California Wines Part 2: Seven wineries to sample three valleys

Tasting at Honig

Happily, our tastings exceeded my expectations. I'd been warned not to look for deep expertise in the marketing-led tasting rooms. The pourers had their set schpiels, and were unlikely to want ... or be able ... to talk in further depth.

This was certainly the case in our first, and only unplanned, winery stop. Bartholomew Park was picturesque, a stone's throw from our rental property and had pleasant if unremarkable wines. Our pourer was a retired lady who was doing this for some part time cash; friendly, but uncomfortable with any wine conversation that went beyond the official tasting notes. To be fair, this was also the cheapest tasting we did: $10 for the standard range and $20 for the premium. But it had me worried that it might set a standard for the region.

Fortunately, we could rely on local expertise to up the game for the rest of our tastings. In Napa, we hired professional guide Dean Gross to organise a full day's exploration of the valley. In Sonoma, two of our party had once lived here and could take us to old favourites and spots tipped by their friends. And in the Russian River valley, some wine-obsessed new friends who were also Bay Area residents got us in to two wineries that impressed every local who heard the names. Here's a roundup of those visits:

NAPA

Honig - A small, family-run operation with a fresh attitude and a sparky staff. The most enjoyable tasting we had in terms of conversation; Casey clearly loves what he does and sparkles with the enthusiasm of sharing his knowledge with others. His ability to talk in depth about Honig's wines, but also put them in the context of his wider understanding of Californian and world wines ... all with a wonderful sense of humour ... was exceptional. Lead winemaker Kristin Belair is one of a growing number of women in the industry; a change in which California is far ahead of Europe.

Schramsberg - One of the oldest wineries in continuous operation in the valley, German immigrant
Jacob Schram built a business so respected in the late 19th century that visiting literary star Robert Louis Stevenson dropped by. It left family hands at the turn of the next century and didn't do much significant production until the late 1950s, when the Davies family took the place over with a dream of producing sparkling wine to rival Champagne. Twenty years later, they were the brand President Nixon took on his diplomatic mission to China, and their reputation was made. The family home is a historic landmark, the gardens are lushly beautiful and the tour of the cellars does a fine job explaining this fascinating process. My one criticism: the tasting takes place in the the musty cellars, where the strong scents of mould and mildew can overpower the delicate tastes of the wine. Two of our party with minor allergies had significant breathing problems after half an hour; I don't want to think what the lungs of the workers who spend their days down there look like.

Krug - Another winery with historic origins, Charles Krug and Schram were friends and colleagues; Krug's vineyard slightly pre-dates the higher-altitude Schramsberg fields. German heritage passed to Italian in the 1940s when the Mondavis bought the winery. It's still in the family. The vines might be old but the winery building and tasting rooms are some of the most modern in Napa, fresh from a multi-million dollar renovation. It's a dramatic, modern space that plays with dark and light, with massive glass walls separating the working winery from the tasting area. You're welcome to bring your own food to take advantage of the shaded picnic lawns and great views out front, as long as you buy a bottle of their wine. You can also explore the herb garden of the Culinary Institute of America, which occupies a hill across the street. I would happily have lingered longer here.

SONOMA

Gundlach Bunschu - Another winery with roots in 19th century German immigration, this one has been in the hands of the same family since its founding in 1858. The foundation story is wildly romantic: Jacob Gundlach bought the land, returned to Bavaria to marry his childhood sweetheart, then they spent their honeymoon collecting European rootstocks before returning to California to get to work. The Bundschus married in later. Today you do your tastings beneath pictures of the fifth, sixth and seventh generations. It's obvious the team feels a part of this family spirit and is hugely proud of their story.  The hillside location has stunning views and a hip, casual vibe. With lots of live music and a variety of outdoor seating, this is the one I'd be most likely to hang out at if I were a local.

Ledson - It's wine tasting at Hogwarts! Ledson's "castle" is the California wine region captured in architecture. (It's the lead photo in my last entry.) Grand European tradition, lovingly crafted with high quality standards, implemented with technology and featuring all the mod cons. The family has a long history as farmers and building contractors in the area, becoming more famous for their winemaking after the opening of the castle in 1999. Ledson specialises in small varietal lots and has an unusually large range of wines on offer. This is a great place to sample how traditional European varieties like viognier, riesling or petit verdot adapt to California. There's a great shop, a deli with tasty sandwiches and lovely grounds to explore, making this the quintessential "destination winery".

RUSSIAN RIVER
We liked the pinots from these wineries best, and it was here we were able to really taste the kind of dramatic, terroir-based variations in vintages we're used to in Burgundy. With our limited experience, it's hard to say if that's because the Russian River wines are better overall, or if the friends who organised this day picked the best wineries of the broader region. Certainly, it's an endorsement when the sommelier at the French Laundry raises his eyebrows in appreciation and tells you you're off to two special places.

