Category: Experiences

Napa Valley is the most beautiful winemaking area in California.  It stretches 30 miles between two mountain ranges, the Mayacamas and the Vaca.  There are hundreds of wineries there and many of them are the most famous in America.  We always have a wonderful time when we visit there.

Sonoma County contains the most beautiful winemaking areas in California. There are several distinct growing areas, several of which specialize in certain grapes.  There are hundreds of wineries there and many of them are the most famous in America.  We always have a wonderful time when we visit there.

Does that sound just a tad schizophrenic?  Well, there’s a lot of truth in that.  Both Napa Valley and Sonoma County are very special places for us and we visit one or the other or both almost every year.  That raises a question that is the theme of this article: for the wine tasting visitor, as opposed to a winemaker, are they two distinct places or just one, divided by mountains?

The view from William Hill in Napa Valley

The case for distinctiveness starts with the grapes.  Chardonnay is grown plentifully on both sides but Cabernet Sauvignon (and to a lesser extent, Merlot) is the king of Napa Valley.  Sure, there is lots of Pinot Noir in Carneros on the south end, but that sector is  split between Napa and Sonoma Counties, so by definition Carneros is an outlier.  Sonoma County also has lots of Cabernet Sauvignon, but it’s concentrated in Alexander Valley and Chalk Hill.  Zinfandel is in Dry Creek and Pinot Noir is the star in Russian River, Green Valley and the aforementioned Carneros areas.

[To be sure, all the foregoing is an over-simplification.  You can find some of everything everywhere.  But the reason that the wines in each AVA are world-famous is because of the grapes mentioned.]

The view from A. Rafanelli in Dry Creek

Of course, they’re much the same as well.  Both Napa Valley and Sonoma County have great restaurants, attractive wineries and ample opportunities to learn about wine.  Sadly, the hotels on both sides are getting waaaay too expensive, as are the charges for tasting.  They both offer mountain and valley fruit, along with the disputes about which is better.

The strongest argument for treating Napa Valley and Sonoma County as one wine tasting destination is the ease of traveling between the two.  Route 121 traverses them both on the south end; the glorious Oakville Grade is in the middle; and Mark West Springs/Petrified Forest Roads are at the north.  Or you can continue up Route 29 until it leads you into Alexander Valley.  The counterargument, by the way, is that you shouldn’t attempt the mountain crossings at night after a day of wine tasting.  We learned that lesson the hard but fortunately safe way.

For many years, we visited one or the other but not both.  Recently, we have been packing our bags and spending a few days in Napa Valley and then a few in Sonoma County.  That’s great if you have the time.  But this strategy doesn’t answer the question as to whether they are one place or two.  At the end, we say that the answer is “Yes”.  They are one place just as Manhattan and Brooklyn are both New York and they are different for just the same reasons.  They are much alike but they feel different.  A Sonoman tell you that they are jus’ folks and the Napans are snobs.  Napans say that they are cultured and the folks on the other side are hicks.  There are palaces in both places (although more in Napa Valley). There are interesting little out-of-the-way places in both but more of them in Sonoma County.  Visit both.  Reach your own conclusions.  Enjoy the wine.

When we go wine tasting, we tend to visit the better wineries in the regions we visit.  What’s the point of travelling such long distances just to sample the ordinary wines we might find at a store back home?  But even the best wineries are reluctant to open bottles of their most expensive, rarest wines for casual visitors, and we are not accustomed to buying the highest priced bottles. So we hardly ever get to taste the wines with top scores granted by Wine Spectator, Wine Advocate, or Wine Enthusiast, and certainly nothing rated 100.  So here’s how we got to try a 100-point wine.

In 2002, we were visiting Bordeaux at the vendange, or harvest time. Wine tasting there is a lot different than Americans are used to.  We may be used to names that are Chateau This-or-That, but in Bordeaux the famous wines are really grown in the estates surrounding actual castles.  They do offer tastings, but not to just anyone who happens to be driving by.  There are “appointment only” wineries in the US, but if they have an opening, most will accommodate the casual visitor.  Not so in Bordeaux.

