Almost any winery will sell you a foam insulated box for under $10.  So fill it yourself and take it with you.  It may cost you another $25 to include the box with your luggage, so you might be saving $25 in total.  And, oh yes, remember to bring packing tape and scissors with you.

That may be good for your wallet but it’s bad for your back.  You have to get the wine into the back seat of your car (in summer at any rate; in winter it can go in the trunk), out of the car and into the terminal and then reverse the process on the other end when you land.  If your car is a rental, there’s one additional step.  Don’t even think about sending wine as luggage if you have a stop on your itinerary.

You are also subject to the tender mercies of two sets of baggage handlers.  For the most part, bottles we have taken home this way have arrived intact, but there have been some sad counter-examples.  When we travel to Europe, we generally limit our purchases to the legal limit (four bottles per couple), wrap the bottles in bubble wrap that we have brought from home and put them in our luggage.  We have had no horror stories thus far, but time will tell.

 

Let’s say you want to go wine tasting in France.  That’s a good idea but France is an awfully big place.  The question then is where in France?  If you go to Bordeaux, you get to taste Bordeaux wines.   In Burgundy, you get Burgundies.  It makes sense, doesn’t it?  But there is one place where you can have two totally different styles of wine to enjoy and that place is the city of Lyon.  A half hour north is Beaujolais.  The same distance south and you’re in the Rhône Valley (at least the northern end of the valley with appellations like Côte Rôtie, St. Joseph and Condrieu.

The primary grapes of the northern Rhone are Syrah and Viognier.  Beaujolais makes wine from Gamay.  The vineyards in the Rhone grow on terraced mountains that seem from even a short distance to be sheer cliffs.  Beaujolais’ vineyards are on lovely rolling hills and valley.  As we say, two totally different wine tasting experiences.

And right in the middle of it is France’s third largest city, its temple of gastronomy, the capital of the east: Lyon.  Sure, go wine tasting all you want but leave time to explore this wonderful city.  Of course, there are historic churches, grand plazas and elegant shopping.  But if you are a wine lover, it’s a sure bet that you love food, too, and dining in Lyon is, simply put, great fun.

You can indulge yourself in the highest of high cuisine.  Just twenty minutes’ drive from downtown is the Taj Mahal of French cookery, Paul Bocuse.  It has had three Michelin stars for more than fifty years and will surely continue to do so as long Maître Bocuse is alive.  He’s 90 now, so if you want to have a meal under his tutelage, go soon.  It’s expensive.  If you can afford it, it’s worth it.  The wine list is also quite pricey but there are some bargains to be found if you search for them.

One step down are the bistros and brasseries in Lyon.  Perhaps the best of them also have Monsieur Bocuse’s name on them.  Several of his associates have opened top-end brasseries named (with a certain lack of imagination) Est, Ouest, Nord and Sud (East, West, North and South).  They feature the classics of French cuisine.  Onion soup, anyone?

You don’t need a fat wallet to enjoy Lyonnais dining.  The city is full of little restaurants known as bouchons, French for corks.  In these places you can choose among numerous regional specialties like salade Lyonnaise (salad with big chunks of bacon and a poached egg), cervelas briochée (a hot dog-like sausage baked in brioche, chicken fricassee with morels, quenelles de brochet (a poached fish cake in a rich crawfish flavored sauce) all finished off some creamy St. Marcellin cheese.  Don’t even think about rushing your meal.  You’re going to take your time to enjoy the food, the surroundings, the French families at the other tables and, not least, the chatter of your waiter.  In the best places, he’ll speak English and if you speak French, so much the better.  He’s explain the menu, the weather, the history of France and a little bit of life lessons as well.  Enjoy the show.

The bouchon Les Lyonnais

And enjoy the wine.  While some bouchons have broad lists, most focus on just the local wines.  But when “local” means Beaujolais and the Rhône, that’s not too bad.  Go ahead and order what you like, but the true glory of a bouchon is the house wines, each served in a 40 cl. bottle called a pot (pronounced poe).  Pots are inexpensive, always good, never great and just not quite enough for a meal.  So you order another – hey, why not, you’re having a great meal in a great city in a great country.  And you know what, two isn’t quite enough either to have some to go with the cheese, so…  Three hours later, you waddle out of the bouchon content and ready for bed.

