Living in a Wine Region

Since it’s become obnoxiously hot and our hiking hobby has been mostly postponed until things cool off in the Fall, we’ve decided instead to use our weekends to explore the local wineries. San Ramon is ideally sandwiched between the Northern (Napa and Sonoma) and Central Coast (Livermore) wine regions. 

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This basically means we could visit a different winery every weekend and it would still takes us years to try them all. We visited Wente Vineyards in Livermore shortly after moving here but were a bit more hesitant to make the hour (plus) drive to Napa with a baby. 

Forest is still at an age where naps are pretty important for him to get through the day without a major meltdown, and he’s never been the best at taking quality siestas on the go. However, we decided to risk it last weekend and just see how he performed. Many of the wineries in Napa require reservations for a tasting and/or tour, but with a young baby we just didn’t feel like we could make that sort of commitment. We decided to take off some of the pressure by choosing a more commercial winery, Clos Du Val, for our first Napa experience. 

Sure, the experience is a little less intimate in a public tasting room but it was nice to be able to show up unannounced, try our wines and leave as soon as we felt like Forest needed a change of scenery. Plus, neither Jon or I are overly educated on fine wines so we like to blend into the crowd rather than have to swirl, sniff, and ponder tannins in front of the experts.  

Forest did pretty well overall. He catnapped on the drive over and stayed content in the front carrier while Jon and I sipped our wine flights (though he did try to intercept my wine glass from time to time). 

The wine was really really really good. Jon is better at the lingo than me, whereas I am only slightly able to distinguish red from white. Or sweet from not sweet. Just kidding, I am starting to develop a bit of a palate and even correctly identified a ‘dark chocolate’ flavor in one of the reds we chose and then was super proud of myself for later reading that exact description in the winery’s tasting notes.  Boom! There’s hope for me yet! 

Clos Du Val had two tasting options: you could choose 5 from the lower end wines for $15 or for $20 you could choose 5 samples from the higher end. We decided to choose one of each option and share tastings. Clos du Val is known for its fancy Cabernet, which was definitely tasty. However,  Jon and I both agreed that we enjoyed the Red blend best. I don’t know why, but we have a thing for red blends. Maybe there isn’t hope for us since we aren’t wine ‘purists’. We prefer our reds a little mutt-y, you know? Either way, we bought a bottle of the blend. It may now be the most expensive bottle of wine in our collection so at least it’s a fancy mutt, like a labordoodle or something. 

After our tasting and souvenir selection, we headed to downtown Napa for some grub. Once again, Forest behaved like a prince and charmed the pants out of all the patrons while we chowed down on sushi. 

He took a more lengthy nap on the drive home which pushed his bedtime back by about an hour, but we figured that was a small bargain for a great outing to a world class wine region! 

This weekend we decided to stay closer to home and headed back to Livermore to check out the popular Concannon Vineyard and Winery. Concannon is known for it’s Petite Sirah and it’s picnic grounds. 

Despite it being a scorching hot day outside there were plenty of families huddled under the shade. We opted to head indoors to the tasting room and shared a flight of 5 wines for $10. 

We even got a bonus tasting of a Pinot Noir probably because Forest turned on the charm with our bartender. Baby boy was the center of attention in the Tasting Room and several pretty ladies came over to gush about how handsome he was. 

Baby on a wine barrel...classic!

Once such lady even volunteered to take our photo so we got a rare picture of the 3 of us. 

She remarked, ‘Now you will always remember his first wine tasting!’. I didn’t want to to correct her that this was actually his 3^rd wine tasting.... We are quickly becoming winos!  

This trip did involve his first outing to a bar though. 

Once our tasting was finished we decided we wanted to cap it off with something to eat so we got a table at the on-site wine bar and shared some tuna sliders while having another glass of red. 

After our snack, Jon returned to our bartender to purchase a bottle of Merlot, our favorite from the samples. 

With these two purchases, our bottles from Italy, and our recent joining of a Wine club which sends us two bottles of red every month, we finally have a full wine rack! 

Of course, I can never bring myself to actually open any bottle over $10 when it is just the two of us, so hurry up and come visit us so we can break open the good stuff!