So if you plan to visit, make appointments months in advance or use a broker.  These brokers charge a hefty fee just to get you into the best-known chateaux.  We used one on our trip, and she spread out our visits around the region: Macon one day, St. Emilion the next and then Sauternes.  The latter is probably the world’s best known producer of dessert wines, named after the village of Sauternes.  What most people don’t know is that there is only one winery, Guiraud, that is actually in the village.  The others are in the outskirts or in another nearby village, Barsac.  Even with France’s strict appellation rules, wines from Barsac are allowed to use the name Sauternes.

After a memorable lunch at a relais in the village, we pulled up to a winery in Barsac named Doisy Daene, where the broker had arranged a tasting.  This was no grand castle, but a working facility.  “Okay”, we thought, “we have an appointment so let’s go in”.  There was only one person in the winery, a rather elderly gentleman.  We introduced ourselves and he immediately recognized Lucie’s Quebecois accent.  “Nous adorons votre accent”, he told her (We adore your accent).  This was amusing because the French are usually rather proprietary about their accents, so Lucie was pleased to hear him say it.

It worked out that he was the former winemaker, now retired, and he was filling in for his son, the current winemaker that afternoon.  He took us for a tour and let us try some white table wine right out of a fermenting tank.  Because it was the harvest, the grapes had been pressed only a few days previously.  It was horrible, and we two visitors looked at each other disappointedly.  We hadn’t visited Bordeaux to drink lousy white wine.

Then he took us into a small room to sample what we had come for, their dessert wine.  This was no tasting room, just a little office off the barrel room.  First he offered us a 2000, which was very good but still a bit young.  Then he poured some Sauternes from the 1990 harvest, known to be a millesime.   This was a really excellent wine, amber in color, round in the mouth, deliciously sweet.  Finally he opened a little refrigerator and took out an unlabeled half bottle, with no cork but a piece of aluminum foil on top.  This was the as yet unreleased, unbottled 2001, just a year from its harvest.  He told us that he was offering us this special treat parce que vous êtes Canadienne (because you’re a Canadian girl), with what might have been a wink at Lucie.

With the first sip, fireworks went off in our mouths.  This was the most magnificent Sauternes, in fact any dessert wine, we’d ever tasted.  (It still is.)  We wanted to buy some, but since it wasn’t even in bottles yet, how would we get it home?  Sadly, we let the opportunity slip.

As you might have guessed, when the wine was released a year later, Wine Spectator gave it 100 points.  You never know.

In most cases, the best way to go wine tasting is to drive out into the countryside; see the vines; snatch a grape or two if it’s harvest time; and get to know the area where the wine is produced.  But there are times when this is not necessarily the best idea.  In the Napa and Sonoma Valleys on a weekend (especially a holiday weekend); in Europe during the vendange, in remote areas where just getting from place to place takes up too much time it is often best to look for other alternatives.  One of these is to do your tasting in a town, rather than in the vineyards.

It’s a bit unfair to the wineries that have opened in-town tasting rooms, but most of these have, for a long time, been pretty terrible.  We are happy to report that this is no longer the case, at least not everywhere.  There are reasons to stay in town, but there are also drawbacks.

Priest Ranch in Yountville, CA

Perhaps the greatest advantage of tasting in town is that you don’t have to drive from winery to winery.  A very little shoe leather will take you from one to the next.   On the other hand, unless you are staying in the same town, you do have to get back behind the wheel to go home.  So the plus is you can taste more wine without driving but that’s the minus as well.  Take it slow and easy in town just as you would out among the vines.

When you taste in towns, you trade off the beauty of the trees, sky, lanes and vines for the less ethereal attraction of cafes, shops and everyday life.  In Santa Barbara, for example, the tasting rooms are in two main locations: along the railroad tracks in the aptly named Funk Zone and uptown in shopping centers.  Neither of these are necessarily bad, but a lot of the artistry or wine is lost in an atmosphere that is either party time (!) or commercial.

You lose a connection with the terroir is towns.  The wines are there because that’s where the owner opened the room, not because the wines come from right around that area.  Again using Santa Barbara as an example, many of the wines you can taste are from Santa Barbara County, but many are from Santa Maria, San Luis Opisbo or even Sonoma Counties.  There’s wine there, but no there’s no there there.

