Wine tasting in Napa Valley

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We're staying in a beautiful B&B called Cedar Gables Inn, which is English style, full of plush carpets, wood panels and antique furniture. Our room even has its own secret staircase that emerges into the lounge. Very cool! We started the day with a great breakfast of homemade scones, a fruit platter and their signature bread and butter souffle with bacon. Definitely needed to line the stomach before setting off.
We have been out touring the valley all day on the Wine Valley Shuttle, who took us and 8 other people around to 5 different wineriers. We started at Castello di Amorosa, a huge Italian castle that was actually moved to Napa from Tuscany! We sampled 10 wines, red, white, rose and dessert and explored the castle, which has its own Catholic church and tower. Our second stop was Twomey, a smaller winery where we sampled about 6 mainly red wines. After picking up some lunch items from a local deli, we had a picnic lunch outside at our third winery, Dutch Henry. This was a small winery but with many award winning wines. Again, we mainly had reds apart from a sauvignon blanc. We sat out in the trees and there were lots of nice birds around including a woodpecker, some kind of big nuthatch and some very blue jays. They brought us wine while we ate and must have had another 4. We also got a tour of their wine caves, which is where they store all their barrels while the wine ages as it keeps them cool. We tried two wines from the barrel. Napa is having a cool summer by their standards but after a cloundy start, it was absolutely clear blue skies and about 80 degrees. Normally it is 100! We bought a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc and a Petite Sirah here and a bottle of their extra virgin olive oil. The 4th stop was Frank Family Vineyards. The owner, Rich Frank is a Hollywood mogel who moved to Napa to open a vineyard. We tried a chardonnay and then a nice selection of Pinot Noir, Zinfandel and Cabernet Sauvignon. Simon bought two bottles of the Zinfandel. Our final stop was a very small winery called Zahtila, opened by an IT specialist who left IT to follow her dream of having a vineyard. In a few years she has become well known for her good quality wines. We tasted a lot of wines here and came away with two bottles of chardonnay (the first unoaked ones we'd tried) and a bottle of 2002 Cabernet Sauvignon.
The scenary is lovely with the blue skies, peaceful vineyards, green vines with dark grapes. Due to the cooler summer, the grapes have not yet been harvested so most of the vines still had bunches of grapes on them. Our hotel has free wine samples from 5pm-7pm but not sure I can drink any more wine as we have been tasting, and drinking, since 11am!
I am very happy to report that Simon's bag was waiting for us when we got back to the B&B!

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Comments

[LJ]

What a lot of wine!
I am suprised you could stand after all that wine, let alone type!