There are hundreds of bouchons to choose from.  Some are of relatively modern vintage, others are more than a century old.  There is a web site of the organization that is trying to preserve the authenticity of these wonderful restaurants, www.lesbouchonslyonnais.org.  Even though it’s in French it will give you lots of excellent recommendations.  But don’t restrict yourself to this list.  Explore a little and you’ll find that some are just as good.  It’s really hard to have a bad meal in Lyon.

This is an unusual “Places to Visit” article, because you can’t visit the places described here.  They’re gone, vanished into corporate policy, Napafication, wine economics or just the passage of time.  We’re talking about wineries that we have loved in the past that are no longer there.  These musings were occasioned by a recent visit to Joseph Phelps’ Freestone winery in Sonoma county.  Phelps is one of the best known Napa Valley wineries and they added a tasting room way out towards the Sonoma Coast when they bought vineyards in the area in the late 1990’s.  It has been open since 2007 and as of December 31, 2016 it will be closed.

Joseph Phelps’ Freestone Visitors Center

The tasting room had a gracious farmhouse feel to it and we hope that someone else decides to share their wines there.  Even if someone does, it won’t be the same without those wonderful Phelps wines, which will still be available at their St. Helena winery.  How sad that future wine lovers won’t be able to enjoy it the way that we did. (Actually, we’d love to buy it as a home but Phelps isn’t offering and we doubt that we could afford it.)

Not so many years ago, Michael Mondavi Family, owned by the son of the great Robert, had a winery in Carneros.  It was similar to the Phelps Freestone winery in that it also gave visitors a sense that they were stopping by an old friend’s home.  Sure, there was a bar and a server, but with a fireplace and some easy chairs, you felt that Mike would be dropping by any minute to offer you a glass and a welcome.  Okay, this was all in the imagination but for one thing, wine tasting calls for some imagination and for another, that feeling is part of the experience.

[Today the Michael Mondavi tasting room has been replaced by that of a businessman who has turned the winery into a monument to ego and garish taste.  No more need be said about the sense of loss.]

The former Michael Phelps Family tasting room

Perhaps the saddest loss was the Stag’s Leap tasting room built by the master winemaker, Warren Winiarski.  Oh, you can still visit Stag’s Leap Vineyards and taste their famous wines.  But Mr. Winiarski hasn’t had anything to do with them for some years now, since he sold his vineyards and winery to a conglomerate.  Today, there’s a stunning stone and glass Visitors Center there, a truly modern Napa building.  But there used to be a wooden building, a bit too crowded to be sure, with an inviting terrace and shady trees that told you that wine making is about farming and artistry, not just business.

The former terrace of the Stag’s Leap winery

There was that same sense in a lot of the wineries that have upgraded to meet the demands of tourism and trade.  Perhaps it’s just wistfulness, but there was an immediacy to the experience when you stepped up to a plank stretched between two barrels and got a glass of wine from the fellow whose name was on the bottle.  You can still experience that in Paso Robles and other out-of-the-way corners of Wine Country.  But for Americans, it all started in Napa Valley and it is missed there.

There is more than simple nostalgia to these memories.  Wine has a history; that’s why they give it vintage years.  And wine tasting, as a voyage and as an experience, has a history as well.  Our children won’t encounter a visit to Wine Country the way we did.  It will be great fun for them too, but it won’t be the same fun.  We have no yen to bring back the good ol’ days.  They weren’t always that good; some poor wineries have been replaced by great wineries
in places that were only orchards back then.  But it is important to keep the memory alive, if only to measure progress.  As the economics of wine making and selling have changed the product, so it has changed the sensation one gets when going wine tasting.  As wineries like Phelps Freestone and Michael Mondavi Family disappear, a bit of our lifetimes disappear with them.

One of the pleasures of going to Wine country and visiting wineries is the chance it gives you to think to yourself, “Imagine if I owned this joint!”  A lesser pleasure among all those of wine tasting, but a pleasure nonetheless.  Nowhere in the world are such imaginings so fertile as in France and nowhere in France are they better than at the Clos de Vougeot in the Côte de Nuit of Burgundy.  Pronounce that Kloh de VOO-zhoh.

A clos is an enclosed field, or in this case and enclosed vineyard.  Yes, there’s a wall around it but the vineyard is enormous, the second largest of the grand cru vineyards in the Côte d’Or.  (Corton is larger.)  There is a hierarchy of vineyards and thus wines in Burgundy and grand cru is the highest level.  As beautiful as it may be, the reason to visit is not the vineyard but the building sitting in the middle of it.