In Italy, in our experience, wineries don’t open tasting rooms in town.  For one thing, the vineyards are just outside the towns, within a few minutes’ drive.  For another, many of the towns are too small to attract visitors.  They are little more than a few houses gathered around a crossroad.  Exceptions include Montalcino and Montepulciano in Tuscany, where you find sale di degustazione that feature certain wineries that they represent.  You pay a fee and you get a guided tour of the region, sitting on a bar stool.  It always felt like a shame to us to be there when the real vineyards were just down the road.

A degustazione in Montalcino.  Photo courtesy of Sempione News

Virtually every village in France’s wine growing regions has a cooperative, where the farmers who don’t have the money or interest to make wine for sale on their own band together for common facilities and marketing.  If, as happened to us in Beaujolais during the last harvest, none of the wineries are open, the cooperatives are there to give you an idea of what the regions’ wines are like.  In some, sadly, all you get is a distant hint of the greatness in that denomination, not the true glory of the AOC.  There are some great exceptions, such as in Rasteau or Chablis.

 

At Walt Wines in Sonoma

There is hardly anything more pleasant than passing an afternoon taking in the scene in the street or on the piazza or the petit place sipping lovely wines.  As with everything else having to do with adult beverages, that pleasure should be indulged with discretion.  We like tasting in town sometimes, but we know where the real magic of Wine Country comes from, too, and it’s not on the streets.

 

In almost all California wineries, when you go wine tasting you’ll find a brochure (or your server will give you one) inviting you to join their wine club.  At that very moment, it usually seems like a great idea.  The few sips you’ve had so far appeal to you; the room is warm; the server is friendly; and the wine is beginning to lighten your mood.  So why not?

There are some very good reasons to join a wine club and about as many that would lead you to decide not to.  Being a member certainly makes a difference to your wine tasting experience, as we have written previously.  So let’s give some thought as to how you might decide whether to join.

The first question you should ask yourself is whether you like the wine.  Even more, do you like it enough to want to receive a case every year?  If the answer is “yes”, by all means join the club.  But if not, think twice. That’s because by joining you are signing up for at least a case annually.  A slightly more nuanced question is whether you like all of a winery’s production, or just certain (usually the top tier) wines?  If you would welcome getting some but not all of their wines, you should follow up with some more questions.

• Can you select just the wines you want?  Or as we call it, can you customize?  Many clubs will offer you just the whites or the reds or the sparklings or however they split up their production.  So if, for example, you like all their red wines but aren’t eager to get their whites, limit your deliveries accordingly.
• But what if you only like some of their reds?  Again, some wine clubs will allow you to specify certain varietals.  For another example, we are members of a few wine clubs in the Carneros region from which we only receive Pinot Noirs .
• But what if you only like one or two of their wines?  That’s a bit tougher and many wineries won’t let you choose only one or a few.  But some do, and then you’ll get a dozen bottle of the same wine year after year.  Do you really like it that much?

For the most part, wineries select certain wines for you for each shipment and that’s what you get.  You may not even be allowed to cancel an order you don’t want.  Some, however, will allow you to change their selections to your preferred wines.  This is another way of limiting what you get to what you like.

Another reason for you to join a wine club is to have the opportunity for free tastings whenever you visit.  So before joining a club, ask yourself whether you like the experience in a particular winery enough to come back.  Or put another way, would you like to come this way again repeatedly?  If you don’t see yourself in that part of Wine Country very often in the future, maybe it’s a good idea to pass on this club.

For some people, a consideration is how often a wine club delivers.  One of our clubs send two bottles every two months.  That’s six time a year waiting at home for UPS, which can be a drag.  The ones we appreciate most have two annual shipments; the norm is four.  They usually arrive in spring and fall, since shipping can be tricky in deep winter and wines don’t like cross-country transportation at the height of the summer.

We travel to California for wine tasting every year, so we have certain places where we like the wines a lot, find the tasting rooms and their outdoor areas very inviting and the servers to be congenial and welcoming.  So membership makes sense for us.

