2005.07.02

For the fourth of July weekend, Sherylen and I were up in the Sacramento area, where temperatures cracked the 100-degree mark (or 41 degrees, for you metric folk), making it quite unbearable. So what better way to escape the heat than to head back toward the San Francisco bay and the Napa Valley, eh?

Here are some grapes growing at one of the millions of wineries in Napa. After a while, they all look the same.

My impressions of the entire wine-tasting tour bit are rather lukewarm; while I agree that it was interesting and amusing to see what's out there and taste some wine, on the whole, I was left shaking my head wondering what the big fuss was all about. For starters, I'm not much of a wine drinker, so when the people serving up a flight of wine at a taste test mention things like "fruity" and "nutty," I'd be more likely to think they were referring to the tourists from San Francisco instead of the taste of the wine.

Here's an extreme close-up of a bunch of Chardonnay growing on the vine. They won't be ripe until August or so, so for now, each of these is about the size of a Peanut M&M. Also, all the grapes are green right now, so this might as well have been a Pinot Noir or some other red grape in July.

In addition, I'm quite the alcoholic lightweight, so if the lack of wine sensitivity wasn't bad enough to begin with, once I started getting loopy after only two vineyards, they all started to taste the same. But I did leave with this one piece of knowledge: on a scale from "grape juice" to "mud," a Pinot Noir is closer to the grape juice end than a Cabernet, even though both of them look and smell the same to me.

If you look close enough, you'll see little bubbles of carbon dioxide in these glasses of champagne (aka "sparkling wine"). These three glasses of bubbly cost $8.50. And you don't even get to keep a glass! But at least you get free crackers.

shameless plug

Here's the Mumm lineup, a lot of which never makes it to the store shelves

If I had to recommend one single place for a Napa-newbie to stop, I'd have to point you to Mumm, where they make Champagne. There's a free 1-hour tour that doesn't require reservations; they let you eat grapes right off the vine (when it's harvesting time), and their wine-tasting fees are about the same as you'd find elsewhere. Of course, if non-bubbly wine is more your thing, then never mind.

Here we've got Sherylen posing next to the token grapevine rows on the Mumm tour. Part of me thinks that the people who run the winery are free to switch the grape names on us tourists, but they wouldn't do that...would they?

It was here that I learned what riddling was, how fermentation creates bubbles at a pressure upwards of 100psi, and of course, what difference a few teaspoons of sugar makes in how dry a drink feels as it leaves your tongue and down your throat. I still can't taste the difference between a "blanc de blanc" and a "blanc de noir" but at least I can now identify them by sight.

I thought about stealing this big wine bottle...ok, not really.

natural spring water

It wasn't that much of a stretch to continue up toward Calistoga, home of Calistoga water, which supposedly comes out from natural springs at 140-150 degrees (that's pretty darn hot, mind you). Aside from the 10-degree temperature increase relative to Napa, and my sighting of a Full-Service gas station pump along the way (in St. Helena -- it was strange, I went to go pump gas into my car, and out of nowhere, this guy comes to wash my windows. Even though I pulled up to a pump marked "Self"), we were largely surprised at how Calistoga was not much bigger than the three-block stretch of Downtown Sunnyvale. You had your two blocks of shops, and maybe a two block radius around that full of day spas.

I can't tell if this used to actually be a railroad crossing or not...

...but it's been turned into a shameless strip mall of sorts.

So Sherylen and I opted to get full-body massages at a place that shall remain nameless because of the sheer inaneness of the treatment. Instead of actually working the muscles (kind of like kneading dough, as you'd imagine a massage to be), these people seemed as if they wanted to shake any tightness out of your muscles, claiming to be using some sort of "motion method" of massage. It's no wonder this place specialised in mud baths and not massage treatments....