The Insiders' Guide to St. Barths: Wanderings with wife in wineland (1)

Our California wine country adventure began inauspiciously. After checking in to our San Francisco hotel, we went to visit my wife’s niece and her husband who live in a loft on Haight St. They recommended we eat at Kati café in Japantown. We ordered a bottle of wine and dinner and had a nice long conversation about life in San Francisco, the relative merits of various wines, travel and other topics. Although we received the wine and some beers and eventually some bread, we realized that two hours had passed and no appetizers appeared. Our waiter eventually brought out one of the starters, a salad of large Romaine leaves, which we all hungrily consumed. Since we wanted to make it an early night, and, looking around the restaurant, noticed no one else was eating nor was likely to eat until the wee hours, we eventually decided to cut our losses after the second starter of tuna tartare appeared an hour later. Sharing this again, we bid farewell to our apologetic waiter and the other hungry patrons, and left while others looked at us enviously, locked into their unexpectedly extended Friday night dinner plans. We tumbled into bed at midnight for a jet-lagged sleep before our travels began.

After a breakfast in the fog-shrouded Marina district, we crossed the Golden Gate Bridge for the ride past Marin and Sonoma into the sunny Anderson Valley of Mendocino County. Passing Boonville, we noticed the elegant-looking Goldeneye winery on the left and pulled in. Not having heard of them previously, we discovered they make only Pinot Noirs and are part of the larger Duckhorn enterprise of Napa. Although we didn’t know it then, this was the most pleasant (and relatively private) tasting experience of our trip. They had a three wine, seated tasting served on their beautiful back patio, overlooking their vineyard and hills and accompanied by nuts, fruits and cheese to pair with their wine tastes.

After a pleasant half-hour or so, sampling two of their Migration label Pinots, our eyes were opened by the velvety, aromatic, wonderfully flavorful signature Goldeneye label Pinot. At $52, this was much more than we had ever spent for a Pinot, but this was vacation after all, so we went for it. This wine became the benchmark to which we would compare all Pinots we would subsequently sample. We usually select wines under $40 and mostly under $20 in Virginia wine stores. But we had now tasted the forbidden fruit from the tree of wine knowledge and our education, if not our economic downfall, had begun in earnest.

Our next stop was the Navarro winery, which was a much different experience. Typical of what would become our future tastings, we bellied up to the bar along with many others for a diverse tasting experience encompassing many varietals and quality ranges. After realizing the relative inferiority of their Pinots, we selected a pleasant, sweeter-style Muscat for purchase.

Next we stopped at Roederer Estate, known for their widely-distributed Anderson Valley Brut, and owned by the famous French Champagne producer which also produces Cristal, the choice of the bling crowd. Here we discovered that the bubbly tastes differently when bottled in magnum sizes versus the usual 750 ml bottle. This is due to the ratio of wine to air and the resulting difference in oxidation. We also noticed that our vintage Brut sample had a sour taste which our server agreed was due to a bad bottle. He opened a new bottle which was much better. So, it seems that there is some risk involved in wine selection due to variations from one bottle to the next. We selected a pleasant Extra Dry bottle for purchase and continued on. After the sunny, pastoral vineyards, route 128 enters an impressive, tall, dark, redwood forest before emerging onto the Mendocino coast and route 1.

Resisting the temptation to stop at every overlook, after a short drive, we pulled into the driveway for the Stevenswood Lodge where we thought we had a suite for the next three days. The elegantly mustachioed Nelson, however, could not find our reservation although we produced a copy of the email conversation showing a fully prepaid stay. This being a summer Saturday, there was no room at the inn and Nelson proceeded expertly with damage control. He gave us some drinks and started calling around to other properties for equivalently luxurious digs for the night. ‘Hi, this is Nelson at the Stevenswood. I have some VIPs who need a room ….’ I liked that we were called VIPs but I strongly suspect this is hotel lingo for ‘we messed up the reservation for these folks so can you help us out?’ Maybe Victimized by Incompetence People?

Anyway, after some of the other properties proved also to be full, he secured a beautiful room for us at the Stanford Inn with a balcony overlooking the gardens and sea and having a wood-burning fireplace. He also gave them a credit card to charge for the room – nice, but also necessary. The woodsy Stanford is unique and more so than is implied by their affiliation with Unique Inns.

They have edible organic gardens on property, a vegetarian restaurant, books on dowsing, yoga classes, horses and llamas, and a bike shop and canoe rental facility on the Big River which runs to the sea, the cliffs and the beach at the adorable artist colony of Mendocino.

We wandered around the boutiques and galleries and selected the Café Beaujolais for dinner that night. Fortuitously, this was near an incredible hand-made ice cream shop, which we made a habit of visiting each afternoon. The Café provided the first of many memorable dinners on this trip. I had a wonderful sturgeon in sauce and my wife had a delicious duck and we went to bed on 600 thread-count sheets and enveloped in a warm blanket of gustatory satisfaction, happiness and love. After some bumps, our ‘slow down and smell the roses’ tour had begun.