San Francisco - Day 3

I love wine, plain and simple. So when our trip to San Francisco came about the thing that I was most excited about was the chance to travel to Napa, California and go wine tasting in the wine mecca/capital - at least of the US anyway, and up there in the world too I'm sure. I did all kinds of research on what tour company would be the best to go through, although I didn't focus too much on which vineyards would be good to check out, I figured that would come with picking the good tour company. We were planning to spend one day in the Napa Valley so I knew I had to make the most of it, the boys had already planned baseball activities back in San Francisco the other days, Napa was my day.

In the end we ended up driving ourselves around for the day, or rather Gina drove us around for the day. We thought it was for medical reasons she wasn't drinking for her gluten allergy and although the real reason was also for medical reasons of her not drinking, shortly after our trip we came to find out that Gina is expecting and she is pregnant!

We got an early start to our day so we could get lots of wineries in, but also so we could check out Muir Woods on the way up to Napa. Gina and I had mapped out our whole route the night before over our dinner at Fog Harbor, I was to be the navigator for the day. We got to Muir Woods bright and early, so early it was barely open and we got in for free since it was before it officially opened. Having dressed for a beautiful day in the low 70s the woods were freezing, my toes especially in flip flops, it was quite cold there in the shadow of all the towering trees. Gina and I seemed to be satisfied with a quick walk around the woods, we saw all the trees, it was cool. The guys on the other hand seemed to want to take pictures of every single tree which all looked the same. It took some coaxing to get them to come out of the woods, otherwise it wouldn't have been a bad place to leave them behind. The forest was really cool to see how tall these trees have grown, def the tallest trees I've ever seen.

Finally we were on our way to Wine Country! It was a good hour's drive from Muir Woods up to Sonoma. Our plan was to drive up north through Sonoma and then come back down south through Napa (this plan turned out to be really good and we seemed to be going against traffic in Napa). We had a high level idea of where we wanted to go and had a map to follow along with but we mostly just winged it and stopped at random places along the road that looked good.

Our first stop of the day was at a winery called Mauriston. It was right along the road and was easy to pull off into. It was a small little place but we were delighted to see it was free wine tasting! After our free samples we headed back in the car and onto our next stop, another random place along the road, this time we stopped at J. Pedroncelli Winery. We were delighted again to find another free tasting here too, this was a great start to our morning. The drive through Sonoma was absolutely beautiful, probably one of the most beautiful places I've ever visited. The scenery was breathtaking on a beautiful sunny day driving past all the vineyards, its amazing how many there are, big and small.

One of the few wineries we did plan to stop at was the Francis Ford Coppola Winery. It was an absolutely beautiful property. You can actually go here and pay to use the pool and hang out by the pool or they have a nice restaurant which smelled delicious and overlooked the vineyards. They also had the desk from The Godfather on display that you could take pictures with. It was fun to walk around here and take pictures and of course try the wine!

After that we were on our way over to the other side to make our way down south through Napa. Of course we had to stop at the famous Napa sign.

We stopped at a couple of wineries in Napa but decided not to taste. Some of the places wanted $20 per person to taste wines, we didn't realize just how expensive wine tasting could be! Some of the wineries we stopped at were Freemark Abbey,  St. Clement and even Beringer but didn't taste at any.

 We also stopped at this one place that was like an Italian Castle, Castello di Amoroso, it like something you would find in Tuscany, it looked beautiful, the grounds were really pretty but it was very crowded even in just the parking lot. We decided at this point to have our little cheese and crackers and some of the fresh bread we brought with us for a little lunch snack.  The cowgirl creamery cheese we brought with us with the best cheese I've ever had in my life!

Although we were enjoying this absolutely beautiful day and the amazing scenery we were starting to get parched and needed some more wine. We noticed Sutterhome and decided to pull in there, they advertised free wine tastings, and free wine is free wine, we weren't going to turn our nose up on that.

We stopped at another small winery after that called Milat Estate. I personally didn't really like the wine there but Mike and Joe had some. It felt like we were in there forever though, the gentleman pouring the wine was quite the talker.

Wanting to get the most out of our day we pulled into another winery to stop and check out. We stopped at this beautiful winery, Del Dotto, that also advertised cave tours and wine tasting. I jumped out of the car to go check it out, it was $60 per person for the tour and tasting, so we passed on that, but it did look beautiful! So on to another winery we stopped just down the road at Provenance Vineyards. Since it was $20 per person to taste here, Mike and I decided to split the tasting between the two of us. He let me have the Savignon Blanc wines to taste which were quite fantastic!

We did stop at the Robert Mondavi Winery as we were passing it. It was really crowded there but we didn't taste any wine.

For our final winery stop of the day we went to Domaine Chandon which is a champagne winery! The champagne here was fantastic and the grounds were beautiful as well. It was a great way to end our wine tour.