At a certain point, you may find your wine rack overloading with wines from one or more of your clubs.  Maybe the wines appealed more to you on vacation than when you started drinking them at home.  Maybe the food you make in your own kitchen isn’t very compatible with the wines you loved so much on that visit two years ago.  Maybe enough is just enough.  Then quit the club!  It’s not a lifetime commitment and you can always join a different wine club and fill out your cellar.

 

There are two good reasons to visit a particular winery on any particular trip to Wine Country: to taste good wine and to experience wonderful places.  Unfortunately, there are some wineries that have neither attribute.  (It is not Power Tasting’s policy to give derogatory reviews, so we’ll withhold names.  But take it from us, they exist and they’re no fun.)  So why go to one of these wineries?

The easy answer is, “Don’t go”.  But that’s not always easy to do.  For one thing, you don’t know you’re going to have a poor experience until you have it.  And there may be reasons why you are at a particular winery that are beyond your control.  Perhaps you’re with someone who doesn’t know anything about wine but likes the sound of the wine’s name.  Maybe your client has an interest in a winery.  Maybe it’s just there on the road, so why not.  These have all happened to us, at one time or another.

It’s sort of like being at a dull party; you’re already there and maybe something will come up.  How can you leave five minutes after arriving?  At one of these sad wineries, you brace yourself and try your best to seem interested.  You hold onto a glass for longer than usual, looking around, not actually tasting more than the barest sip and saying things like:

• “I’ve never tasted anything quite like this before.”
• “What a unique presentation of the varietal character”
• And the always popular, “Hmmmm”.

Some of the grand palaces being erected by wineries these days at least offer the possibility of architectural interest.  But what about wineries that are no more than a suburban house or, worse, an industrial shed?  You can’t just jump to conclusions; great wineries come in modest homes.  For years, Ridge’s Lytton Springs winery was in the barrel room.  Iron Horse has a wooden, outdoor shed.  Heitz Cellar is a modest stone building.  If you can’t tell a book by its cover, you can’t tell a wine by its winery, either.  But you can be forewarned.  If it doesn’t look too good and there are no cars in the parking lot, maybe you should think twice about entering.

There is a variant on the Lousy Winery phenomenon. You’re hating everything about the place: the wine, the tasting room, the noisy people assembled at the bar.  But everyone else, in particular your companions, is loving it.  And it’s raining so you can’t just wait outside.  This is the time to recognize the wisdom of Orr’s Law from Catch 22:  If you’re bored, time goes more slowly and you live longer. Okay, it’s not a very good rationale but it may be the only rationale you have.

We have recently been travelling in some lesser known wine making areas in France and California and we have happened upon some of these unfortunate wineries.  Sometimes we were the only ones there so we couldn’t leave without being rude.  We sipped; we sighed; and we left.  We recommend this strategy if you find yourself so entrapped.  You never know, the next place down the road may be wonderful.  Or not.

In our youth, most people we knew who did drink didn’t drink wine.  Oh, there would be an occasional bottle on a special occasion, but the alcoholic beverages of choice in those days were whisky and beer.  Many of us were the first in our families who took wine seriously, both as an accompaniment to a meal and as a drink that would give unique pleasure on its own.

So what were we drinking back then?  By our current standards, it wasn’t very good.  For one thing, we were students and we didn’t have much money.  Even if a Mouton Rothschild could be had for around ten dollars, that was a lot for a starving scholar then.  Also, there weren’t as many wine stores such as we see today; there were liquor stores with a few bottles of red and a few bottles of white somewhere in the back.  (It was a little better if you lived in an area with Italian, French or Spanish immigrants, but not a lot better.)

Photo courtesy of J. Crew

If you were anything like us, the first wine you actually went into a store and bought for yourself was one of these: Lancers, Mateus, Mouton-Cadet or Gallo Hearty Burgundy.  All these wines are still available for purchase.  (One of the reasons for buying Lancers was that it came in a nice clay bottle that you could use as a vase, so it maybe doesn’t count as a wine, but let’s include it.)

Lancers was and is a light bodied rosé from Portugal.  Amazingly, it is produced by the great port house, Fonseca.  It was created for American tastes and it succeeded quite well in that regard.  Described as “moderately sweet” on the Fonseca web site, it tastes pretty sweet to us.

