Holiday in Carneros!

Each year the Carneros wine region puts on a two day wine open house event, including more than 20 Carneros wineries.  http://www.carneroswineries.org/events/  In addition to serving a selection of their wines, participating wineries feature live music, food pairings, and special tastings.  A group of friends and I were in attendance this year, and here is my report!

We began the day at Schug Carneros Estate Winery, where we sampled delicious Thai Style Pumpkin and Creamy Wild Mushroom soups, to pair with the whites and reds, respectively.  I loved the 2007 Sonoma Coast Chardonnay with the pumpkin soup, and the 2007 Carneros Pinot Noir with the mushroom soup.  We also sampled Calolea olive oils here.

Next we visited Cuvaison Estate Winery, and loved the very modern lines of the tasting room.  The winery served delightful little pulled pork sliders, which were delicious and paired wonderfully with the 2007 Carneros Syrah.  I particularly liked the 2008 Carneros Chardonnay, and took a bottle home.  The '06 Mount Veeder Cab was great as well!

We visited Etude, where they were serving delicious cheese samples in the beautiful tasting room with it's Great Wall of Wine Bottles. 

Our next stop was McKenazie-Mueller – the standout winery of the day for me, where we loved every wine we tasted!  The 2006 Los Carneros, Napa Valley, Pinot Noir was stupendous, as was the 2001 from the Library collection!  The 2005 Malbec was another standout wine – I had difficulty choosing which one to buy.  Combine these fabulous wines with a pleasant cheese spread, very friendly winery personnel, and live music with a bit of a CSN vibe going out front, and our visit to McKenzie-Mueller was a wonderful mid-day respite.

We made a very quick visit to Ceja Vineyards because we knew they would have superb live music, and we weren't disappointed!  They had run out of tapas, which was a shame for us, but I enjoyed the 2006 Sonoma Carmeros Pinot I tasted.  (This is Lisa by the sign.)

Our last stop was the beautiful Truchard Vineyards, with the lovely gazebo, grounds and cellar, outstanding food and music.  The Chardonnay, Pinot and Syrah they poured were all really nice, and I particularly liked the '06 Cabernet – yummy!

It was all in all a delightful day enjoying food, wine and festivities with good friends!

Weekly Winery Adventure

Now that I live in the lovely wine region of Sonoma County, I decided I’d like to visit a winery a week. My goals are to explore what my amazing new home region has to offer, meet wine industry folks, and above all, “shop local” (which is big around here, I find).

So today I set off to visit Schug Carneros Winery tasting room. I selected it in part because the website says it has no tasting fee (about which, more in a moment), and let’s face it, I’m trying to spend as little money as possible given the fledgling state of my business. However, although I had looked at the map and the directions on line, I failed to take the map with me in the car, and took a couple of wrong turns and an extra 20 minutes or so to get there. "Geeeze!" #1. However, I persevered and managed to find the tasting room.

Of course, as may have been expected because there are practically no (i.e., virtually zero) free tasting rooms any more, there was a tasting fee of $5, which would be no big deal except that (and here is “Geeeze!” #2) I had no cash and no debit card on me because yesterday, when I walked the Sonoma bike path (lovely walk btw!) I had put them in my pocket so as not to carry a purse and of course failed to take them out of my pocket and return them to my wallet. AND since I hated to put a mere $5 on my Visa (at least, this was my rationale), when the tasting was done I just had to buy a bottle of their actually quite lovely 2007 Carneros Pinot Noir! Which is "Geeeze!" #3! But shuckie-darn, it’s really a quite lovely Pinot, just enough complexity to stand up to, say, a really nice pork dish, which I intend to try pairing it with sometime very soon. I’ll let you know how it goes!

And that was my first Weekly Winery Adventure!