Back to the mountains and drinking with gods

Today we headed back to Spring Mountain. Which, by the way, is a fantastic drive! Especially if you’ve got a decently zippy car as a rental. You do want to take it easy in the afternoons though as traffic picks up a bit on this road (And people are…less sober.) Anyway, we started this morning at Keenan. I was really surprised by this tasting as it was very informal. We walked into their standing bar and tasted 7 wines. I really liked the fact that you were able to split a tasting, since they had so much open! Nice little joint and a great informal mountain tasting.

We headed further up the mountain to Paloma. We actually stopped in here yesterday to ask for directions when I got a bit lost. The original owner/winemaker’s son is now the owner/winemaker here. He’s a bit of a cowboy in the best sense. The tasting takes place in the family’s home on the property. Sheldon is a pretty straightforward guy and runs a no nonsense tasting. I like that he gives you space to taste the wine w/o telling you what you’re going to ‘experience’ in the wine. He’s doing mostly merlots that are all very different and lovely. The man is a wealth of knowledge about the mountain; He threw out a host of suggestions and of the places we had been on that list, we loved all of them.

Our next stop was only a mile as the crow flies, but took more than 20 minutes to get to due to mountain ridges. Kris discovered that he can get car sick and that 2 trips up and down Spring Mountain in one morning are 1 trip too many. Since we were a bit early for our appointment at Stony Hill, we ran into Calistoga for some crackers to settle his stomach. Stony Hill is in the middle of a state park and you wind your way up a one-lane driveway. Stony Hill is known for their whites, although they’ve started making a Cab, presumably for all of the people who show up and go ‘what do you mean you don’t do any reds?’ Their Gewürzt is delicious and the Riesling is fairly crisp. The house and property are amazing and offered a beautiful view across the valley.

We completely shifted gears after this stop and headed up to Calistoga to Laura Michaels. This is a tiny little winery doing a variety of reds from across Sonoma and northern Napa. A cute little tasting room and the gentleman who led our tasting provided a wealth of history about the winemaking in the valley.

We headed to Farmstead tonight for dinner because they were doing lamb. Yum! I had an amazing lamb gnocchi and Kris had a lamb burger. Ultimately, we should have split an entrée here because the portions are HUUUUUGE. Don’t miss the chocolate pie for dessert! After dinner we headed over to Goose and Gander (as suggested to us Alex from Stony Hill,) for a night cap. They have a basement bar and are doing really interesting cocktails. As is fitting for California, Kris ended the night with the guy below!