FunctionalAmbivalent

Pokey and the Bandit

So I'm driving across central Illinois yesterday with my wife. My sister and her husband and their big, fur-intensive dog are driving along about 10 miles behind us. We come up over a little rise and on an overpass I can see a black SUV. I tap the brake to shut off the cruise control and drift down to the speed limit. (I was going my normal five miles and hour over.) I assume the SUV is a cop using radar.

We pass under the bridge and over another little rise and in front of us are a half-dozen police cars with lights blazing. It looks like there was a plane crash or something, but it's just a bunch of troopers ticketing anyone designated by the SUV on the overpass. We pass anonymously and politely through and call back to my sister behind us, telling her to look out.

And we drive on for while before pulling off for gas and a 55 gallon drum of diet soda.

When we get back on the freeway we call my sister and warn her that we're no longer in front of her, looking for police. We're now behind her, and she's on her own.

A little while later, a black Volvo with Pennsylvania plates blows by us at about 90 miles an hour. I comment that he's probably thinking what we're thinking, which is that all the state police in the area are back working the speed trap, and it's smooth sailing.

And then my phone rings, and my sister -- who is now five miles in front of us -- tells us there's another cop at mile marker whatever. I joke that we have nothing to worry about; some guy in a black Volvo just went by us at 90 and he'll clear out any cops in our path.

When we get to mile marker whatever, there's the guy in black Volvo, pulled over while the cop writes a ticket. I looked at him in my rear-view mirror. He looked really pissed.

I don't know why, but I got a huge kick out of that.

25 and Counting: The Last Winery Part 1

The last of a series on our recent vacation to Napa and Sonoma Counties, which celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary and cost us our life savings. Read other installments here, here, here, here, and here. Read why I may never go on vacation again here.

We read about Tulocay Winery in a guidebook. From the sounds of it it was a one-man operation -- that one person being Bill Cadman -- and if you made an appointment he would show you around personally. A web search turned up a couple of people writing about Bill and his wine, which was reportedly both good and relatively inexpensive. When I asked frequent commentor Wally -- who's in the wine business and knows people -- if he knew anything about Tulocay, he said this:

"Yes. Bill. He's a good friend."

We scheduled a stop at Tulocay for our last morning in wine country. It's just outside of the town of Napa, south of where we'd been hanging around and on the way to San Francisco, where we were going to spend the last couple of days of our vacation. We planned on spending maybe an hour at Tulocay before crossing the Golden Gate into the city.

Tulocay is literally a Napa winery in that it's a winery in Napa, but the phrase "Napa winery" conjures up images of the kind of high-ceilinged tourist destinations we'd been hitting for the last few days. Tulocay is, in fact, Bill Cadman's house and a few outbuildings. His goal is to make about 1,000 cases of wine a year. He does that at the end of a long driveway, atop a hill a half mile or so outside what seems to be the less glamorous side to the town of Napa.

We knocked on the door and Bill snuck up behind us, announcing his presence with a string of  robustly insulting remarks about our mutual friend Wally, and inviting us into his kitchen. There, we loaded up on wine glasses and crackers. Then back out to the patio in the front yard where he popped open a bottle of Chardonnay and started talking.

After the Chardonnay came a Pinot Noir, and after the Pinot Noir a Syrah and -- my memory grows foggy here -- I think a Merlot or maybe a Zin.

Tolocay is a winery with no vines. Bill, who ditched a job on the Pacific Stock Exchange in the early 1970s, came to Napa with no experience in the wine business. He learned the trade as a cellar rat at Robert Mondavi, among others, and eventually decided to make his own wine. He has long-standing relationships with the owners of excellent vineyards, and the grapes are grown to his specifications a few rows here and a few rows there around the valley.

After a while, he gave us a tour. We walked across the driveway past a forklift, a beat-up old pick-up truck, and a few huge fermenting tanks. He unlocked the door of a small barn and inside were barrels in which Pinot was aging and Chardonnay fermenting. The Pinot was quiet, but the Chardonnay -- some in oak, some in steel -- was bubbling away with the sound of a pet store filled with fish tanks. The smell in the room was fantastic, one of the best smells ever. It was grapes and wine and bread rising. We stood there for ten minutes or so talking about how Bill makes his wine before moving down to the next building, where finished wine is bottled and stored.

We kept talking, and as we talked Bill pulled a bottle of Cabernet out of a box.

