Sonoma, Day Two

I know I’m really far behind, but I keep thinking about blogging about this day during the day, then realize I don’t have the menu, then when I get home, I’ve been either running around doing things (or watching the ever important finale of whatever is on tv that night).  Two months is quite long enough, though, so I need to get this out post-haste.

 

The day was pretty structured, as M had made reservations for a 2-hour tour of Stags’ Leap Winery, which we were excited about, as we had seen the movie Bottleshock, and thought it would be interesting to go to the vineyard where they created the wine that beat the French wines, and also excited as you had to make a reservation for the tour, since space was limited.  Finding the winery was a little difficult, as it is down a private road and the directions included things like, take the left fork in the road.  We wound up at our destination, which turned out to be a house, a manor house, as we later found out.  The tour was very small, one other group of four (a dad, mom, and a couple) showed up.  We started with the tasting, during which we learned that we were not at the vineyard that created the winning wine – that was Stag’s Leap Cellars, which is denoted by the apostrophe-s, not the s-apostrophe, but that the winery we were at was the oldest in the stag’s leap district, which used to formulate the name, and that the owners of the two had been friendly, even while suing each other over naming rights.  During the tour, we learned all about the winery, which was only turned into a winery relatively recently, but had been the site of a resort and a speakeasy during prohibition. 

 

Despite the fact that the tour was interesting, we still felt like we had been “tricked” into going to the wrong vineyard, so we decided to stop by the “real Stag’s Leap.”  The drive to the vineyard was very short, and they had some picnic tables out front, so we pulled out our lunch supplies that we had purchased the day before (bread, cheese, and spinach artichoke dip) and had a picnic.  Since we didn’t have advance notice, we weren’t able to go on a tour, but we did taste some excellent wines.  We were feeling like we wanted to take a nap, and maybe visit the pool, so we headed back to our hotel before our big night at FRENCH LAUNDRY.

 

 

______________________________________________________________________
This email has been scanned by the MessageLabs Email Security System.
For more information please visit http://www.messagelabs.com/email
______________________________________________________________________