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Napa / Sonoma / SF Trip Report

Napa and Sonoma Trip Report

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In a pretty large coincidence, my girlfriend and I recently accepted new jobs and requested a little time off before starting. (Ok, maybe not that large a coincidence) We had been wanting to take a trip to California wine country for the last 3 months or so, so this seemed like the perfect opportunity to do so. Cooking, eating, and drinking / learning about wine are just about the only hobbies we have these days, so Napa / Sonoma seemed like the perfect destination. We booked our trip rather last minute, but thanks to thisthread started by El Diablo and this thread started by Clarkmeister we were able to plan it rather quickly.

We took the 9 am flight out of Newark and arrived in San Francisco around 11. Eager to get into Napa as soon as possible so and stop at a couple of wineries, we decided to drive right through San Francisco. Luckily there was time at the end of the trip to walk around a bit and have dinner at “Chapeau!”. Anyway, more on that later. Starving, we decided to stop at In-N-Out burger halfway to Napa. I had no idea that the food here was so cheap. I enjoyed the burger a lot and can see why a lot of people think this place is the best fast food restaurant in the U.S. Is it as good as a place like Shake Shack in NYC? No, but its drive-through and there isn’t a 1 hour wait.

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Thanks to some traffic and delays at the airport, we didn’t actually hit Napa until 3:30. Plenty of time to visit 2 wineries! Our first stop was Trefethen. El Diablo highly recommended this place in the trip report above, so I was pretty excited.

Just as a little background, my wine knowledge is not very advanced. Most of what I do know comes from just drinking, so my tasting notes below might be a pretty basic.

Trefethen

Wine – 4/5
Experience – 4/5

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The wine tasting was definitely off to a good start. Trefethen is a relatively small winery, though I think they are in limited distribution in certain parts of the country. The lady behind the bar ended up pouring us two tastings from every wine on both the regular and reserve lists. I think she ended up waiving the tasting fee as well (we bought two bottles) Its funny how much these little gestures mean in terms of overall experience. Anyway, we tasted the following:

Dry Riesling ($20) – This came up a bit short to me, especially compared to the German and Alsatian Rieslings we are more familiar with. It is pretty similar to Alsatian Riesling I think, but I prefer this bottle for 3 dollars less. Compared to the couple of Rieslings we had on this trip, however, this was probably the best.

Estate Viognier ($30). Very good. Fresh, rich citrus and peach flavors. Very slight oak (aged 9 months in French Oak). We ended up buying this one.

Chardonnay ($30) Good. We were surprised to taste so much citrus in a chardonnay.

Cabernet Franc ($35)

Pinot Noir ($45) – Good, but not remarkable.

Double T (Bourdeaux Blend - $24) – Very good and excellent value. This wine is mostly Cabernet Sauvignon, mixed with smaller amounts of Merlot, Peitit Verdot, Cabernet Franc, and Malbec. We bought this one.

Cabernet Sauvignon ’04 ($50) – Very good. We don’t drink a lot of California Cabernet, but I enjoyed this. I was really looking forward to the next one though…

Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon ’02 ($80) – Excellent. One of the top three cabs we had on the trip.

Late Harvest Riesling ($50) – Good, but something was a bit off. Definitely not worth the 50 dollars for a 375 ml bottle.

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V. Sattui

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We were shocked by how late it was when we finally left Trefethen. With only 30 minutes or so left in the wine-tasting day, we checked our map for the closest winery on our list. I read somewhere that V. Sattui was a must visit, but could not remember the reasons why. Turns out, people love this place for its beautiful picnic area and food store, and unfortunately not for the wines.

That being said, we had a decent time. The tastings were free (a rarity in these big wineries), and the host was very generous in what he lets us try. We decided to take full advantage of our last tasting of the day and have almost everything on the list. The only wine we bought was the Gamay Rouge, a cheap ($18) rose that tasted a lot like strawberries. If the guy hadn’t been so nice, I doubt we would have been inclined to purchase anything.

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Despite the disappointing wine, V. Sattui turns out to be one of the most important stops we made on our trip. We asked the host for winery recommendations and he very strongly suggested that we stop at Arroyo Winery the next morning. This turned out to be one of the best visits of the entire trip, and led to several other recommendations that were spot-on. Its funny how things work sometimes.

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Following the lead of Clarkmeister and several others, I’ll do this trip report in installments. To come, winery visits to Vincent Arroyo, August Briggs, Sterling, Clos Pegase, Frank Family, Louis Martini, Benziger, Imagery, Goosecross, Reynolds Family, Hagafen, Gundlach-Bundschu and Turnbull. And restaurant trip reports for All Seasons Bistro, Taylor’s Refresher, Café La Haye, The General’s Daughter, and “Chapeau!”.