Napa Valley rocks

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After that mad 300 dollar night (not even one free bottle of champers), we went to a brilliant village called Calistoga. There was a tasting festival on and we just sat on the grass, imbibing excellent white wines and listening to a live dixie jazz style band of old codgers giving their instruments what for.


The place we stayed was maybe the best bit - The Calistoga Inn is an old French design they said, all wood panelling and creaky floorboards. I felt like Huckleberry Finn. Here they had an interesting looking book on one of the shelves....something like "A painstaking work of breathtaking genius"; I read quite some pages, but didnt want to swap it with the books I had brought myself.

In Calistoga we had the most exquisite meal of our lives at some big posh place i forget the name of but was in the TimeOut California guide i think: fab seafood starters; i tried the oysters which Sofie sucked down with animalistic zeal. I had a go at one, but in an old friend of mine´s words, they indeed were like snot that tastes of sea. Here we had these wine samplers, were each sample is a goodsized glass, which are a little wooden rack over a foot long. We went for the clarets given my beefy main course choice (need sofie to comment what she ate here, think it was fish, anyway, she loved it).


We visited a few wineries in the region and i tried to follow the instructions for wine-tasting in the book i bought, but then, the resounding maxim is simply, Do You Like It? So for an oik like myself, I could simply drink my brains out until they all tasted the same without feeling out of place among all these well-dressed winies on the opposite side of the counter.


Worth mentioning the Sideways movie again. I was captivated by the scenes of the pair driving around the countryside, and doing it yourself you see the movie can only suggest the majesty of those rolling hills and meadows. Bootiful indeed, with only the odd high-speed SUV to spoil it. Like being in the middle of France, and the weather is perfect still, even in October.


Our last night was in Napa town itself, which disappointingly, is a modern shopping mall affair with none of the old world charm you´d have expected. But this is where Sofie´s love for playing pool was first seeded. We spent a whole evening downing beers, and me taking ´artistic´ B&W photos of her bending over the pool table :-)

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