Its competitor for American attention was Mateus, which some of us pronounced mat-OOS and those affecting a European elegance said ma-TAY-us.  We don’t think anyone knows to this day.  It’s also Portuguese, sweet, comes in a pretty, mandolin-shaped bottle and was impressive to bring on a date.  It showed you were too cool for Lancers, which after all had an English name.

But what could be better than a French name, and that of a French baron no less?  Mouton Cadet was originally the name that the French branch of the renowned Rothschild family gave to wines it didn’t think were worthy of being called “real” Mouton.  By the time we were buying it, Mouton Cadet had morphed into a thin, acidic, mass produced wine.  But we liked it.  Just perfect for anyone who knew nothing about wine…and that was us.  By the way, these days it’s not bad for the price.

Finally, Gallo Hearty Burgundy was, as Gallo calls it today, their “original red blend” which of course had nothing to do with Pinot Noir from the east of France.  But it tasted pretty good and showed your fraternity brothers that you were above (sneer) mere beer.  You probably can’t do much better even today for six bucks.

Other than a nice walk down memory lane, what’s the relevance to today’s wine tasters of even moderately good taste?  These wines are where we got our start.  Even if they weren’t very serious wines, we took them seriously.  If we’re honest with ourselves, we liked them back then although we couldn’t have said why.  They brought a little glamor and sophistication into our lives and opened some horizons as to how people lived across the ocean or the continent.

In short, these wines of yesteryear were the first steps that led us to wineries in Napa Valley, Tuscany, Bordeaux and numerous other outposts in Wine Country.  Sure, we can look down our oh, so elegant noses at those bottles we wouldn’t think of buying today.  But consider: there’s probably some wine you like today that won’t be as appealing to you in a few years.  Our tastes grow and change, and they had to start somewhere.

September is a wonderful time of year to go wine tasting.  Wine is necessarily grown in warm climates, and by September the heat has slackened a bit so it’s more comfortable to pass through the vineyards.  And even better you’re there to watch the process of transforming agriculture into art: harvesting grapes, pressing them and turning them into wine.  There’s something romantic about watching grapes being picked, placed in baskets and walked over to nearby trucks that will soon be piled high heading to the press pads.

Léon-Augustin L’Hermitte, the Grape Harvest, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

September is a terrible time to go wine tasting.  There is a constant threat of rain.  The roads that were never too easy to travel at the best of times are packed with trucks that are heading, full of grapes, to the wineries.  Even worse, you get to be a witness to the transformation of art into industry, turning nature’s bounty into a factory product.  If you get there on the right day, you might still be able to see vines with great clusters hanging from them.  A day later and the vines are bare.  And all you can see as you watch the grapes being harvested are ill-treated migrant farm workers.

The crush at Saintsbury winery

Okay, you must be asking, which is it?  Is harvest time a good time to go to Wine Country or not.  And the answer, of course, is both.  (If you’re going wine tasting in Australia, Chile, Argentina or South Africa, harvest is likely to be in February or March, but let’s keep this simple.)

For personal and business reasons, we often travel in September and our voyages almost always include wine tasting.  This works better in especially hot years; the 2014 harvest in Northern California began in July in some vineyards.  Thank you, global warming.  August is the usual time to pick grapes in much of Italy.  So we have experienced all the positives and negatives of the vendange, as the French would put it.

The biggest question is how does the time of year affect the wine tasting experience.  If you’re traveling in an area where the wineries you’d like to visit are large, well-funded and likely to derive significant revenue from vinotourism, your wine tasting experience should be only minimally affected.  They have lots of bottles on hand and the tasting room employees are servers, unlikely to be in the fields filling baskets.  But you may not find all the wines you’d like to taste because they have all been previously consumed.  Worst of all, you may find that some wineries are closed, because they have sold out the previous year’s wines and haven’t made this year’s yet.  We encountered this in California’s Central Coast at Linne Calodo and Booker wineries in 2011.  So call before you go.