"I almost forgot about this," he said. "We just bottled this a little while ago."

We walked back up to the patio, opened the Cab and kept going.

I've never understood those who seek to remove wine from its context, who consider blind tasting the only valid measure of a wine. Wine is, to me, entirely about context -- about the history of the plot where the grapes grew, the outlook of the wine maker, the friends with which it's consumed.

That said, any judgment I might have of Tulocay Wines should be considered highly suspect, given that the context in which we tasted them was maybe the best context ever. We sat for a couple more hours in the shade of Bill's patio, talking with a very nice, very funny man who is a no-nonsense expert in a subject that fascinates me: wine. Clearly, my judgment is impaired by all the things serious tasters seek to remove from the experience of judging wine.

My recollection of bill's wines is like this: The Chardonnay was crisp and unoaked, the first vintage going out under the Cadman brand, which features a World War II-vintage photo of his parents on the label. The Pinot was new world fruity and without volatile acidity, to which I'm highly sensitized and which ruins a lot of Pinots for me. The only Pinot I've ever really bonded with is Alma Rosa, and Tulocay's Pinot is very much in the same style. I liked it a ton. The Syrah was fruity and fresh and I don't recall the Merlot, so maybe we didn't actually have any.

The Cab that Bill nearly forgot, however, was the star of the show. Like the other wines, it was sleek more than opulent, with fresh fruit, a fill-up-the-room nose, and a subtle structure. Or maybe it just seemed subtle because we'd been tasting 15-20 wines a day for almost a week and my mouth felt like someone had rubbed it with 120 grit sandpaper. Plus -- and this is important -- I'm a lousy taster. I don't get subtle undertones of dry brush and vivacious red fruit. The professionals use a 100 point scoring system, discerning  meaningful differences between a 92 and 93-point wine. I have a scoring system that delineates only three levels of quality: wine I want more of, wine I'll settle for, and wine not to bother with.

Bill's wines -- every one of them -- were wines I want more of. In fact, by the time his cat jumped into my lap I was ready to move in. Seriously: I'd work for room and board and a couple of bottles a week, and I'd spruce-up his Internet marketing and get his prices up where they belong and turn his home into a tourist Mecca. Except, I think, that's all the opposite of what Mr. Cadman is looking for.

We spent three hours at Tulocay. When we pushed off all of us were filled with regret that we didn't have more time. We had to get to San Francisco, where the urban portion of our vacation awaited. But in all of the excellent things we did this trip -- the longest, most extensive vacation my wife and I have ever taken -- there was nothing as memorable as our time at Tulocay. We bought a case of wine and will surely buy more as that dwindles. We'll go out of our way to return, to sit under the trees on Bill's patio and pass the time, maybe to pitch-in when he's bottling his next vintage.

If you're ever in the neighborhood, give him a call. I don't think you need any special introduction; I think Bill Cadman is just a nice guy leading a relaxed life atop a hill overlooking paradise, and he'd be more than happy to have you stop by to pass the time. I think that's exactly the reason he got into the wine business in the first place.

25 and Counting: The Next Day Part 1

Part of a continuing travelogue of our recent vacation, which involved an inordinate amount of wine drinking and cost us our life savings.

I thought of the next day like this: Today, we're running up Napa's gut, hitting a couple of big name wineries that I can't afford in real life. The day had two goals: cadge a taste of Heitz Martha's Vineyard cab, which retails for something over $100 a bottle, and clear a few hours mid-day for my wife to get rubbed and scrubbed at a spa in Calistoga. Which means that we'd spend the day moving up valley, as they say, hitting targets of opportunity.

We started at Grgich Hills. Mike Grgich is a wonderful success story. He arrived in California a penniless immigrant from Croatia, and worked for nearly nothing at what were then the best wineries in California -- Souverain, Robert Mondavi, Beaulieu. He got a winemaker job at Chateau Montelena, where he produced the Chardonnay that won the now-legendary Judgment of Paris tasting, about which the movie Bottle Shock was made.

Grgich left Montelena to start -- with partner Austin Hills (of Hills Brothers Coffee) -- Grgich Hills Winery. He built a tasting room out close to Highway 29 where drive-bys can't miss it. As a piece of architecture is is...well, actually, exactly typical. It's perfectly indistinguishable from every other tasting room we visited: high ceiling, long bar, dark wood, large format bottles on display up near the clerestory windows. It's only a week and a half after we visited and I can't tell one winery from the other, in my memory.