Littorai - I have a sweet spot for this place because it was started by a writer (reflected in its name) and has a passionate attitude towards organic gardening. The vineyard tour is a gardener's delight. Herbaceous borders next to the vines are stocked with flowers to attract pollinators or to draw pests away from the vines. Other plants are grown because they rot down to make organic fertilisers or provide early indicators for disease control. They move goats around the vineyard to munch down the weeds, and recycle all their waste water through a reed bed. It's the place at which I most wish I would have had a notebook. Not for the tasting notes, but for the gardening tips.

Merry Edwards - The only place where we bought a bottle. The queen of California's growing ranks of female wine makers, Edwards has been at her craft since the mid '70s and is a legend in these parts. Her winery was most similar to our European experience. No distracting shops or adjunct activities, no "destination" pitches, no wine clubs. Just very serious wine, best known to the sommeliers of very serious restaurants. This was our most detailed, traditional tasting, providing loads of information on soil qualities, growing conditions and how those elements transferred into what we were tasting. Here we found true variety across terroir, exploring how pinot noir could change dramatically from place to place. If you're serious about your wine, this is the place to seek out above all others.

California Wines, Part 1: We're not in Burgundy any more, Toto!

I apologise to any American reader who thinks I'm a snob.

My objective in this blog is to evaluate great food, travel and culture against the value it delivers for money. That is inevitably going to be coloured by my perspectives and experience, which are European.

"But you're American!" You cry. True, born and raised. But I started taking on European assignments at 30, and had moved to London full time a few years later. American Ellen, with her junior exec salary, her auto loan and her big new mortgage, lived in Dallas, drank beer and thought Macaroni Grill was a special night out. These days, Ellen drinks wine. I live an hour's train journey from one of the world's great capitals, a quick flight from all of Europe's best wine regions and tend to get to three or four Michelin-starred restaurants a year in the normal flow of life. I came to my cultural and culinary maturity in Europe. This is the only experience I have to compare American wine regions and fine dining with. So please, believe me, I'm not starting with any prejudice against America. I'm simply relating my experience from a European perspective.

That experience found the California wine country to be equal in quality to its European rivals, but far worse value for money and far more conservative in its outlook. That's not meant as an insult to any American reader, just an honest observation based on my experience. If I were living in St. Louis, and Burgundy was a once-in-a-lifetime trip rather than a jaunt for a long weekend, my perspective would no doubt be different. But I can only write from what I know. So there's my warning. Americans may be a bit offended by the next three entries. Europeans will find them more useful. Mea Culpa.

That caveat delivered, let's talk Californian wine. This entry offers some general observations, the next covers the specific wineries we explored.

While the quality of the wine, the belief in the concept of terroir and the producers' passionate dedication to their craft is the same as in Europe, there are some radical differences. Here's a mind-blowing statistic: more than 90% of California wine is drunk within 24 hours of purchase. When you're tasting quality wines at European vineyards, one of your first questions is: "when should I drink this?" The expectation is that you're tasting something still in development. The game is to imagine how it will mature. The finer the wine, the truer that is. In California, though it can age, even the really good stuff is meant to be drunk now. Hotter growing conditions yield higher sugar content, leading to higher alcohol levels and earlier maturity.

In America, you pay for tastings, which are usually conducted by marketing staff rather than the winemakers. In Europe, with rare exceptions, you're tasting for free with the unspoken understanding that, unless you really hate what's on offer, someone in your party will probably buy at least one bottle just to be polite. In all but the really big vineyards, your tasting is likely to be conducted by either the actual winemaker, or someone fundamentally involved with the production. The level of detail you can get into ... if you can speak the language of the country in which your tasting ... is vast.

The average price for a tasting in Napa and Sonoma seemed to be about $35, rising to as much as $65 if you threw in a vineyard tour or chose the makers' premium line.

With the ability to rack up serious costs for tasting, you need to be careful.  There are more than 600 Dean Gross, who will help you find the better experiences, do your driving and generally take the stress out of your day.

To make the most of your time,
use an experienced guide like
Dean Gross

wineries with tasting rooms in Napa and Sonoma, and though they all charge (unless you're with "wine club" members who can get you a free tasting), what you get for your money varies greatly. It's a salutary warning that the only winery we approached on a whim, without research or a local's recommendation, was the least satisfying. A cheerful marketing rep was skilled at making small talk, but couldn't tell us much beyond the tasting notes she offered on beautifully printed cards. If you're serious about your wine, I highly recommend working with a local guide like

Once you've made your choice, what will you be tasting? Pinot Noir is the acknowledged star of the region, a dominance solidified by its celebration in the 2004 film Sideways. (Witness the power of popular culture. According to Dean, in the mid '00s many acres of merlot ... much maligned in the film ... were ripped out and re-planted with pinot to match the shift in taste the screenplay triggered.) And there's no arguing that California pinot is lovely. When you're used to the challenging, young pinots of Burgundian tasting rooms, it's a real delight to try something that already has its full fruit in evidence, and is ready to drink. Two- and three-year old Californian pinots taste like Burgundians twice their age. The majority of our tastings featured six wines, and three or four of them were typically pinot noir.

