We tasted a lot of wine these last two days without going to too many wineries. Our day would start off slow until about 10:30 or so and then we would head out to the wineries as they don’t open until 11 am or later. And, I as I mentioned before, we try not to go to more than three wineries in one day.
Friday found us as Booker Wines, Nicora Wine, and Epoch Estates Wines. Each of these were wineries that John had researched from Wine Spectator and produced wines from grapes we were interested in tasting. By the way, each of these wineries were low production, boutique wineries and most of them used grapes from their own estates.
Our first stop at Booker was interesting as they had good wines but our visit with a couple who are regulars to this winery was more memorable. Matt and Wendy found our story of RV travels very interesting and as we talked we discovered that we had similar tastes in wines. They highly recommended we visit McPrice Myers and told us to tell them who had sent us there. We also enjoyed the wine at Booker and bought 4 bottles.
After lunch at Thomas Hill Organics we met Nick at Nicora’s tasting room in the industrial park. He started out following his father’s footsteps in construction in but then struck out on his own after college where he started working at a winery learning the trade from the ground up. Along the way he discovered that he has a good palate for wine and started making his own. He gets his grapes from several vineyards in the valley and hopes to one day grown his own. We really enjoyed the four wines that we tasted and bought half of a case.
Our last stop on Friday was at Epoch Estates. They have a beautiful tasting room but we did not find any wines we liked enough to buy.
Saturday morning we arrived at McPrice Myers/Barrel 27 early. We were the only ones there to taste as has been the case with most of the other wineries. A lady about our age, Pat, was training a young man so she waited on us to show him the ropes. She recognized that we knew what we liked and knew how to taste wines. What transpired after that was an almost three hour wine tasting of over 15 wines from their cellar. She started with the 2011 and 2012 then started pulling from their library and we tasted wines from 2008 and 2009. We tasted Syrah, Grenache, Mourvedre, Zinfandel, blends with those grapes plus Cabernets and Tempranillos. We tasted wines that no one outside the company has tasted! We enjoyed Pat and she, obviously, enjoyed us. We had lunch on their patio and she gave us two glasses of wine to have with our sandwiches. Of course, we bought a LOT of wine from them. We hope we like them just as much when we get home!
Alta Colina Winery was their next door neighbor so we stopped there and John like one of their wines which we purchased. We drove by Turley’s Winery but since we already have ordered some of their wines, we didn’t find any we wanted to taste.
We had dinner at El Cortile Ristorante, an Italian restaurant which everyone we visited with recommended. And they were correct - fabulous meal!
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