Anyway, out front Grgich has some vines you can steal grapes off of, which is nice, and around back they were loading grapes into a crusher/destemmer at something less than a frenzied pace. (People talk about how busy the crush is. Every winery worker I saw in Napa and Sonoma was standing around either waiting for something to happen or waiting for someone to tell them what should be happening. I saw no one moving at even a brisk pace.) In the gift shop, they sold black berets -- black berets being something of a trademark for Mike Grgich -- in an act of charming self-parody. 

What I remember most about Grgich is the kid pouring the wine. He was tall, dark, and handsome, all of 24 years old with the look of a triathlete. My wife latched onto him immediately, smiling and laughing at his little jokes, oohing and ahhing at his vast knowledge and doing everything she could to elbow me out of the picture.

She brought up the Judgment of Paris movie; he said that people at the winery considered it a slap in the face, since Mike Grgich was barely seen in the film and he'd made the wine. My wife nodded sympathetically. He poured her another taste of oaky Chardonnay, something she normally abhors.

"This is really good," she said, licking her lips. "Whats' next?"

I think she was hoping for sexually ambiguous banter, but instead he pulled out a Fume Blanc. I normally avoid Fume Blanc because "Fume Blanc" is California code for "Sauvignon Blanc whose lack of quality is disguised by the heavy application of oak," and I don't go for that. As a matter of fact, I have a couple of bottles of Grgich Hills Fume Blanc down in the basement that I haven't opened because I just know I'm going to hate them as much as I was starting to hate our host at the Grgich winery.

"I'm sure you'll like this," he said, leaning unnecessarily close to my wife and, if my memory is to be believed, somehow growing a pencil-thin mustache before my very eyes.

I interrupted their moment, pointing out that I needed a taste, too. He grudgingly poured me what seemed like an undersized taste and I even more grudgingly sniffed at it. The wine was startlingly good. Grgich's touch with oak is incredibly light and I no longer cared whether the host pulled my wife over the bar and took her there on the winery floor. Actually, it might have been kind of fun to watch, so long as he reached up once in a while to pour me another taste.

But they limited their involvement to goo-goo eyes and guttural expressions of pleasure, ostensibly over the wine, as he worked his way down the list through a tasting-toom-only Merlot and then a tasting-room-only Yountville Cab. We bought three bottles of the Cab, wine we wouldn't normally consider and spot-on at the marketing department's separate-the-tourists-from-their-money $70 price point. My wife also bought a t-shirt, I think primarily so she could drape it across her chest and ask the kid, "How does this look?" The answer to which he provided only after an extra long consideration of her breasts.

"Good," he said. "Really good." 

I made her pay for the damned thing herself.

The next stop was Heitz Cellars. My whole goal at Heitz was to get a taste of their Martha's Vineyard Cab, which I can't afford (or find) back home in Kentucky. The Heitz tasting room is small, as much like the living room of a country lodge as it is a retail center. They had a few gift items around, but most of the precious shelf space was taken up by racks of older vintages for sale. Our host was a lawyer who chose the wine business over the law, and he tasted us through five wines. (I had vowed to take notes, but somehow pulling out my little moleskin notebook seemed obnoxious.) The goal, remember, was a taste of the rare and expensive Martha's Vineyard cab. I had done my homework. I knew how I was going to approach the problem and, if my experience at previous wineries was any measure, felt I had a pretty good lock on a couple of ounces of the legendary, eucalyptis flavored juice.

The host started with a rose, made from a weirdo Italian grape (Grignolino), that tasted just like every other rose I've ever tasted. I pretended to like it. Then he moved us to a pretty good Napa cab, where I started a learned discussion aimed entirely at getting him to pull out some Martha's.

We talked about the Rutherford Bench, which is the alluvial outwash of the Mayacamas Mountains and is said to have a highly salutary effect on grapes grown to the west of Highway 29. I asked about vineyard practices and maceration and extraction and subtlety -- subtlety being a big topic of conversation among makers of un-subtle Napa cabs. I talked little and listened much, hanging on his every word, most of which I already knew and all of which he got absolutely right. (This is actually rare in tasting rooms, where it sometimes seems people just make stuff up for their own entertainment.) He was talking about the characteristics of grapes grown in different vineyard as he poured the next Cab, a 2004 Bella Oaks, as I recall, that was spectacular. Really a serious wine, but I persisted.

