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