At the end of October, we went on a two-day wine tasting trip to Napa. October is low season which makes it more affordable meaning there is more money left for wine. To get to Napa we rented a car from San Francisco International Airport. Depending on traffic this drive takes about 2 hours. We decided to stay in a B&B close to Yountville, at the Oleander House B&B (http://www.oleander.com/), it was very cozy and the people running it were friendly, helpful and had great recommendations. The breakfast was FANTASTIC!!
Just down the road from the Oleander House B&B is the Cakebreak winery (https://www.cakebread.com/), also recently featured on ‘Keeping up with the Kardashians’ (yes, this is the point where we have to admit that we might have watched an episode or two of their series…). The grounds of Cakebread are beautiful. We did a wine tasting of their current wines for $15. The wine tasting was held outside in their garden and we had one of the employees walk around with us and tell us a bit about the family run vineyard. Their red wines are lovely (generally, we are more red wine drinkers, though we do not discriminate against white wine). Definitely worth going for a tasting.
The outside of Cakebread winery.
For the rest of the day we went to rent some bicycles (don’t drink and drive, none of us were prepared to be the designated driver). We had that image of wineries being right next door to one another… A bit of a misjudgment, we did quite a lot of cycling, but as the weather was good we did enjoy our little cycling tour. We managed to go to 4 different wineries. One winery that we discovered on our bike tour and thought was beautiful with great outside seating to sit, enjoy a tasting and some food is Clos Du Val (http://www.closduval.com/). A tasting here costs $25. Once again one of their red wines did it for us. This was the last winery of the day for us and a great finish
The grounds of Clos Du Val.
Cycling past vineyards on our way back “home.”
On our last day in Napa we decided to pop by two more wineries before heading back to the airport. We decided to stop by Goosecross Cellars (http://goosecross.com/) which we chose because we liked the name. Turns out it was our favourite winery of the trip. The tasting once again was $25. The best wine we had, and this is where we would like to re-iterate we are generally red wine drinkers, was their Chardonnay white wine! The gentleman doing the tasting for us was informative and told us that Goosecross, being a small winery, bottles their wine from a truck in the parking lot of their estate. Wonderful wine and we have already said next time that we are back in the area we will definitely have to stop by Goosecross to buy some more white wine.
Wine tastings in Napa are generally between $15- $30. The vineyards generally are lovely and it definitely helped that we had great weather the whole time we were there. We are planning to visit Sonoma Valley next for some wine tasting so will be able to compare the two J
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