"So," I asked, "what's the substantial difference between this and the Martha's Vineyard? If we were to put them side-by-side, what would be the difference?"

He considered me for a moment and said: "Oh, Martha's has a minty quality. People attribute it to the eucalyptus groves that grow around the vineyard. It's quite distinct. You should taste it some time."

I knew the bastard was sitting on a bottle back there somewhere. I knew he could pull it out and pour. If he had assessed me as the kind of deep pocket wine bore who'd step up for a case, he'd have done it. But he looked at me and decided I was a three-pack dilettante -- which I am. But still.

"Eucalyptus," I parried. "So it somehow permeates the grapes?"

"Yes," he said. "It's really quite extraordinary."

The bastard stood his ground.

My wife, sitting a few feet away and petting the miniature doberman she'd found warming himself by the fireplace, chuckled. She'd gone as far as she'd wanted in the seduction of the kid over at Grgich, and I was going down in flames in my attempt to seduce the host at Heitz.

He poured the next sample, a port also made from Grignolino. It was good. My wife strolled over and remarked that she didn't like port, but that this one might change her mind.

"If you like that," the host said, reaching under the counter, "you're going to love this."

He pulled out another bottle of port, older and inky black. He poured, glancing at me and smiling. He knows, I thought. He knows what I wanted and he's deliberately humiliating me. My wife sipped and smacked and cooed over the port. I considered killing the dog just to spite her. But i didn't. Instead, I confirmed everything the host assumed about me by buying a three pack that included two Bella Oaks and -- yes, I admit it -- a bottle of Martha's. I couldn't help it. I'd promised myself a taste of Martha's, and I wasn't going to be denied. I felt like the guy who went to Spring Break and ended up with a hooker.

"Dude," I can hear my friends taunting me. "You had to pay for it? Whoa. That's sad."

We drove up valley toward Calistoga. I think my wife snickered the whole away. If there was a place on our agenda we approached with trepidation, it was Chateau Montelena. It was, in effect, the star of Bottle Shock, and just as Sideways boosted sales of Pinot Noir, Bottle Shock has turned the previously out-of-the-way Chateau Montelena into nearly mandatory stop for Napa visitors. I imagined tour buses outside and tourists more touristy than even me inside. And Montelena is famous for Chardonnay, which I don't really like that much.

So why did we go? Well, there's really no reasonable explanation. We needed a place near the spa my wife had chosen in Calistoga. And we needed a place you could just walk into, since there was no telling whether we'd be there pre- or post-spa, which made appointment-only runners-up (e.g., Storybook Mountain) impractical. And, to be honest, it was in the movie and all and we wanted pictures for the Chritmas card letter... 

The tasting room was packed. The host barely had time for us, and what time he did have he spent talking not about the wine but about the movie. If Grgich thought Bottle Shock a slap in the face, Montelena viewed it as nearly a documentary. It was, our host told us, an only slightly fictionalized account of how Chateau Montelena became the recognized best wine in the world. We would be fools to not buy all we could get our hands on and sign up for the wine club so we could get even more, automatically.

I, personally, wasn't that impressed. The wine was good, but after maybe 60 samples in four days we were getting kind of picky. Besides, they were sold out of everything even remotely interesting. We passed on the opportunity to order futures deliverable in 2010. Though I've lived in the same house (and, basically, the same position on the couch) for eight years, I find it impossible to commit to buying wine futures that won't be deliverable for years. In the back of my mind, I'm always one day from getting fired and three days from hitting the road as a hobo. I know it's not rational, but I feel like two years from now I'm as likely to be a forklift driver in Houston as I am to be living where I live now, and I don't want the guy who buys my house out of foreclosure to get my wine when it's delivered.

So we wandered outside to take pictures of the Chateau Montelana facade, which the host assured us had actually been used in the film, and I peeked into the basement where a couple of cellar rats were doing what cellar rats do during the high-intensity harvest: they were standing around, about as active as a couple of cops contemplating a donut. I watched them for about 10 minutes, and the only things they did was talk and shift their weight from one foot to the other.

While my wife went to the spa (where I imagined her being rubbed by the kid who worked in the Grgich tasting room) I drove up over some pass or another to the Alexander Valley where they grow -- you will not be surprised to know -- grapes.

I picked up my wife, who post-spa melted into the seat of the rental car as we drove down the Silverado Trail to Clos du Val. We were introduced to Clos du Val at a restaurant that ran out of Alma Rosa, the only Pinot Noir I've ever bonded with. The wine guy offered us a bottle of Clos du Val Carneros Pinot as a substitute, and it was terrific.

