Napa Report: The Wine

It's the reason we went to Napa. To taste. To learn. To experience. Every winery does things a bit differently - whether it be the height of the vines, the time of day they pick the grapes, or the type of barrel the wine is aged in. Thankfully, The Pope's contacts allowed us to experience an array of wineries: from the small, hands-on crafting at Opus One (where the above picture was taken) to the larger production facilities like Beaulieu Vineyard.

For those who have yet to visit Wine Country, a little background. Just like every winemaking process differs, so do each winery's tasting and tour offerings. A majority simply offer walk-in tastings in their rooms: there is a bar, and for $5-$25 you are poured 4-6 tastings of the current vintages. Others offer similar tastings but by appointment only. Then there are the "industry" tours and tastings which are setup by wine purveyors for their customers. Because The Pope is kind of a big deal in the NOLA wine world, he had a few of these "VIP" tours setup for us.

Beaulieu (or "BV") was our hands-down favorite winery. We go to do a lot of cool stuff, such as...

Barrel tasting in the wine cellar. These wines had not yet matured enough for bottling, but they tasted fine to me - straight out of the barrel. The wines we sampled came from specific clones of vines, which over time have proved to produce the best grapes. Note - if you see any wine which says it comes from Clones 4, 6, or 337, then it's probably going to be good.

After a tour of the production process, we had lunch at the Rutherford House - which is a private residence located on the vineyard. Above is the view from the driveway. How would you like to wake up to that every morning? The house had recently undergone an extensive renovation, which included the addition of cameras in the kitchen and flat screen TVs in the dining rooms so that diners can communicate with the private chef while he is preparing their meal. No, I am not making that up.

Speaking of food, we did not have a private chef, but we did have a great lunch catered by Napa Valley Grille. Flat iron steak with more sauteed mushrooms, marinated chicken, grilled yukon gold potatoes, and (the crowd favorite) a salad of mixed greens, goat cheese, grapes, and a cabernet sauvignon vinaigrette.

It was hard to top BV, but each tasting and tour is different. For example, Sterling Vineyards is located on top of a mountain. So how do they avoid sending visitors walking or driving up the narrow road to the tasting room? Why, a gondola lift, of course. Here is a picture from above, complete with the shadow of our passenger cabin.

Duckhorn Vineyards was definitely the "hippest" winery we visited. The tastings are sitdown, (everywhere else we visited was standup at the bar), they played music in the tasting room, and the house has a wraparound porch which allows you to fully take in the scenery. Above is a snack which was being served: turkey, stuffing, and cranberries. Sort of an all-in-one Thanksgiving appetizer.

We visited quite a few other wineries - St. Supery, Acacia, Provenance (which is where we stayed), and V. Sattui to name a few. Honestly, if you do the same standard walk-up-to-the-bar tasting every time, I could see that becoming quite monotonous and boring. My suggestion would be to do some research and visit wineries which offer unique experiences. If you can somehow score an industry tour, then do it. Besides the inclusion of a more extensive and in-depth tour, the industry tastings also include samples of the "reserve" wines which, I must say, are exponentially better than those with larger case production quantities. Problem is: the reserve wines are hard to come-by. Most of the reserve wines are available only through distributors, and even then the case numbers are so few that they are only sold to those vendors who move a large volume of the higher production wines. Thus, we tasted a lot of wines which we could only purchase at the vineyard. And so...

We made sure to take home as much as we could afford. There were quite a few judging looks as we pushed this luggage cart through the hotel lobby. I am not sure why.