California Adventure: Day 2

Remember how I said I love West Coast travel?  I do, except when it comes time to wake up on Day 2.  On the second day, I'm always up before dawn.  Chris and I are typically early birds, so back the clock up two hours and we could easily be up at 3 a.m.  We managed to sleep in until 4 a.m.  I like to enjoy a cup of coffee within minutes of rising.  I looked around and didn't see a coffee maker.  I've been down this road before: no in-room coffee maker, lobby coffee isn't set out yet, room service takes forever to bring coffee.  Dang fancy hotels.  Sometimes I just want a Courtyard Marriott with a mini-Keurig.  Was my thus-far perfect stay at the St. Regis about to be ruined over my inability to get coffee?  No, it was not.  We called for room service.  It arrived within minutes.  A large pot, two cups, and biscotti laid out beautifully on a tray.  Now we could relax and sip coffee until breakfast.  I opened the shades and watched the city come alive.  It can be easy to romanticize a city a like San Francisco, but at 4:30 a.m., I was watching a line of headlights cross the Golden Gate Bridge from Marin County.  It was the Tuesday after Labor Day.  San Francisco's work force was up and trying to beat traffic.  By 7 a.m. there would be gridlock.

Breakfast:  We dined at the St. Regis.  Hotel breakfasts are usually overpriced, so they aren't my first choice, especially in a city like San Francisco with so many amazing options, but Chris puts in enough time staying at Marriott properties throughout the year to earn platinum status.  For his loyalty,  he is rewarded with free breakfast.  We both ordered omelets.  Chris built his own and I had the truffle omelet.  It was delicious.  It was a legit truffle omelet.  I could taste and see the pieces of shaved truffle on my omelet.  It was not truffle-flavored or truffle-infused, or whatever most places do to make things try to taste like truffle.  It came with juice and more coffee, as well as toast.  I normally pass on toast, but I'm a sucker for fancy butter and little individual jars of jam.

Even after our leisurely breakfast, we still had more time to kill before our harvest tour at Wente Vineyards.  We decided to pick up lunch at one of the Italian delis in the North Beach neighborhood.  North Beach is San Francisco's "Little Italy."  It would be a little out of the way, but since we had the extra time, we scheduled an Uber to stop at Alimento before heading to OAK to pick up our rental car. 

Wente Vineyards:  This was, of course, the highlight of the entire today.  Wente is in Livermore, CA, which is not in Napa or Sonoma County.  It's in Alameda County with a second vineyard in Monterrey County.  We chose Wente because Livermore happened to be on the way to Yosemite and I enjoy their mass production chardonnay.  I'm so glad we did.  The harvest tour at Wente is by far the best wine tour I've ever been on.  We've been fortunate enough to taste and tour at some big name wineries in Napa, Sonoma, and Paso Robles.  None of those wineries have Darryl, our tour guide at Wente. 

We started with a sparkling wine in the tasting room.  It is sparkling wine, not champagne.  I'm sure I've heard this before.  Champagne is French and I know that France names their wines after the regions they are grown, not the varietal.  This does not stop me from referring to anything that goes pop as champagne.  No longer will I do this, thanks to Darryl.  We tasted a sparkling wine made with chardonnay grapes grown in Monterrey County, CA.

Darryl gave us a basic introduction to acid, sugar, and alcohol.  The upshot is that you can line up a few different wines and without looking at the label, you can gauge acidity, sugar, and alcohol content.  Take a sip of wine, let it pass over your gums, wait and see how long it takes to salivate.  The quicker you salivate, the more acidic the wine, which means it will have less sugar.  Less sugar equals less alcohol.  Whites tend to be more acidic than reds.  They have less sugar, and hence less alcohol.  I know that reds tend to have more alcohol than whites, which helped me keep it straight in my head.  We experimented with the concept on subsequent tastings.  Darryl had me convinced that I'm an expert at detecting acidity, sugar, and alcohol in wine without reading the label.

We then stepped outside for another tasting and a brief history of Wente Vineyards.  Wente is the oldest continuously running family-owned winery in the country.  It was founded 135 years ago and is currently operated by the 4th and 5th generation Wentes.  We were then on to the grapes.  Here is where you see firsthand why some wine costs $10 a bottle and some cost $100 a bottle.  It starts before the vines are even planted.  I won't even get into all of that because I don't fully understand it.  I know zero percent about breeding plants and grafting.  It sounds expensive and complicated.  But let me back up.  Before you can even plant a vine, you need to find the right soil and the right climate.  Good wine grapes will grow in areas with a high diurnal temperature range.  You want a big difference between the daytime high and the overnight low in a given day.  You also cannot have a climate that is generally too hot or too cold.  There are wineries in every single state, but it's probably a good idea to look at a climate map and it will tell you where the best wine grapes are grown. 

Okay, so we're standing in the middle of vineyard, having gotten our climate lesson and a bullet point presentation on how the vines come to be, not just the selection of the seed and all the grafting and what not, but how a vine has to be cared for before it even produces fruit.  Grape vines will grow like a big bush if they are left to grow wildly.  Everyone has seen neat rows of grape vines.  They are not unkempt bushes.  That all happens by hand.  A vine must be pruned and trained to grow like this and it can be years before the vine produces its first fruit.

