Just returning from a 4-day wine country vacation where we have been talking a lot about wine with our friends, the trip home wasn’t any different.  The other night, we shared with them one of my wife’s organizational practices of writing the price and retailer on the bottles of wine we purchase locally.  In a lot of situations, I may not track these wines in CellarTacker because they will be enjoyed soon and can often be weeknight quaffers.  Other times, I am just lazy and can get behind on updating the system.

Arlo & Janis (5/28/96) by Jimmy Johnson

At first we all agreed that seemed like a good system, because often we forget what we bought, when we bought it and for how much and sometimes that is good information to have when determining what to drink at any particular time.  But, then the question was raised: “Well, do you care if your guests see the price you have written on the bottle?”  Hmmm, we all thought to ourselves.  Our initial thoughts were that it didn’t bother any of us.  Wine should be evaluated on it’s own merits, not where it came from or what it cost.  And we firmly believe that, as human beings, we will be “anchored” with what we should expect from a wine at a certain price level if we know it ahead of time, which will only mess with the experience.  Check out this recently published studyby Hilke Plassmann of the California Institute of Technology where it was explained that the medial orbitofrontal cortex, which is the part of your brain responsible for pleasurable experiences, displayed much more activity when the subject was tasting a more expensive wine than a less expensive one after being told the price of each ahead of time.  Another research project called The Wine Trials approached this from a different angle by showing many wines that were less than $15 outscoring wines of $50-150 range in blind tastings.

Additionally, beyond the anchoring aspect and the experience expected from the wine based on price, do you feel your guest would consider you cheap if you put a $7 bottle on the table for them while attending your gathering?  Please feel free to comment and share your opinion and, of course, any related stories you may have.

Cheers!

The first half day is in the books for our Sonoma trip.  Half day as in we enjoyed a half day actually in Sonoma, some of us were up as early as 3:30am EST to start the day of travel, so by the time we got to dinner around 8pm PST, we were quite a subdued bunch.  Luckily, there were no serious travel issues and I don’t even have a crazy or quirky story about it to share, other than the movie, Informant!, was not what we expected.  But, who cares really about that?  Let’s get to Sonoma.

Getting to the town of Sonoma was, again, fairly easy without event, and we arrived a bit ahead of schedule.  Was this an omen?  I had hoped so.  We were all hungry and in a great mood already!  Sondra (@figgirl) from the girl & the fig was instrumental in helping assure our party of 6 had a table when we arrived as they are a small, quaint, cottage-like restaurant with a bar and patio in the back that I knew was very popular.  Everyone raves about this place and now I know why.  The service was fantastic and the food was phenomenal.  There are plenty of local options including several sheep, goat and cow cheeses from their Salon de Fromage that we sampled.  Being in a Spring-like atmosphere, as the sun was shining outside and seeing how the foliage growth was much further along over here when compared to Atlanta where it is still brown and cold, we opted for a Marsanne and a Viognier to some wine in our blood.  The waiter wrapped things up by bringing us some chocolate-covered figs with some candles, which was a nice little touch that was noticed and really goes along way.

By this time, it was time to move on to Bartholomew Park or “Bart Park” as many call it.  Unfortunately, we had so much fun at lunch, our schedule had gotten a little tight and had to shorten the planned tour if we were going to make it to Santa Rosa and then on to Healdsburg to meet the owners of our rental cottage.  “Bicycle Bob,” our tour guide was fantastic.  He iterated the importance of knowing/learning what you like and not worry about all the pretenciousness that can come with wine.  After a great introduction into some Sonoma wine history and the fact that Bart Park used to be an old hospital, we tasted some fantastic wines blind and enjoy trying to pick the grapes, choose our favorites and what we might eat with them.  The 2006 Zinfandel was my choice, while others really connected with the Sauvignon Blanc.  We definitely need to make more time for this one the next time we are in the area.  Thanks to Steve (Manager) and Bicycle Bob for being accommodating and flexible.

Jonjie, Kevin, Hardy and Ed

We then worked our way up highway 12 to Santa Rosa where we visited Salinia Wine Company situated in a little warehouse-style office park well away from rolling hills and scenic vineyards, but don’t be fooled.  We enjoyed tasting from barrels of natural juice, nothing like we’ve ever tasted.  Fermenting Sauvignon Blanc on the skins? Who does that?  Not flipping the nose at the status quo or methodologies learned at UC-Davis, the winemaker, Kevin Kelley, comes from a background as a history buff having learned about 8000 years of winemaking and felt there was more weight to that history and knowledge than just the last 50 years of wine study and technology as many have now come to know it.  He uses what we has learned from the chemistry and microbiological perspective to give him confidence in what’s he’s doing and how he’s doing it.  The results are simply amazing or and at the very least brazenly different for many people.  I have been in the middle of a few debates about commercial vs. natural winemaking, but you really need to experience the end result to make a decision for yourself.  These are the same folks who form The Natural Process Alliance (NPA).  Thanks to Kevin and Hardy for opening up their shop to us.