The Clos du Val tasting room is, again, pretty typical: vine-covered exterior, high ceiling, long bar. The glasses were a little bigger and nicer, and the hosts seemed to have a certain amount of latitude in what they poured. We chose the higher-priced tasting, and what we got was the regular progression: light to full-bodied, ending with the show-stopper $70 Cabernet -- in this case, the 2004 Stags Leap District, tasting-room-and-mailing-list-only Cab. We were pretty wined out by then, just kind of going through the motions on the way back to the hotel, but the Cab jumped out at us. Fried taste buds and all, it was something. Predictably big, yeah, a fruit bomb even. But more than that: earthy and rich and -- if I may use a technical term drawn from my vast education in wine -- yummy good. 

I was too tired to try to act educated and impressive in hopes that they'd pull out something special, but apparently we fawned enough over the wine that the hostess concluded we'd never actually had wine before and deserved a treat. She pulled out a 10 year old vintage of the Stags Leap Cab, poured a dollop into a decanter, and rolled it around to aerate as we sipped a second sample of the 2004. She set up glasses so we could taste the two side-by-side, and had the good grace to drift away and let us concentrate. 

I'm sorry I didn't take notes. The older wine was sleeker but still vivid, softened slightly, I suppose, but the new wine was pretty soft to begin with. We made the tiny pours -- two sips each, really -- last ten minutes, sniffing and sipping and enjoying the long, long finish.

I don't know if it was the best wine of the trip, but we bought a bottle to drink back at the hotel and, when the time came, we couldn't bring ourselves to open it. It was, clearly, the most beautiful bottle we'd seen, big and shiny with gold trim on the label. For the next few nights, I took it out of my suitcase and set it up in whatever hotel we were staying in and just stared at. I'm going to stare at it for the next 10 years, and when we finally crack it open for our 35th anniversary I'm confident it will have been worth the wait.

25 Years and Counting: A Note On Tasting Room Marketing, Part 1

I want to explain something about the wine business. In the movie Bottle Shock, there's a moment when an English wine buyer touring the Napa Valley in the 1970s offers to pay a winemaker for a tasting. The winemaker is befuddled as to why anyone would offer to pay for a tasting. It's a funny little moment, since at the time California wineries were grateful for anyone who was willing to taste their wine. There's a nice little montage where the wine buyer goes from winery to winery, leaving a few dollars behind to pay for the tasting, and the grape farmers and winemakers marvel at how ignorant he must be.

Since then, wine tasting has become a huge business. There are wineries that exist almost entirely as tasting rooms and gift shops.

One of the interesting marketing phenomena of the wine business is the advent of tasting-room-only wines. That is, wines that are exclusively for sale in the tasting rooms. Almost every winery has them, and they're a brilliant little bit of flim-flam.

Consider retail wine: Let's pretend there's a bottle that sells for $10. The winery gets maybe $4 of that. (I'm making these numbers up.) The winery could, theoretically, sell the same wine for $8 in its tasting room -- a 20% discount -- and still make more money than it did on distributor sales because there aren't middlemen getting a piece of the action. In the early days, wineries sold just like that, which pissed off the distributors who were being undercut.

Pissing off your distribution isn't smart in any business, but it may be particularly stupid in the wine business, in which there are dozens of regional distributors who are more or less used to being treated as demigods. So, to protect those relationships, wineries make it a policy to keep prices i ntheir tasting rooms at or slightly above retail.

Which sucks for the winery since, once consumers figured out they could buy the same wines back home for less, consumers stopped buying wine in the tasting rooms. After all, why would you bother to schlep heavy wine through airports when you could buy the same stuff back home, probably for less?

At some point, some crafty marketer figured out that the thing to do was create special wines for sale at the winery alone. So wineries started making smaller production wines of somewhat higher quality. By putting a little more effort into tending a particular vineyard block, letting the grapes hang a little longer and extracting a little additional color out of the skins, they could produce a "reserve" wine with the kind of fresh, bold, New World fruit that turns critics' heads. That, in turn, would boost the status of the winery within the wine business, making their retail offerings more attractive to people out in the hinterlands. It would also provide unique product for the tasting rooms, creating an imperative for visitors to buy ("It's now or never!") and allowing the wineries to charge whatever they wanted, without regard for what the bulk buyers like Liquor Barn charge on their discount shelves.