I found the zinfandels more interesting, however. They're more uniquely Californian. The grape is cultivated by southern Italians under the name primitivo, but it's in California where this jammy, strong red gains complexity and sophistication. Cabernet Sauvignons also make frequent appearances; bold yet comforting, often with dangerously high levels of alcohol. Almost everyone starts with Sauvignon Blancs, though after that the white varietals go off piste. We saw vermentino, picpoul, gruner veltliner ... whites seem to be an area with less accepted norms, where winemakers feel more freedom to experiment.

Small or large, Napa and Sonoma vineyards tend to have a far more sophisticated marketing operation than your average European house. Maybe when you're charging for tastings, you're more aware of needing to deliver value to your customer. It could be the fierce competition, or the fact that American culture is just naturally more aggressive with sales and marketing. Wineries here are more likely to be destinations for a lingering social outing. Expect beautiful tasting rooms and tastefully landscaped gardens. Some allow you to bring your own picnics as long as you're drinking their wine, others offer food, from simple deli options to full-service restaurants. Many have shops. Going well beyond wine sales, you may encounter wine-related gifts, local gourmet food items, clothing, jewellery or art galleries.

The most fascinating difference in marketing, however, is the wine club. Given the high tourist footfall in the region, it was a brilliant move to cut out the middleman and sell direct to visitors. Don't worry about finding a distributor in your region, we'll ship direct to you. Club members typically sign up for multiple shipments of wine every year, get free tastings and other benefits when visiting the winery, and extra communications. Most taste pourers have their pitch ... some less subtle than others ... and it's clear that converting visitors to subscribed, mail-order buyers is a critical part of the wineries' sales plans. It's a masterstroke. Wine lovers from Kirkwood, Missouri or South Bend, Indiana can combat a bitter winter's night by uncorking memories of sultry summer days on golden hillsides, and differentiate themselves from the guy buying wine at the local grocery store because they have a direct line to their special winery. I wish European wineries would embrace this approach. The only thing I've seen that comes close is the shareholder scheme at England's Chapel Down.

The most shocking difference for Europeans, however, will come with the price tags. At a typical tasting, entry-level white wines might start at $25 a bottle, mid-range reds would quickly jump to the $60s, and it wasn't unusual for the best wines to be in the low $100s. Going direct to the source in Burgundy or Tuscany, you'll only find those kinds of prices at venerable names with serious reputations. In California, they seemed standard. Why so shockingly expensive? Our waiter at Volta offered three reasons:

One: American farmers get no help from government. (Back in Europe, a full 50% of European Union funds go in agricultural subsidies.)

Two: Californian vineyards tend to have much higher levels of debt. Compared to Europe, the industry is a very new one. Owners still have mortgages on vineyards, and have fresh costs of new vines and equipment. The owner might be a Silicon Valley billionaire, but he still needs to pay off that debt.

Three: Because they can. Favoured weekend destination for Bay Area money. Beloved holiday spot for America's prosperous cultured class. No real competition without a long haul flight. If you want to do fine wine in America, you pretty much have to do it here. Prices reflect that captive market.

Next entry, I'll talk about the specific wineries we visited.

Living the good life in Sonoma

Our rental house nestled into a hillside garden above a valley full of grape vines.

Surrounded on three sides by a deep, covered veranda framed with wisteria, and dotted with clusters of generously-cushioned furniture, there was enough room for our group of six to spread out and lounge without ever bothering each other. The outdoor dining table on one side could seat 12, was already dressed with cheerful linen and festooned with chunky candles. It sat next to a broad patio with a double barbecue built into a stone wall restraining a steep hill. If, for some strange reason, we didn't want to be outside, there was another massive dining table indoors, beneath a cathedral ceiling that also sheltered an open kitchen, overstuffed sofas and a fireplace "nook" bigger than some British bedrooms.

It wasn't a house as much as a compound. Below, at vineyard level, a separate cottage housed the owner's winery on its ground floor and guest accommodation above. No veranda here ... just an enormous screened porch complete with hammock and other furniture deigned to while away a sultry afternoon. Between the cottage and the main house, terraced herb and vegetable gardens offered produce to add to our meals all week. On the other side, the hill by the dining patio led down to more vegetable gardens and up to a large pool surrounded by cushioned seating areas, another dining table and an outdoor kitchen. If you weren't transfixed by the view of the vineyards below, you could climb further to find a bocce court beneath Spanish-moss draped oaks. Climb further still through the woodland to gather branches for the barbecues, or settle on a deck to watch the sun set. While watching the hummingbirds and sipping a chilled glass of something local, of course.