In areas where the wineries are all or mostly small family affairs, you are indeed more likely to find the doors locked while moms, dads, kids and cousins are out in the vineyards bringing in the crops.   This recently occurred when we were out tasting in Beaujolais.  “Desolé, monsieur” a somewhat grimy teenager would shrug.  The only choice left to us was to taste the wines served in the local cooperatives.  These are open in all seasons and you do get a good education about the grapes and winemaking practices of the area.  Unfortunately, the wines most of them pour are good but hardly representative of the quality that attracted you to that region of Wine Country to begin with.

Should you go wine tasting at harvest time?  Yes, you should, because you should experience all the seasons that pass through Wine Country.  Each month has its attractions and drawbacks, so there’s no perfect time of year.  All the same, if you are new to the fun of wine tasting, it might be better to hold off on being a “part” of the crush until you know better what you are likely to get.

Something there is that loves a vine.

As we have traveled throughout Wine Country, around the world, we always feel a little thrill when we see vineyards.  As we’re driving closer to grape-growing areas, the first to spot some vines growing in the distance will point them out and both our hearts will expand a little in our chests.  The sight of the orderly rows of grape vines marching in orderly rows across a valley or a hillside, like an army of benevolent green soldiers.   Seeing the vineyards adds enormously, for us, to the pleasure of going wine tasting.

The beauty is even more enticing in harvest season, when the leaves are pruned back and the ripe fruit is hanging from the vines.  (Don’t tell anyone, but we have been known to sneak up on some unsuspecting vines and taken a few grapes.  There’s nothing like the sweetness of these grapes just before they are turned into wine.)  It is hard to count the number of photos we have of big, juicy clusters just hours before the crush.

Chimney Rock Cabernet Sauvignon, almost ready to pick

What is it about the vines?  We are no farmers although we have read a few books about the agricultural aspects of wine production.  Of trellises, pruning and irrigation we know virtually nothing, so we bring only the amateur’s eyes to our visits.  All we can says is that looking at the sun glistening off seemingly endless rows of vines gives us a jolt of joy.

By way of comparison, there are times when we go wine tasting and don’t see vines at all.  In some cases, that’s because we might be visiting tasting rooms in a town.  This is mostly the case in California where wineries that cannot afford to build a palatial “visitors center” take a storefront in, say, Paso Robles, Calistoga or Healdsburg.  (See our previous article on tasting in Napa Town.)  There is a certain charm to wandering from one winery’s offerings to another and another.  There is also the advantage of not having to get behind the wheel of a car, if we are staying in that town.  And while it was once the case that only subpar wineries had in-town tasting rooms, that is not universally the case anymore.  But without the sight of vineyards just outside, there is definitely the sense that something is missing.

That sensation is certainly multiplied when the wineries are far from the fields and the tasting rooms are in the industrial buildings where trucked-in grapes are crushed and aged.  The total dissociation of wine from nature, no matter how good the wine is, leaves a rather empty feeling inside us.

And that is really the point: Wine tasting at its best combines product and place.  You just cannot really understand Burgundy, in our opinion, unless you’ve seen Burgundy.  Of course, the same applies to all of Wine Country.  Wine tasting should engage all the senses, not just taste and smell, and the emotional attachment to the land is a factor in the passion for wine that almost every winemaker speaks of.  Call it terroir, if you please, but actually seeing the soil and the sky and the vines where the stuff in the bottle actually come from adds enormously to the pleasure of the experience of wine tasting.

Let’s say that you’re in some wonderful sector of Wine Country and all day long you’ve been tasting fabulous wines.  If you’ve taken our advice, you’ve selected only the best wines to sip even if you had to pay a little more for the experience.  At the better wineries, you could be enjoying a pour from bottles that go for a hundred dollars or in some instances, several hundred.

Then you go to dinner.

Remember that wine you liked so much this afternoon.  Well, with the restaurant’s markup, that could make the price of drinking it with your meal unaffordably high.  But there is a way around it: bring your own bottle.  Remember, most restaurants charge a corkage fee if you bring a bottle with you.  It could be as little as $10 per bottle or as high as $25.

But look at it this way.  Restaurants mark up their wines between twice and three times the retail price.  So if for example you loved a $75 wine, you might expect to pay $150 to $225 for this wine to accompany your meal.  If you bring it with you, it would cost you only $100.  Now, “only” is a relative term, but it certainly is cheaper than the price on the wine list.