Everyplace you go, the hosts point out "this is only available in the tasting room" and it is, inevitably, at a $70 price point. Give or take a few bucks, that seems to be the magic number in Napa tasting rooms. Big, fruity-fresh recent vintage...one day only...$70.

Let me tell you this: It works. I'm ashamed to say how well it works. I'm not even a big, fruity-fresh Napa cab guy (though I am, in my own way, fruity fresh) and I bought like I was on some kind of special edition of Supermarket Sweep. And everyone around me was doing exactly the same thing, buying bottles and gift packs and cases of wine at two or three times their at-home upper price limit because it was special.

Bastards.

25 and Counting: The Rest of That Day Part 1

The Rutherford Grill sits on Highway 29 right in front of the Beaulieu Winery. The place was packed with a mixture of tourists and locals. There were lots of lunch meetings going on. It was loud and busy and reminded me of the Ginger Man, a place in Beverly Hills I used to hang out in back in my magazine days. The table help had the same kind of swift, urban way of moving around.

Wine tasting is tiring. I know that sounds funny, but running through a couple of dozen wines in a day -- swishing and spitting and driving and paying attention and behaving yourselves, as opposed to just getting drunk -- can take it out of you. My top limit for wineries in a day is four; a couple of the winery hosts we talked to were openly scornful of dilettantes who try to squeeze five or six into a day. After a while, you get to the point where your mouth is so raw you can't taste any more.

I ordered an iced tea and a French Dip sandwich and nearly fell asleep in the booth before it came, arriving with a huge helping of real horseradish. I forget what the gimmick was to the meat; it was prime rib aged or hung or marinated in some elaborate, branded way, the subject of the kind of menu write-up that normally disguises pure banality. (Take it from me; I used to write menu copy.) But when the sandwich came, it was beautiful. The beef was shaved off across the grain into what was nearly beef powder. The dip was dark brown and crystal clear. It was accompanied by a huge ramekin of fresh, pureed horseradish. The combination was fantastic. Seriously: one of the best sandwiches in the world, and I say that as a personal friend of the Reuben at Junior's in Westwood.

Lunch recharged us, and we walked across the parking lot to Beaulieu's reserve tasting room. Tastings at the regular tasting room/gift shop are free, but my goal at Beaulieu was to taste the Georges de Latour, Beaulieu's flagship cab for nearly 100 years. In real life, I don't drink what insiders refer to as "George." It runs about $75 a bottle, and I don't normally spend that kind of money on wine unless it fits into my Strategic Plan. Napa cabs aren't in my basement because Napa cabs don't offer a lot of value, and when it comes to wine I'm pretty much a K Mart shopper.

There were four other people in the tasting room when we walked in, and they were deep into their tasting. It was a retired naval officer from Baltimore, his wife, son and daughter-in-law. The navy guy, who had the bearing of an Annapolis grad but none of the ring-knocking tendencies, was serious about wine; he apparently collects, and he and the hostess were talking about great wines and vintages and had clearly bonded.

The hostess got us started on a tasting: obligatory chardonnay, valley cab, vineyard cab, and the Georges. By the time we got to the Georges, the other four were long done with their allotment, but the hostess decided to pour them something a little extra since they were pleasant and knowledgeable. Given the quiet intimacy of the tasting room, there was no way she could pour for them without pouring for us. She poured an earlier vintage of Georges. It was wonderful, evolving into coherent complexity. We talked it over, and when it looked like we were out of conversation she poured another, even older vintage. Then another. By the time we were done we were seven vintages in. The navy guy bought a case, his son bought a half case, and I pitched in for a measly two bottles -- which is, to be fair, two more than I intended to buy.

We staggered out to the car and made straight for the hotel. Tasting, as I said, is tiring, and we needed a nap.

Next: The Next Day Part 1

25 and Counting: News-You-Can-Use Winery List Part 1

Here's the list of wineries we visited and my two-line assessment of whether other people should visit them, too.

Cline, Gloria Ferrer and Buena Vista were covered here.

Just up the road from Buena Vista is Ravenswood, known primarily for its Zinfandels but now corporatized into offering all kinds of fighting varietals. Ravenswood's tasting room is pretty, nestled back in what we here in Kentucky call a "hollow." It's very northern California rustic and the wines they pour are considerably more up-market than the wines they distribute nationally. The patio behind the tasting room stretches narrowly along the hillside, and has both tables for group meetings and Adirondack chairs for individual contemplation. Highly recommended.

