Pictures from CA

Photos from our latest wine tasting adventure!

Well part one. I need some fodder for tomorrow. These are photos from the Melville Harvest BBQ. Too much fun and lots of wine!

It was an amazing day:

Cold, but beautiful.

How could someone leave a wine glass unattended?!?

Once again, Claire was the smart one. She brought her gloves!

Cover of Wine Spectator anyone?

Action shots at dinner:

Waiting our turn for food.

Can you see the purple teeth? How about the grey hair?

Get that damn camera out of my face!

Husband just about thought he died and went to heaven.

Are you still there?

Still there? Still wanting more photos? You are just insatiable aren’t you?

Good thing that I like to take pictures. Here ya go:

One of the places that we wanted to taste at was Clos des Papes. Remember that whole street sign thing in France? We wandered up and down one street of Chateauneuf-du-Pape for about 10 minutes looking for the winery. We knew the address, but weren’t sure exactly where, because there are no street signs or numbers anywhere. Imagine our chagrin when we saw this:

This was the first place that we tasted at that we didn’t have an appointment. It was supposed to be an open tasting room. Well, when we walked up, there were no signs (see the previous post. Apparently the French’s aversion extends from street signs to signs saying “Enter here for wine tasting.”) We kind of wandered around for a little bit before getting our courage up to actually ring the bell.

It was the first California winery experience we had in France, and it wasn’t nearly as fun as the other places we visited, but how can you go wrong with scenery like this:

We also headed up to Gigondas, and didn’t get lost! (Thanks GPS.) They had a tasting room where you could sample wine from all of the wineries in the area, FOR FREE!! Too bad husband didn’t feel good. I didn’t feel comfortable asking for so many tastes, so we didn’t stay long.

It was pretty and gorgeous countryside, but what caught our attention was a cave in the town!

Next to a building that has the coolest balcony I’ve ever seen. Husband had his camera, I had mine and when you compare the pictures, it is pretty funny. This is the only one with both. His have lots of close ups of the cave and mine have the balcony. I could just imagine Romeo and Juliet being staged from that balcony!

After that, we were pretty much done in the south of France. I highly recommend it! Very laid back and great wine. Avignon is a good central location and lots of people speak English if that is your thing.

We headed back to Paris for the night. It was supposed to be for the afternoon, but the train was detoured for 2 hours. We WALKED from the train station to our hotel so I was pretty glad we didn’t end up bringing home a case of wine. That would have sucked.

We wanted a little time to poke around Paris, but had to make do with a photo of me with the Eiffel Tower in the background:

The next day we flew home and like the wine obsessed people we are, we headed to our favorite restaurant for a wine dinner as soon as we got back. That’s right folks. We didn’t go home. We didn’t shower. We got in the car and drove to a restaurant for more wine.

We look pretty good for being up 20 hours don’t we?

Our friends saw the camera come out and they wanted a picture too:

It’s a pretty good one if I do say so myself!

So that was France. Maybe if you ask nicely, I’ll show you the “project” that I knitted on the plane on the way home. You might want to cover the eyes of any children that might be watching; it’s pretty hideous.

It could be worse…

It could be a slide show that I am forcing you to watch after dinner. You are free to turn off the computer at any point. But seeings as you are still here, sit back and enjoy some more photos (long overdue!!) from France.

I love the history and the beautiful buildings! You just don’t see that in the downtown areas in the states.

This is a church next to where we ate dinner. I don’t know the name of the church at all. I just though it was so beautiful with the amazing blue of the sky.

Next door to the church were some private residences.

I love how they modernized the windows, but made it fit within the style of the square. When it got darker, you could see that they had Christmas strung up in the windows. I loved it!

Most restaurants are closed on Sundays in Avignon. Husband had a very attentive “waiter”.

On Monday, we were on our own. The rest of the birthday revelers had gone home; they couldn’t handle the madness that is wine tasting with Husband. We rented a car:

We didn’t request the sweet Benz, but it was the only one that came with the most amazing invention known to travelers in a foreign land that are crazy enough to drive:

A GPS (you can see it over on the right hand side). Seriously people, Europeans don’t believe in road signs the way that Americans do. I don’t think I saw a single street name at a crossroads. Addresses are pretty much useless if you don’t already know the area. If you have a great map, you can generally get around without many issues. But without a good map or a GPS, you might as well enjoy driving around in circles.

One of the best things about having your own car is that you can yell at the driver to stop at any point. I make Husband stop on the side of the road for some of the strangest pictures. On this trip, it was dirt. I’m going to leave you with a couple more pictures of soil:

This is just outside of Gigondas, northeast of Avignon.

This is about 1 mile away from the above picture.

And if you remember, this is what the ground looks like in Chateauneuf-du-Pape, about 30 minutes away:

Call me a wine geek, but I just can’t get over the difference in the terroir and the impact that it has on the wine!

The importance of being rocky

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.

Ooh la la!

I love my job. Lots of reasons, but right now it is because I get the chance to travel. We’re in France right now and it is wonderful. The trip doesn’t have anything to do with work, but purely vacation. I am very lucky that I didn’t have to ask for time off, but could schedule it with good certainty that graduation would happen the day before Mother’s Day.

Ostensibly we are here for a friend’s fortieth birthday but Husband and I keep telling ourselves and everyone else that it is also for our fifth wedding anniversary. If we tell people it’s just for a birthday party, we get some pretty odd looks but if it is for an anniversary, then it is more OK. More understandable I guess.

We flew into Paris, but aren’t spending any time there. Someone asked if we were going to visit the Louvre, but honestly I am still pretty full of art from Italy. Plus I don’t want to tempt fate and catch a glimpse of another Annunciation of Mary. Husband gets pretty upset when I start yelling and ranting in public places. Instead, we headed down to Avignon in the Rhone area. It’s not a real vacation unless there is some wine tasting involved. We didn’t let small things like jetlag or a three hour train ride distract us from our mission:

This is only about half of the group that met for the festivities. The birthday boy in in black on the right.

Husband showing off the first bottle of Rhone wine that we shared. Don’t worry, he hasn’t grown out of control, it’s only a half bottle.

I’m still getting used to the new Nikon. I have been trying not to use the flash so much indoors because it throws weird shadows and flattens out the picture but the photos without a flash have a pretty strong orange tint if people aren’t in direct sunlight. Plus, I think the viewer on the camera gives a false sense of brightness to the photo. When I look at the photos on the screen, they look OK, but when I upload them to the computer, they are much darker. I was hoping that I would be over this learning curve before we came to Avignon and all of my photos would be wonderful, but it’s not the case. I have some really nice ones, but I also have some stinkers!

More coming soon. We’re off to dinner!