If this is your plan, it could change the way you approach wine tasting during the day.  If you know the restaurant at which you plan to dine that evening, call them and find out their corkage policy and fees.  You might even ask what the specials of the day will be.  Then go wine tasting with your dinner in mind.

Perhaps you’re planning on having a steak, a big, luscious steak.  A Cabernet Sauvignon would be just the right wine to drink with it.  And luckily enough, you’re in Napa Valley or Sonoma County (or Bordeaux or Chile)  where they just happen to be famous for big, luscious Cabernet Sauvignons.  As you go through the day, try the Cabernets that would fit your budget with the corkage fee added.  When you’ve found the perfect wine, buy it and take it with you to dinner.

Of course, you might taste several “perfect” wines while you’re visiting the wineries.  If you’re thinking of buying one for your evening meal, it’s a good idea to take a few notes as you go along and then decide which one is most to your liking or fits best with your dinner plans.  You can then go back the winery where you tasted that wine and buy a bottle.

Here’s a little tip that will make bringing your wine even more attractive.  Many restaurants, even some of the best, don’t charge corkage at all.  They may place some restrictions on that policy.  For example, Dry Creek Kitchen in Healdsburg only extends the no-corkage policy to wines made in Sonoma County.  That still gives you a lot of room for maneuver.  Another California restaurant with a no-corkage policy is Hurley’s in Yountville.  We especially appreciate that the sommelier there gives extra attention to wines that are more than ten years old, because they and their corks can be a little more delicate.

There may be other restrictions, such as only certain nights when corkage is waived or a requirement that you buy one bottle off the list before they waive the corkage on the one you bring with you.  A little advance planning pays off.  There are lists on the web, but we’re not vouching for their accuracy.  A few simple phone calls are the best bet.

As we state on our front page, Power Tasting is not about wine as such, but about visiting Wine Country.  We offer advice to travelers, not connoisseurs.  The people we generally talk with when we go visiting are servers and tasting room managers, not winemakers.  Still, over the years we have had the occasion to meet many winemakers who just happened to be in the tasting room while we were there.

Perhaps our warmest memory was meeting two generations of the Charavin family at their winery in Rasteau, Domaine des Coteaux de Travers (www.coteaux-des-travers.com/index.php/en).  We were already familiar with their wines and made a point of visiting them.  The winery had only a simple bar in front of the production area.  The young woman who served us was the both the wife of the present winemaker and the daughter of the family that had owned the estate in previous years.  While we were talking with her, her father-in-law, Robert Charavin stopped by and we learned a bit more about the history of the winery.  And then his son, also named Robert, came by in his mud-covered boots.  They were all excited to meet Americans who loved their wines, but not as excited as were to meet them.  It was a unique and educational experience.

Also in the Rhone Valley, we visited Chateauneuf du Pape, an area famed for its hearty and expressive red wines.  Traveling through the sector, we stopped at a winery we had been told was up-and-coming, Domaine Paul Autard (www.paulautard.com, in French).  The woman serving us recognized that our accents were from North America and when we asked a few questions decided to introduce us to the winemaker, that is, her husband Jean-Paul Autard.  He explained that his father, Paul, had started the winery and that he was setting about to create world-quality wines.  We discussed his trips to New York, invited him to call us when he was there the next time (he never did) and he gave us a nice corkscrew that we use to this day.

Jean-Paul Autard (Photo courtesy of Domaine Paul Autard)

One more story.  We have been drinking the wines of David Cofaro for quite some time and visit his winery often.  We’ve gotten to know him and his wife Pat a bit over the years.  In 2015, we got to meet his new assistant winemaker, Josh.  He’s an earnest and thoughtful young man who has some great ideas about how he could improve wines we already thought were pretty terrific.

In all three of these stories, there’s a common element.  There’s more to wine than barrels and terroir.  There are the people and the way they think about wine, their personal histories, their way of approaching what they do for a living with passion and intelligence.  We are not oenologists or critics, so our interactions with winemakers is necessarily irregular.  But when we do get the chance, it adds enormously to our understanding or wine and to the pleasure we get going wine tasting.