Lorraine, Sean and Cyndi working the thief

Finally, wrapping up our travel day we ascend the Dry Creek Valley to meet our gracious hosts Dale and Lorraine at their rental property aply named Casa Privata.  It sits on 9 acres of which 3 are planted to vine as Dale has been making his own wine for 15 years.  Casa Privata is also literally right next door to Montemaggiore winery and surrounded by other neighbors who also manage their own vineyards.  As guests, we also have unrestricted access to barrels full of some 2006 Cabernet from the vineyard.  A great after-breakfast treat, or anytime really.  The Casa was purchased and renovated about 4 years ago and is in a nice secluded cranny of the mountains, so you can enjoy some peace and quiet and admire the wildlife.  We were informed that a mountain lion had been seen with a cub fairly recently, which made early morning strolls somewhat of an adventure.  As of this writing, we are all still alive.  If you don’t hear from me in another day or so, send a search party.

Cheers!

Planning a vacation can sometimes be tough, frustrating and nerve-racking.  Once you decide where you want to go you then have to decide what to do next. What to see?  Where to sleep?  Who to visit?  Where to eat?  The list goes on.  Lucky for me, I have a wife who is very organized and loves to plan and when we put together an itinerary for wine country we balance the duties quite perfectly as I get to focus on the wine aspect of the trip.  Having travelled quite a bit and having some recent wine country visits under our belt specifically too, I offer a few pointers that I believe will give you a great chance of a lot of fun on your vacation.  Thanks to several of my online wine friends who offered some of their insights as well on a recent Facebook thread about this topic.

1. What’s your main focus?  Are you an art person, a foodie, or a wine connoisseur like me?  What is going to be your “homebase,” if you will (don’t you just hate it when someone uses “if you will”?… good), on your trip, the one thing that you must do, see or experience?  Raelinn of Wine Ophelia starts with art, food and music and looks for something authentic for the local region.  I liken this to the proverbial “when in Rome doe as the Romans do” and make sure you have identified what is a must do, want to do or just niceto do to help in prioritizing your itinerary otherwise you will get overwhelmed quite easily.  In my case, we are going to Sonoma to focus on enjoying some great wine while chilling with long-time friends.  The bottomline is to “start with one place and build your plan around it,” as Hardy succinctly puts it.  If you are having a hard time with nailing that down, maybe you could start with a place where there’s bacon.  Thanks to Rick Bakas for that tasty tidbit, though I thought his new year’s resolution was to get off of bacon?

2. Along the lines of “when in Rome…” I find the best way to learn about places to go and things to see is to get insider information from locals or friends.  Sure, you can buy that Fodor’s book for $14, but they have an obligation to put a lot of various stuff in there that will only make things that much more complicated.  Besides, the probability of finding what you want and having a great time is going to go up when you talk to your friends or people you trust who have experienced the trip already, or better yet, live there.  Word of mouth always wins.  Gee, where have I heard that before?  For example, using Twitter, I was able to get the proprietor of a restaurant to take a reservation for us when OpenTable couldn’t due to our party size.  A plus is that now she knows who I am vs. some reservation in a system.  One of the important things we learned by talking with locals is that this weekend is Barrel Tasting weekend hosted by Wine Road, which is a great event.  While we enjoy tasting wine from a barrel and trying to determine what it will be when it grows up, we also knew that it meant very busy wineries with people shoving glasses towards the tasting room staff like baby birds insisting on being fed.  If it was just the two of us, that would be fine, but since we were with friends and celebrating we wanted less stress and more focus.

3. Think about locale.  Once you have determined the types of things that interest you the most and which places to go, we find it a must to find lodging that is central to the majority of the trip if geography allows. Think about how close everything is to each other and maybe divide them into areas that allow you to group them and cut down the daily driving distance, especially when wine tasting is involved.  Limo services are available but pretty expensive.  So, unless you’re rolling in that kind of coin, you may consider opting for the middle ground like we did and hire a driver who will drive our rental car around at a much lower cost.  But, if you insist on driving yourself, mapping the trip with shortest trip time in mind will pay off.  For this trip, each day is broken down by “zones” around Healdsburg, which is where we will be staying (Casa Privata): Dry Creek/Alexander Valley, Russian River Valley – South and Russian River Valley – North.  Tools like Google Maps and Google Earth were very instrumental in helping me develop a daily driving plan for the most efficient use of our time.

4. Talk to the wineries.  Since the focus of our trip is visiting wineries, we feel it necessary to reach out and find out about the best way to experience their wines and vineyards, if applicable.  If you’re into art or restaurants, I think you could do the same thing.  We will be visiting a couple of wineries that took the time to reach out to me via Twitter and via relationships I have developed in various social media channels and real-life.  As you may know many wineries are starting to adopt social media avenues as a way to reach would-be customers and visitors and it works for people like us.  Once I made it known on Twitter and Facebook that we were heading to Sonoma, I was approached by several local businesses, most of which were wineries, restaurants and lodging offering to share their experience with us.  Some wineries may even offer a special deal to twitter connections much like St. Superyin Napa, where tasting fees are waived if you heard of them via Twitter.