Photo courtesy of the Confrérie des Chevaliers du Tastevin

The chateau of Clos de Vougeot has a history, in fact quite a lot of it.  It was erected in the 12^th century by Cistercian monks.  The name originates from the nearby abbey of Citeaux, which is the mother house of the Cistercian order (known as Trappists in the United States and elsewhere).  It was one of the most influential monasteries in medieval Christendom.  It was eventually abandoned, restored in the 19^th century, damaged in World War II and once again restored after the war.  That latter task was carried out by the members of the Confrérie des Chevaliers du Tastevin, a definitely snobby club of rich and famous Frenchmen.  Today the Confrérie has, according to its web site, 12,000 members.  It’s still rich and snobby but no longer exclusively French.

You can visit the chateau and pretend you’re one of the 12,000.  It’s worth doing on its own merits, just to see a 12^th century castle in the heart of a great vineyard.  You can do a self-guided tour and watch a film or you can be shown around by one of their guides.  Based on our experience, the guided tour is worthwhile.  The cellars and the formal rooms bring on that imaginary ownership mentioned above.

Perhaps the most exciting part of a visit is knowing that you are at the epicenter of Burgundy winemaking.  Sadly, the one thing you can’t do at Clos de Vougeot is taste wine.  That is, you can’t taste wine.  But every year in spring and fall they hold a “tastevinage”, a grand wine tasting with a jury of 250 of the finest connoisseurs that can be assembled.  They’re famous wine-growers, great merchants, heads of viticultural unions, wine-brokers, oenologists, government officials from the government’s wine office, restaurant owners, enlightened amateurs.  Maybe you’re one of them, otherwise you’re not going.  Out of the tastevinage comes a seal of approval, the emblem of the Confrérie des Chevaliers des Tastevin that the selected winery can put on its bottles.

By the way, what is a tastevin?  It’s a wide, flat cup that sommeliers use to slurp a little bit of well-aerated wine before serving it to you.  Or at least sommeliers used to do that (maybe some still do) in restaurants that had sommeliers.  If you take the guided tour, they give you one.

Photo courtesy of Amazon.com

 

Let’s suppose that you are in Paris, perhaps on business.  You have no time to leave the city, so even though you’re in France, you will have no opportunity to go wine tasting.  You have that old “so near but so far feeling”.  Fear not, redemption is at hand.

We’d like to point out to you a chain of restaurants called L’Ecluse (http://www.lecluse-restaurant-paris.com), which means the lock, as in a lock on a canal.  (To be honest, we only tried the L’Ecluse alongside the Madeleine church in the 8^th Arrondissment.  There are also sister locations in on rue Francois 1^ier also in the 8^th, St. Honoré in the 1^st, in the 17^th not far from the Arc de Triomphe, and along the Seine in the 6^th.)

L’Ecluse restaurant, near the Madeleine in Paris

We at Power Tasting are not in the business of restaurant reviews, so we will only note that you can get a meal at L’Ecluse from a limited menu long on Bordelais cuisine, especially sausages and patés.  In nice weather, you can sit outside, which is generally a pleasure anywhere in Paris and particularly so in the better neighborhoods.  All the L’Ecluse restaurants are in better neighborhoods.

The reason for avid wine tasters to go to these restaurants is the wine.  If you love Bordeaux wines (and which wine lover does not?) this is your chance for sampling a wide variety of wines from that region while still in Paris.  What part of Bordeaux do you like the best?  Margaux?  Got it?  Paulliac? Got it.  St. Emilion? Got it.  Get it?

Perhaps the most fun is to try wines from sectors you’re not as familiar with, such as Lalande Pomerol or Listrac.  The good news, especially if you’re visiting as a couple, is to try a few things previously unknown to you and then follow them up with your favorites.  We noticed something interesting: we each ordered wines we particularly liked, shared sips and found that we liked what the other had chosen better.  Isn’t that what wine tasting is all about?

Not sure what to order?  You’ll find the manager (more so than the wait staff) very knowledgeable and willing to listen to you (in English or French), find out your tastes and try to match them.

As stated, we don’t do restaurant reviews.  But here’s a tip.  If you do visit L’Ecluse and if you do have a meal, finish it off with the chocolate ganache and ask for advice on the best Sauternes to go with it.  Believe us, you’ll remember the experience.