Imagery is a relatively new winery, a project of Benziger which was, itself, a result of the much more mass-market Glen Ellen. Imagery makes about 40,000 cases a year, but has a physical plant that looks like it's designed to accommodate a lot more. It was very nice, the wine made in a relentlessly New World style and the staff well-trained to emphasize the wine's Old World structure, which I didn't buy for a second. I did, however, buy some of the wine -- petite sirah, which normally strikes me as a terrific blending grape for sprucing-up pekid zins but that, in Imagery's interpretation, stood boldly on its own. Plus, they gave us free tasting passes to Benziger down the road.

Benziger was nice, but not so nice that we bought anything there. It's 100% biodynamic, there are caged peacock's on the grounds, and there's a free tractor tour of the winery and vineyards. We bought the cheap tasting rather than the reserve -- "bought" not being exactly the right word because we used the free tasting passes they gave us at Imagery. Though we denied the upsell to the "reserve" tasting, the host still didn't hesitate to dig behind the bar for the reserve wines to answer my questions about yields and levels of extraction. This is a game it's good to play at wineries: ask enough smart questions to separate yourself from the Kendall-Jackson masses, then work your way to the good stuff without paying the added fee. Benziger's show-off wine is called "Tribute," and while the website describes it as being comprised of "earth, fire, air and water," I think it was a Bordeaux blend heavy on the merlot. It was good on its own, better because they didn't charge me for it, but not so good that I actually bought any.

We finished-out Sonoma with St. Francis. I'm only a couple of days into my description of the trip and I'm already tired of saying "it was nice," but St. Francis was nice. A big tourist winery with lots of merchandise on sale and wines that didn't kick any part of me, let alone my ass. We bought a couple of bottles because my wife's best friend is a big St. Francis fan and it'll make a well appreciated post-pregnancy gift. But of all the wineries we went to, I think St. Francis is the least distinct in my memory.

We crossed over into Napa on Trinity Rd. -- which, once in Napa, becomes the Oakville Grade. It's a beautiful and treacherous drive, winding 16 miles through the Mayacamus Mountains. We made the drive in the morning, before we had hit any tasting rooms, and strongly recommend both the drive and steely sobriety when making it. Encountering a careening pick-up truck on a hairpin turn one-and-a-half lanes wide requires quick reactions; it'll happen to you four or five times on the drive.

Down in Napa, we hit St. Supery, which has a good self-guided tour of the winemaking facilities. The tour is a little surreal, because the winery, despite being disguised by vine growth and a Hollywood facade, is built in the cast cement style of a million suburban office parks, and you look down on the winemakers from the mezzanine level. The wine was -- here's that word again -- nice, but we didn't buy any. The hostess, however, was terrific. I asked her about Rutherford Dust -- a quality said to distinguish wines of the Rutherford AVA from all others -- and she went off the tasting menu completely to construct a vineyard-by-vineyard comparison for me. I'm still not sure I buy that Rutherford Dust exists, but it was a generous and informative tasting.

Next to St. Supery is Peju, an architecturally preposterous place, the most distinguishing aspect of which is the art out in the garden. Peju's visionary -- who no doubt made his money in some other vulgar trade -- has decorated his quasi-Chateaus with what passes, in northern California, for art. His collection is heavy on naked women emerging from marble. There's also a naked woman in bronze sleeping on the lawn. No naked men, at least as far as I could determine without close inspection of the more ambiguous statues. Peju was recommended by a friend who I'm going to have to have a talk with. The wine was tolerable, but the host was by far the most annoying person we met on a our trip, including airport security. I wanted to hit him before he poured the second taste, and if he'd been pouring ambrosia at $2 a bottle I wouldn't have bought any, just to sever my connection with him forever.

When we left there we had been drained of all optimism. We didn't know that the next stop would feature two outstanding experiences: a seemingly un-ending vertical of one of America's great wines and the best French Dip sandwich in the known universe.

25 Years and Counting: Part 1

My wife and I were married 25 years ago, and this vacation was our present to ourselves. We flew from Kentucky to Chicago, where we boarded the legendary California Zephyr for the long, cell-phone free journey to San Francisco and points north, where we would taste a nearly infinite amount of wine.

