Temecula Valley

Temecula Valley is in the Southern California Wine Country. There are over 40 wineries from the small boutique vintner to some full-service wineries with resorts. We visited Old Town to get some visitor information, coffee, cheese and chocolate covered bacon, before heading out on the wine trail to do some tastings. We had no idea which one to choose as we hadn't heard about any of them so we just stopped at ones that looked interesting.

We didn't care for the wines at Leonesse Cellars. The hostess seemed more interested in selling us a club membership that touting their wines. We stopped at Monte De Oro because of the size of their tasting room and restaurant. We liked some of their wines, but they are very young wines as they just recently opened. But we could taste the potential, so we bought three bottles. We drove past Falkner Wines to check out their parking lot as they are on the Harvest Host list of places to possibly spend the night. We then stopped at Baily Wines because we wanted to find out about the actual grape vines they had along the road. The vines looked very old and gnarly and John said they were probably an old Zinfandel grape. This is a very small, boutique winery that has been around for a long time. Once we started tasting their wines, which were actually pretty good, I asked our wine connoisseur if he knew about the vines. He said that most of the vines we could see were cabernet sauvignon and were, indeed, very old.

John was very good to me tonight and took me out to eat at Lucille's BBQ. Their ribs are almost better than those at Bandana's and that's GOOD.