Discovering the Napa and Senoma regions on a wine tasting tour is an easy day trip from San Francisco.
Tourists have a range of options including a wine train trip, large coach tours, private tours in a limo and small group tours. The large coach trips sound horrendous. Sixty people on a coach visiting a limited range of vineyards and getting sloshed on Californian plonk. Not my idea of a good day out. The private trip in a limo seems an odd way to do a wine tasting trip. The train option didn’t really appeal either, it offers the opportunity to see lots from the train, but the chance to experience where you are visiting is limited.
To my mind the small group tour offers by far the best option, allowing interaction with other tourists, the guide and offering an opportunity to influence the vineyards visited. Choose the right trip and you can also include a gourmet meal. We were lucky to have a foodie couple on the trip, restaurateurs from Canada. They were fans of Gordon Ramsey. I sang the praises of Nigel Slater and made some book recommendations to them.
The vineyard which we will remember most was Arger-Martucci. The wine was good, but what really made it was the host. If you were to invent someone to do this sort of job, you’d be hard pressed to do better than this guy. He had a sardonic disarming wit and described each of the six wines he served with enthusiasm and knowledge. He also served the most delicious olive bread to go with the wine.
http://www.arger-martucci.com/arger-martucci/index.jsp
As well as including visits to several vineyards, the trip we chose included lunch at The Brix in the Napa Valley. This was without doubt the food highlight of the whole holiday. The Brix is in an idyllic setting, the service is attentive without being oppressive and the food sublime. Surprisingly the usually reliable Trip Advisor has mixed reviews about this place.
http://www.brix.com/
We were amused that no one we spoke to knew about Blossom Hill, a characterless Californian blend which is ubiquitous in the UK. Our guide said that lots of people from the UK mentioned this wine, but he hadn’t got a clue where it came from. I guess it is the leftovers from various vineyards, blended together by the guiding principle of not offending anyone’s taste buds and sold to UK pub chains and supermarkets.
The Napa and Senoma lack the dramatic beauty of somewhere like Paarl and Stellenbosch in South Africa, but this was a great way to spend a day enjoying a tipple, some great food and meeting some interesting people. We used Extranomical Tours and I recommend them to others.
http://www.extranomical.com/HTML_PAGES/WINE_COUNTRY_LOVERS_ITINERARY.htm
1 comment:
Blossom Hill in California is probably like Piat d'Or in the 1980s - whatever the ads suggested, French people had never heard of it, much less would they take something so insipid and dull round to a dinner party.
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