 

 

 

For many wine lovers, including ourselves, our interest in wine started with Bordeaux reds.  Of course, we hadn’t tasted the greatest of the great Bordeaux chateaux when we were younger; maybe it was Mouton Cadet that first caught our attention and our taste buds.  From then on, as we were able to drink better wines, we thought of visiting Bordeaux as the summa of wine tasting experience.

And in many ways, it is.  But in a few ways, it isn’t.

For one thing, the wine growing areas around the city of Bordeaux cover a lot of ground and produce rather different grapes and styles of wine.  In a gross over-generalization, the vignerons of Medoc north of Bordeaux and Graves to the south make wines heavy in Cabernet Sauvignon; St. Emilion and its satellites to the east favor Merlot; in Pomerol it’s Cabernet Franc; and in the Sauternes-Barsac area they make sweet wines from Semillon.  So you don’t exactly go to Bordeaux, you go around it.

The first thing a visitor needs to know is that, as Dorothy might have put it if she were a wine afficianado, “We’re not in California anymore”.  You don’t just drive up to a winery, enter the tasting room and ask for a few pours.  You need, with a few exceptions, to have appointments.  While you can write well in advance and make them yourself, many only deal with the trade.  That means you are either a winemaker yourself or otherwise in the wine business.  “Otherwise” for these purposes often means tour organizers and brokers.  So you wind up paying someone to be an intermediary just to get you in.

Some visits are in groups; others are one-on-one with a guide who will almost always speak English.  Anticipate a tour and a tasting, each visit lasting 90 minutes to two hours.  The better the wine, the snobbier the visit.  And they generally have only one or two wines, so there is less to taste at the end of the tour.

For the most part, the villages aren’t particularly either.  The port at Paulliac is a good place to eat oysters right off the boat and Margaux has a few nice bistros, but save your dining experiences for the city of Bordeaux.

That all sounds pretty negative, but there are many more positives that outweigh the foregoing.  For one thing, especially in the Medoc, you are visiting real French chateaux.  They are gorgeous to behold and to be in; you never know when you might see some nobleman out with the hounds, as actually happened to us in Barton-Léoville.  Just driving up the main road, the D2, is to behold castles that seem to come out of fairy tales.  Unlike many other vineyard areas, the Medoc is flatland, so the castles you pass more than make up for the lack of rolling hillsides.

Chateau Pichon Baron (Photo courtesy of Wikipedia)

The big, big exception is St. Emilion.  It is a medieval town around which wine has been produced for millennia.  You can see Roman ruins in the vineyards.  Walking through the town, you’ll find enticing restaurants and outdoor cafes.  There are bakeries selling the local delicacy called canelés, which are small, rich cakes flavored with rum, vanilla and caramel. And in town and on the outskirts, there are tasting rooms for wineries, where you don’t need appointments.  (To be honest, these are not the great ones you came to Bordeaux to visit.  Even in this region you need appointments for the big names.  But we have found a few that offer very creditable wine.)

St. Emilion (Photo courtesy of Wikipedia)

Perhaps the best reason to go wine tasting in Bordeaux is the effect of the experience.  Once having seen the endless vineyards, seen the chateaux, tasted the wines where they’re made, you’ll never open a bottle of Bordeaux wine with the same feeling ever again.  You’ve been there, seen it, smelled the grape-sweet air (and maybe stolen grape or two if you go in autumn) and the wine will have an impact on you that you’ll carry with you forever.

Sonoma and Healdsburg, in Sonoma County, are dissimilar in many ways but they have one feature that is very similar.  They each have a major town square, with inviting leafy parks that are the focal points of each town.  Today they are surrounded by restaurants, tasting rooms, galleries and boutiques that announce that these are towns for people who have made it, who have the means to live the good life in Wine Country.  As a visitor, you know that there is money there.

There’s another place in Sonoma County that also has a lot of history, with shops and restaurants too, but this place says something else: “I remember the old days, before Sonoma County became fashionable”.  That place is Railroad Square in Santa Rosa.  It’s actually a formally designated Historic District, and we like to think that that’s not so much because anything terribly historic ever happened there, but because it has retained its roots.

There’s a railroad station of course, but no railroads anymore.  However, the Web (http://www.railroadsquare.net/) says that there will be light rail trains stopping there again, beginning in the fall of 2016.  Trains notwithstanding, this is a section of town to be seen as a pedestrian.  No matter where you’re from, you get the sense that you’ve been here before, and that you’re welcome back.

