Weekend Cooking- Napa Valley Trip- Part II- The Wineries

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Last week, I wrote about the food we had on our trip to Napa. This week, I cover the wineries.

The first one we visited was Frog's Leap Winery, where I took my favorite photo of the entire trip.

The view at Frog's Leap Winery

We took a tour of Frog's Leap, where we discovered that the founder and owner John Williams graduated from Cornell and interned at Taylor Winery, and opened Glenora Winery in the Finger Lakes region where we used to live, so that was pretty cool. Our tour guide Evan was knowledgable and friendly, and we enjoyed all of the wines we tasted there. I like white wine, so I was very happy here. My husband likes red better.

The vineyards

The grapes are collected in wheeled bins

They get dumped into this container

and they go up the conveyor 

Then we saw the huge barrels the wines are aged in.

The wine barrels

Our next winery was Sterling Vineyards, where we took a tram up the mountain for a self-guided tour.

The view from the tram

The views were stunning, and at Sterling you followed a path to different stations where you again tasted more wine. We liked the tour better at Frog's Leap as it was more interactive and informative.

One of my husband's friends and his wife met us at Del Dotto for a tour of their wine caves. Del Dotto looks like an Italian castle inside, and the caves were very cool. We had a VIP tour, and actually tasted wine directly from the casks where the wine was aging. You could order wine from the very barrel you tasted from; the wine would be delivered in a few months or even years, depending on how long that particular wine needed to age.

Del Dotto cave

Del Dotto was pretty spectacular, and our tour guide really knew his stuff, as did my husband's friends. They have been coming to Del Dotto for years, and have many bottles of their wine, so they gave us the scoop on what to buy. Our wine is scheduled to arrive soon, and we can't wait to invite our sons and their girlfriends over for a wine tasting party.

In front of Del Dotto

We visited a few more wineries, and after two days of that, we decided that next time we did this, we'd probably stick to just one or maybe two wineries per day and then a little sightseeing before dinner. One of our friends told us that after visiting wine country, we wouldn't want to drink wine for awhile and she was right. I needed a little break, but by the time our Del Dotto wine arrived, I'll be ready!