6 Lessons We Learned In Napa

We learned about more than just wine on our recent trip to the Napa and Sonoma winemaking regions in California. Here are 6 things that stuck with us, even after the headache went away:

1. Hiring a Professional Can Be Worthwhile – According to Dennis, our driver, the costs associated with a DUI in California are somewhere near the 10K mark. Ok, he’s definitely a biased source. But considering that hiring a limo, van, or car for your wine tour comes with local expertise even while it’s keeping you out of the slammer, that $70 an hour quickly becomes very worthwhile. Don’t know where you’re going? Ask Dennis. Not sure if that next winery is worth the tasting fee? He sure does. It’s short money when you consider everything you get. And nobody has to get stuck with DD duty.

2. If You Don’t Love People, Stay Out Of Service – If one thing separated the truly amazing winetasting experiences from the duds, it was the person behind the counter. At some wineries, the pourer clearly didn’t care whether we enjoyed the wine or not, nor did he or she have much interest in us as potential customers. And at the best wineries, we were treated to friendly banter, instruction, and even a rap about Napa’s climate. Regardless of whether we were wine celebrities (we weren’t) or average Two-Buck Chuck drinkers (we were), the best places made us feel like we were the most important people ever to sip a glass of Chardonnay.

3. Love What You Do – Richard Graeser left an unsuccessful farming business in the mid-80s to take care of some family affairs after his father passed, and ended up planting grapes on some land he inherited in the upper Napa valley. Over 20 years later, he was cheerfully serving his own wines (with his picture on one of the bottles) to us in the lobby of our B&B as part of a free tasting. I doubt he got any sort of fee for being there (if it was, it was probably pretty marginal), and he didn’t bring a single bottle or brand-imprinted corkscrew to sell. Just himself, his stories, and his product. Needless to say, he’s found his passion, and it showed in his personality, and his wine.

4. There’s Nothing Like A View – By the end of the day, when your taste buds are muddled with oak, tannins, grapefruit, kiwi and loamy earth, a spectacular view across green vineyards and dusty hills is like waking up in a Monet. The wine could be grape juice, and I don’t think we would have cared all that much. But add substance (like Domaine Carneros’s amazing sparkling wine) to style (like their stone patio overlooking the rolling hills of their estate and the rest of wine country) and you’ve got a recipe for success. But if you can’t wow ’em with taste, at least wow ’em with beauty.

5. Price Doesn’t Always Equal Quality, But It Sure Does Correlate – Time and again, we would introduce ourselves as “anti-wine-snobs,” and we were pleased to hear that, even in Napa, folks drink plenty of Two-Buck. But prior to this trip, our wine budget rarely went above $8 or so a bottle…with so many palatable wines in the discount bin, how could we justify spending more on something we might not like? But once we had tasted and seen the goodness of California grapes, $20-30 seemed like a bargain for such quality. Oh, we’ll still have plenty of budget offerings in our wine fridge…but you’ll see a lot more Artesa and St. Supery amongst the Yellowtail.

6. Save the Best for Last – The weekend before Napa, we went to the Hudson Valley in New York for another wine tour. We did it in the right order: while upstate NY wines are fine in their own right, they simply don’t compare to one of the world’s premiere wine regions. If we had gone the other way around, it would have been like going to Foxwoods or any other Indian casino before a trip to Las Vegas. Now that we’ve been out west, it’ll be a lot harder to justify buying a case on the Finger Lakes. Everything is relative, of course–you wouldn’t eat steak every night–but once you’ve had filet, you stop paying top dollar for rump roast.