Friday, May 22, 2009
Repeating yesterday's transportation cycle, we picked up Bill and Leah and met everyone else at the Hilton.
On Dry Creek Road (a major Sonoma County wine trail) there is a group of tasting rooms sharing the same parking lot. This is handy because one can park and then stagger from tasting room to tasting room. Very efficient.
Our first stop was Family Wineries which is a co-op of six Dry Creek Valley wineries in the same tasting room facility and sharing employees:
The six wineries are Collier Falls, Dashe Cellars, Forth Vineyards, Lago di Merlo, Mietz Cellars and Philip Staley.
Our host was Shawn who was simply great! If there's a bigger smile in Sonoma County, we didn't see it:
It's easy to tell that the ladies are having their usual good time:
Heck, we're ALL off to a fine start for Friday:
Several of the wineries represented had excellent juice. We particularly liked offerings from Mietz Cellars and Dashe Cellars. Fran joined the wine club.
After Family Wines, it was just a short crawl next door to Kokomo Wines, a particular favorite of ours (Gael and I):
No, the wines are not from the Indiana Wine Country (is there such a thing?) but the winemaker, Erik Miller is from Kokomo IN.
Yes, I like my early-morning juice as well..
Fran joined the wine club.
We ran short of time to visit two of the other tasting rooms but made time to return to Papapietro Perry:
We'd visited Papapietro Perry on HOB 2006 and loved their Pinot Noirs. We wanted to see if the current vintages were up to par. They were good, but I liked the earlier vintages a bit more. Gael and I were already in the wine club but, of course, Fran joined the wine club today. Our host was Renae Perry, wife of "the" Perry in Papapietro Perry so I guess she qualifies as an owner :)
Our next winery was the highlight of this day, Pezzi King. Gael and I discovered Pezzi King Pinot Noir four years ago at a charity event and visited the tasting room (what an understatement) two years go.
To taste at Pezzi King, you get yourself invited to the owner's home on a mountaintop surrounded by vineyards:
Just down the hill from the main house is a picnic pavilion (a full kitchen, really) next to the pool where the fortunate are allowed to taste some really excellent wines. We'd asked Sharon (our contact) to lay on some cheese and crackers and Gael brought shrimp and a few other things; we'd have lunch right there.
Here's the logo on the bottom of the pool:
A real treat was that we were noticed by Pezzi King's owner, Jim Rowe, who joined us for the afternoon. Another neat guy, full of stories, who says the way to make a small fortune in the wine business is to start with a large one. My take? He's doing just fine...
Here's our host, Sharon with Gael:
The ladies looked fine at Pezzi King:
Oh, and Fran joined the wine club (Gael is already a member).
The last winery of the day was Thumbprint Cellars back in Healdsburg. Pezzi King was a hard act to follow, let me tell you!
But if the pictures are any indication, everyone had a particularly good time:
Bystanders were clearly jealous of our good time!
And, for our third Willi's chain restaurant we dined at Stark's Steakhouse:
I said earlier that Stark's is a part of the "Willi's" restaurant group; but more accurately, Willi's restaurants are part of Stark Reality Restaurants. Either way, their food is excellent and we had a great dinner there in Healdsburg.
Then another semi-snoozing-try-to-stay-awake drive back to Santa Rosa again; tomorrow is (yet) another day!
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