One of my favorite memories wine tasting in Napa is at Delectus winery. Not only is it AMAZING wine, but they have the most excellent table I have ever seen. It is eight bins covered with glass and in each of the bins, they have soil samples from the eight vineyards that they source from. We went to this tasting probably five years ago and I still talk about that table. The difference in the soils is eye opening. Some are sandy, some are rocky, some are clay and none are nice fertile soil with a lot of organic matter.
I am continually amazed that grapes don’t like the cushy life. At least, grapes that make good wine don’t like to be pampered! They like to struggle and be challenged. No irrigation, rocky soil, and the side of a hill make for some of the best wine.
Well, Napa has nothing on the soil in the Rhone region. Check out this vineyard from Chateau Beaucastel:

Those are rocks as big as my fist!

Even though the day was rainy and cold, it was still a gorgeous place.

We were in the Rhone for a friend’s 40th birthday party. He’s checking out the size of this barrel to see if it would fit in his house at home. Funny, I’m pretty sure I have another picture like this from when we all went to Scotland. That time, it was a copper distilling pot. I wonder if he even got that one through security…

Big deal, it’s a bunch of barrels you say. Just for perspective, each of those barrel holds 6000 liters of wine. (A regular sized barrel holds about 225 liters of wine, just for comparison.)

We definitely enjoy the results of all of that barrel aging! Of course it is pretty difficult to enjoy any wine at 10:30 in the morning… But after a great tour at Beaucastel it was on to another tasting at Domaine de la Solitude.
No pictures there. It was almost like tasting in a guys living room. Good wines and an excellent dessert wine that we bought one bottle of.
After that it was lunch in Chateauneuf du Pape and then another tasting at Clos Saint Jean. If Solitude was like tasting in someone’s living room, Clos Saint Jean was like tasting in a friend’s garage. This was the find of the trip. If you can find these wine, I can highly recommend them. The 2007 vintage was most excellent and even though we tried to buy some, the bottles had all been allocated.
We thought the Italian system for wine production was confusing but I think the French system trumps it any time. It could have been the language barrier, but not totally. Wineries are limited to 35 hectoliters of wine per hectare, which corresponds to about 2.6 tons of grapes per acre, a pretty low yield. Most of the places we visited said that they didn’t usually get that much, usually more like 25-27 hectoliters. Then, once the wine is produced, they have to get rid of 5% of the wine, I guess to keep the quality up. One produce said they give it to the workers, which wouldn’t be a bad benefit!

The mold on the cellar ceiling at Clos Saint Jean scared me just a little bit.
One of the main purposed of the trip was to have dinner at a three star Michelin restaurant; our friend is kind of a foodie. We went to Maison Pic in Valence. Excellent food, wonderful atmosphere, but what did I take a photo of? The cheese cart:

A hundred choices of stinky cheese! Even the mild cheeses were too strong for Husband. I ended up cleaning his plate in addition to mine. It was a great time and there were lots of laughs and embarrassing photos that wouldn’t make any sense here. But of course I’m going to post one:

Just what he always wanted, a candy “posing pouch.” Most of us voted on the beret but I guess that was just too hard to find in France.