Welcome to Sonoma.

I know that not everyone lives this way in Northern California's wine country, but our experience over a week there certainly made it seem like the whole place had been conjured out of a spread in Martha Stewart Living. Clearly, when you have high-quality wine country within an easy drive of one of the global economy's most dynamic engines, reality gets a bit skewed. Heaven knows where the people who do the hard work in all those lovely fields actually live, or how they can afford to get by in a place that made English prices seem quite reasonable.

We chose Sonoma over Napa because its image is a bit more laid back, less pretentious, and cheaper.
Though the two valleys run parallel to each other, and it's quick to hop back and forth between them, those anticipated differences did indeed prove true. From cars to shopfronts to people, everything seemed gilded with a bit more bling along the Napa road. The landscape is broadly similar, though I thought there seemed to be more woodland on the Sonoma side. Land is a bit less expensive in Sonoma, so it hasn't become as much of a high-end winery mono-culture. They still grow other crops here, and are wildly enthusiastic about them in restaurants and markets.

Towns we drove through in Napa all had the feel of Rodeo Drive moved to the country, with exquisitely high end shops behind perfectly polished windows, with signage so tastefully matching I suspected zoning laws included type face specifications. Sonoma is built around a large, green square called The Plaza. There's a pleasing historic vibe here, with a mission and a complex of colonial buildings preserved on one side. The combo of hotels, bars, restaurants and boutiques around the Plaza is still upscale, but it's also more friendly and a bit sleepy. You could actually imagine someone in a pickup truck pausing for a drink here.

Just north of the Plaza you'll find Sonoma Market, a local version of a Whole Foods (although there's one of those in Sonoma, too) that will fulfill every supermarket fantasy. Superb produce, magnificent meat and fish, upscale prepared foods and desserts to take away. With an expansive local wine selection, of course. Between the facilities at our house and the quality of the raw ingredients, is it any wonder we cooked half our meals in? I'd happily pit the salad I assembled from an enormous, roasted golden beetroot, greens, goat's cheese and toasted walnuts (all local) against 80% of the dishes we had in restaurants. Meanwhile, the boys did a magnificent job barbecuing a variety of meats and fish over aged oak collected from the property. We were all used to cooking with charcoal, but had to admit that the smoke imbued by pure, old wood was magnificent.

We even did a couple of blind wine tastings. We took turns organising, each person buying three reasonably-priced bottles, covering the labels and pouring the tastes. In addition to a fun way of organising drinking for an evening, it was a good method of sampling some of the areas more affordable offerings. As we were to discover at the wineries, the people most highly recommended for tastings tend to have lofty prices. Of that, more in the coming entries.

As wine regions go, both Napa and Sonoma are hot, dry places. In late June, a deep golden brown was the predominant colour of anything not under careful cultivation. Clearly, the vines need to push deep here to find water, to the benefit of their fruit. The temperature and colours reminded me far more of Central Spain than Italy or France, where the wine regions share space with more trees and rivers. A particularly striking difference from Europe: most of the vines are on the valley floor, rather than the best fruit coming from the free-draining heights. In California, it's just too hot up there.

For me, however, the biggest difference from Europe was in how the whole area is managed as a holiday destination. Upscale holiday rentals are abundant, sandwiched between retirement cottages of San Francisco executives and the weekend homes of Silicon Valley tech gurus. Hotels and B&Bs all seem to be in the trendy, boutique category. We were sternly warned to avoid weekends, when the pleasure-seeking masses bring the main roads to gridlock. Every winery is a wedding venue, every restaurant does special events. The area is clearly as much about family reunions, significant birthday parties, girls' trips and anniversary celebrations as it is about wine. Being able to play the local card in a country where people have very little vacation time, the California wine country is able to offer an elegant, luxurious, European-style getaway to people who don't have the time to go to the original.  Wine is just one part of the lifestyle getaway they're offering.

That realisation is at the heart of how I felt about Sonoma. As a wine holiday, it was pleasant ... but not as good as France or Italy. But as a lifestyle destination, it was unparalleled; a magnificent place to embrace the good life with those near and dear to you.

To rent our amazing holiday property for yourselves, check out the property description on VRBO. Quite by accident, it turned out this was the same company from which we rented our holiday cottage in Gascony in 2015 ... up until Sonoma, that had been my best holiday rental ever. Clearly, VRBO will be my first stop next time.