Now let's talk about the grapes.  This is where you really start to get a handle on the manpower that goes into a good bottle of wine.  While harvesting is now done mechanically, the pruning is done by hand.  As soon as the young clusters appear in the late spring and early summer, human beings have to walk the rows and trim the leaves so that each cluster gets the same amount of sunlight.  A good winemaker wants the grapes to ripen evenly so they have the same taste and sugar content.  Clusters covered by leaves will ripen more slowly than ones exposed to the sun.  Wente makes mass production wines that you can find on your supermarket shelf for $12-20.  We were standing in a section of vines used to produce their small lot wines, which run between $30-150.  These vines were very neat trimmed.

We also learned how to measure Brix, which is the sugar content of the grape.  During harvest season, workers descend on the vineyard, pick grapes from each section and measure the Brix with a refractometer.  We got to try for ourselves.  The grapes weren't ready for picking yet.  The winemaker knows exactly what he or she is looking for.  As you get closer and closer to harvest time, it's done more frequently.  Wineries that produce top shelf wines do this daily the closer they get to harvest for exact precision. 

It gets even more complicated.  We were allowed to sample grapes from different sections of the vineyard and lo and behold, they tasted different.  This was by design.  Basically, Wente is breeding grapes to taste a certain way.  I'm not sure if this is the right terminology, but in essence, this is what's going on. Mind blown.     

Chris sampling grapes

After leaving the vines, we walked over to the fermentation tanks.  I'm not going to lie, I don't recall a lot of what was discussed here.  I had a lot of information in my head and Darryl was pouring up some pretty heavy pours of some good stuff.  Then we went inside to discuss barrels and aging.  This gets complicated, too.  French versus American oak and a million varieties in between.  Different kinds of barrels are going to give your wine a different taste.  Top shelf wines only use the barrel once.  Also, I didn't realize this, but you have to keep adding wine to the wine barrel during the aging process.  I guess I thought you fill the barrel, stick a cork in it, and wait for it to age.  Not so.  Air leaks into oak barrels.  Too much oxygen causes wine to oxidize.  Basically, it can turn into vinegar.  You cannot undo this process.  Think of the pressure on the team responsible for making sure this doesn't happen?  To solve this, they have to top off each barrel periodically.  You don't want to mess that up either.  Can you imagine using using merlot to top off a barrel of pinot noir?  The horror!

Our final stop on the tour

After over two hours of what was supposed to be a ninety-minute tour, our time had come to end.  We thoroughly enjoyed ourselves.  It was a great group that was genuinely interested in learning about the wine-making process.  After spending our children's inheritance on a case of wine, Wente rewarded us with two heavy pours of chardonnay.  We took them outside to enjoy with our deli sandwiches.  We had the whole place to ourselves and nothing to do and no where to be.  We relaxed, sipped wine, enjoyed the beautiful setting, and basked in the California sunshine. 

Our next stop:  Groveland, CA for a one-night stay.  Groveland (at least the part for tourists) is a one-street town with a couple of hotels, coffee shops, and restaurants.  We stayed at the Hotel Charlotte.  What a charming little hotel.  It's not the St. Regis, but I loved it all the same.  Originally opened in 1921, the Hotel Charlotte is listed in the National Register of Historic Places as a Gold Rush Era hotel.  Our room was quaint, the bed was comfortable, and I loved the claw foot tub in the bathroom.  There are no key cards to get into your room at this hotel; you get issued a real key.  There are signs in the bathroom asking you to forgive their old plumbing and instructing you on how to make sure you can get a hot shower (turn the hot water on, wait for it to heat up, then feed in the cold).  I forgive them for not having modern plumbing because places like this are special and I love that they exist.

Exterior of the Hotel Charlotte

Lobby of the Hotel Charlotte

Lobby of the Hotel Charlotte

Room at the Hotel Charlotte

Bathroom at the Hotel Charlotte

After check-in, we headed across the street to enjoy a drink at the Iron Door Salon.  Classic rock was playing on the juke box, dollars and license plates adorned the ceiling and walls.  It's that kind of place.  I instantly liked it.  Most importantly, it had a small selection of California beers on tap.  I enjoyed a pint (or two) of 805.   

Journey on the juke box was telling us to stay, but our stomachs were telling us that it was gettin' to be dinner time.  What's good for drinkin' ain't always good for eatin', so we closed out our tab at the Iron Door and walked a few doors down to Provisions, the bistro at the Hotel Charlotte's sister hotel, the Groveland Hotel.  Here, we had a light dinner and more beer in a quiet outdoor setting.  It was the perfect end to another perfect day.  

Amanda is the owner of Travel Adventures by Amanda, powered by Dream Vacations, specializing in cruises, tours, treks, and custom independent travel adventures for individuals, families, and groups.  For help planning your next adventure, contact Amanda at (901) 901-800-6091 or abiggerstaff@dreamvacations.com.