 

The old Santa Rosa station in Railroad Square (photo courtesy of City-Data.com)

There’s the old Hotel La Rose that’s been there since 1907.  It’s the kind of railroad hotel that, in the movies, the new sheriff stayed in while the schoolmarm fixed him up a place of his own.  To be honest, we’ve never stayed at the La Rose.  You can’t use frequent flyer points there, alas.  But it is awfully pretty to look at.

Up the street is a favorite restaurant of ours, Lococo’s.  It’s a little Italian trattoria with red and white checkered napkins and with real Italians working in it.  The food is good, the prices are reasonable and the charm comes free.  Like we said, it’s homey.

Further up the street is Jackson’s, the latest establishment to occupy that corner spot.  It’s changed hands and cuisines every few years and right now it’s a frank and honest bar.  Oh, you can get food there, too, but it’s really the spot for a cold beer or a local wine, preferably on a hot summer evening.  With each change of ownership, the new proprietors have been smart enough to keep the art deco cabinetry that once again provides historic continuity.

Another good part of Railroad Square is the coffee shops.  Whenever we’re in Santa Rosa, which is pretty often, we get our morning joe (well, actually latte) at one of two places.  The Flying Goat is newly renovated, with black and white tiles and a lot of sunshine pouring in, a very modern look.  On the other side of the square, there’s A’Roma Roasters with its rustic style, little wooden tables and stools, old posters on the walls and a long row of dispensers of coffee beans, which they sell at retail. It smells of breakfast when you enter.  Both have a few tables outside where you can enjoy your coffee and watch the crowd.

The choice of coffee shops is a deeply personal one, but both of these offer the same thing: they’ve been there a long time, they’ll be there a long time and you’ll feel welcome whenever you get there.  Sure, there are tourists planning their wine tasting days (isn’t that what you’ll be doing too?) but there are a lot of locals as well.  It’s not infrequent that people will ask where you’re from, what you’re doing in Santa Rosa and ask how you found this particular place for a cup of coffee.  Just tell them you’re coming home.

Power Tasting doesn’t do restaurant reviews so this is not a restaurant review.  It is about a restaurant that is definitely a place worth a visit if you ever happen to be in Nipomo, California.  Actually, no one ever just happens to be in Nipomo, so we’re really saying that if you ever are wine tasting in San Luis Obispo County or nearby Santa Maria, make a pilgrimage to Jocko’s.

A visit there is not just about the steak although the steaks are very good.  It’s about the experience.  For one thing, you feel as though you have been transported to a Saturday afternoon western of your youth.  (You do remember Saturday afternoon movies, don’t you?)  The bar is wood-paneled, with the heads of various dead animals (deer and such, not cows) shown proudly.  Sorry, the door is just a door, not of the swinging variety.  Surprisingly for a restaurant smack in the middle of Wine Country, the list is not particularly impressive although you’ll surely find something to enjoy with your steak.

Then there are the folks who assemble there.  Ten gallon hats and boots are much in evidence.  Everybody is a regular or, more likely, they treat everyone as though they were regulars, which is even better.  You’d better have a reservation as Jocko’s is quite well-known locally and seems always to be crowded.  Not that you’ll actually get a table at the time you reserved, but it will put you in the running to get a table and give you time to enjoy the bar.  Then, when it is your turn, you’ll hear your name bellowed out to overcome the din.

The dining room is a large, open space with cinderblock walls and Formica covered tables.  This is not a restaurant for gracious, elegant dining.  It’s for seriously committed carnivores.  Oh, they give you salad and vegetables, too, but the raison d’etre of Jocko’s (not that they’d ever use a phrase like raison d’etre) is enormous slabs of meat, mostly of the bovine variety.  There are some fish items as well, but really, why bother?

The firepit at Jocko’s.  Photo courtesy of A. Rios on Flickr.

So now you’ve ordered your dinner.  You can go out back and watch them cook it in a great, wide open, wood fired barbecue pit.  There are dozens of steaks and ribs and chops being cooked at any one time and at least one of them is yours.  The fellow tending the grill must be able to stand the heat, because he’s staying in the kitchen.

Go to Jocko’s for the experience.  Don’t worry, if you’re a meat-eater, you’ll love your meal.