 

The train was interesting, both wonderful and horrible at the same time. It was wonderful because of its deliberate pace and the passing countryside. You see things you don't see driving, because the train takes a different route through the mountains and a single track doesn't create the kind of disruption a four-lane highway and supporting infrastructure create. Plus -- and this is important -- you can drink while you're traveling. If you like, you can drink a lot, but we only drank a little, at a constant pace to keep the buzz just right.

The train ride was horrible, too, because Amtrak's service is good, but could be so much better. I'm torn between thinking Amtrak needs more money and thinking it needs to be killed completely. As transportation, long-distance trains aren't viable; as vacations in themselves, they seem to have almost unlimited potential. Imagine Carnival Cruise Lines with trains looping around the west, from National Park to luxury resort to historic mining town. Imagine stopovers giving time to explore America's far-flung cities and remote wilderness. Imagine a nightclub car and a spa car and suite sthat aren't cramped.

As it works now, Amtrak's long-distance service is a kingdom of old people nostalgic for railroads past. Sitting in the lounge in Chicago, we listened to hilarious old guys recount their various journeys, character actors every one of them.

First Old Guy: The food is good.
Second Old Guy: Stay away from the fish.
First Old Guy: I had the fish on the Empire Builder and it was still frozen.
Second Old Guy: Gave me the farts like crazy. You don't want the farts on a train.

I say: Reason enough to pay for a private cabin.

We used the time on the train to unwind, reading and drinking wine and looking out the window. By the time we got to Nevada, we were ready to be off the train, and by the time we got to the route terminus at Emeryville (just below the far end of the Oakland-Bay Bridge) we were tapping our feet and counting the minutes until we could get somewhere that wasn't bouncing. I was ready to kill for a comfortable chair. Still, after two-and-a-half days locked in a tiny railroad sleeper, we were still talking to each other, and that's something.

The next portion of the trip was Sonoma County. We drove across the Golden Gate and made our first winery stop at Cline in Carneros. In real life we drink a lot of Cline wine; it's a great value, and they do some interesting things with the widely ignored mourvedre grape that is so strong in the southern Rhone and along the Mediterranean Coast of Spain. As a winery to visit it's fine, a tourist destination that benefits from it's proximity to San Francisco. It was Sunday and there were lots of small groups that looked like day trippers from the city.

Just up the road was Gloria Ferrer, which makes sparkling wines. Their tour is good, if somewhat perfunctory, and if you're not familiar with methode champenoise winemaking it's a good general backgrounder. Also, if you're looking for a place to hit on attractive middle-aged women, you could do a lot worse than working the patio outside the tasting room. It's a lovely patio, set high above the vineyards and looking down toward San Pablo Bay, and it seems that guzzling sparkling wine in the Sunday afternoon sun appeals to the kind of women that aren't often seen in, for example, Kentucky shopping malls: tall, willowy, well-dressed and not given to recreational spitting.

We drove up into the city of Sonoma from there, and stopped at the historic Buena Vista Winery. Buena Vista is a winery of mostly historical interest, having been build by the visionary and (at least partial) con man Count Agoston Haraszthy. Haraszthy is largely responsible for the establishment of the California wine industry, having convinced the state legislature in the mid 1800s that it should send him to Europe to learn about wine and bring back cuttings of first-line grapes to distribute to area farmers. The legislature bought into Haraszthy's notion and sent him off. Enjoying his government-sponsored tour perhaps just a bit much, Haraszthy overspent his unlimited expense account and brought back 100,000 cuttings of more than 300 types of grapes, which he then offered to sell to the State of California. The state told Haraszthy to pound sand, and he took off soon after for greener pastures in Nicaragua. He got in the rum business there and was, eventually, eaten by alligators.

Still, clones of his European clones still form the backbone of many California vineyards, and Haraszthy is fondly remembered despite the fact that he was basically ridden out of the country on a rail. Needless to say, they don't talk about that a lot at the winery.

To be honest, we weren't really expecting much of Buena Vista, and it delivered as promised. Most of the industrial-scale operations are located elsewhere, and the historic winery takes about three minutes to absorb in its entirety. The tasting room was cool and nice, and the hosts were well drilled at moving us through the wines and getting to the sales pitch. The wines were good, not great, and we were back in the car in less than a half hour.

On our way into Sonoma, where our hotel awaited, we noticed that we were ahead of schedule. We needed to hit another winery before we could check in.

As luck would have it, there were other wineries nearby.

(To be continued...)