5. Leave some room in the schedule for spontaneous shifts in plan.  Make sure you do not over book your plan and allow time for reflection and being flexible to “stumble across unexpected adventures, ” according to Rick Bakas.  Lot of times these will be the most memorable.

If you are in the area March 4-8 feel free to shoot me a tweet @winetonite.  If you are interested in reviewing my resulting itinerary, please feel free to email me.  Cheers!

just some places we'll visit

I love Wine Wednesday on Twitter as it provides an opportunity to appreciate and promote our favorite wine lovers on our special social media day of the week making it more specific and exclusive from the more general, yet just as important and popular, Follow Friday.  One thing that we online wine lovers like to do is end emails, wrap up videos and respond to favorable tweets with the word “Cheers!”  No doubt, in your lifetime you have had occasion to witness or present a toast of some kind, whether it be at a wedding, a graduation party, or just an informal gathering with drinks.  There must always be drinks, preferably alcoholic, involved when there is a toast.  But, where did this term, Cheers, come from?  Well, it seems the exact origin and derivation is not precisely known, but here are a few tidbits that may help us understand this particular term of honor.

Cheers! is considered a rather informal toast as opposed to a loyal (to a leader or country) or formal toast (longer prose and dedication) and is of British origin most likely in the early 1900’s.  One may be able to derive or assume this a toast to be cheerful or happy and the word “cheer” has origins as far back as the 13th century where it referred to “the face” and was eventually extended further to mean mood and  demeanor as reflected in the face.  Could it also have come to mean that as drink (wine!) is consumed, eventually we will become of good cheer with blush face and cheer-ful demeanor?  Of course, due to our historical ties to the British, it is easy to see why Americans would use this particular toast the most.

Other informal toasts that are considered synonyms in many countries across the globe include Prost, Skol, Salute/Salud (possibly derivations of “Salus” who was the goddess of health and prosperity in Roman mythology), and Chin Chin among many others including many listed here at Tulleeho.com.

So, be of good cheer and demeanor and I wish you health and prosperity or in a word…. Cheers!

(C) selfmademinds.com

I really hate the start of a new year.  In addition to all the resolutions that most likely will never come to fruition and performance evaluations at work there is the fact there are not very many holidays to take advantage of after just finishing the holiday blitz of Thanksgiving, Christmas, and [enter your celebrated end-of-year holiday here].  Not only that, there is the careful planning of your measly accrual of always-inadequate number vacation days for the entire year that must be rationed carefully.  That is, of course, if you’re from Europe where many countries have about 6 months of vacation and holiday time… Lucky!

However, here we are already approaching March and finally ready to hit our first wine country trip (of 3 planned so far) of the year.  I am so giddy, I feel like Clark Griswald pulling into Wally World.  In the early days of my career, I was a workaholic, quickly climbing the corporate ladder thinking that’s what would make me happy and what a successful person should strive for.  Probably something I learned growing up in the Greedy Eighties.  Along the way, I would just collect and carry-over vacation days thinking I was showing what a dedicated, corporate-citizen I was.  Sure, there was some reward by way of promotion, but with that came only more responsibility and you guessed it, more stress.  As a result, mental and physical health often suffered as stress levels soared.  One of my first realvacations, was in Hawaii with my wife where we took 2 full weeks to island-hop with plenty of time to de-stress, enjoy each other and the peacefulness that only tropical islands can bring.  So, this was my lesson to learn to give time and focus to my well-being and longevity.

Don't we look relaxed here?

So, hopefully others can learn from my experience and revelations that vacations are necessary and important to your health.  Even if that means gulping gallons of wine as part of it (disclaimer: I am not a doctor and never played one on TV, though I did play quite a bit of Operation as a kid).  Seriously, time off is necessary no matter how busy you are or how much you think your business life will fail or come to halt in your absence.  Life will go on and you can get back to your emails later.

Oh, I haven’t told you where we are going?  We will be visiting Sonoma once again, with the following high-level (not written in stone) agenda starting March 4th.  This time, my wife and I are celebrating our 10 year anniversary with 2 other couples who are our closest friends who also married in the year 2000.  I like round numbers.  We hope to show our friends the best time they ever had in the Sonoma Wine Country.  If you happen to be in the area around the times we are, feel free to tweet me up (@winetonite) and we’ll raise a glass, but note that we will be staying mostly away from the wineries participating in the barrel tasting this weekend, not that there’s anything wrong with tasting from a barrel… as a matter of fact, it is phenomenal.

Thursday, March 4th- Arrive SFO, Sonoma square for lunch, Bart Park winery, GunBun, and maybe Salinia Winery/The NPA before we land in Healdsburg at the always classy Casa Privata

Friday, March 5th – Dry Creek & Alexander Valley – Everett Ridge, C. Donatiello, Quivira, Jordan Vineyards, Lancaster Estate, Wilson Winery

Saturday, March 6th – South RRV – Merry Edwards, Halleck & Halleck, still working on a few options this day…

Sunday, March 7th – North RRV - Arista,  Thomas George, Gary Ferrell, Montemaggiore

Stay tuned this week for more posts on some tips on how to put together a wine country itinerary…