Geeking on the data to plan a trip

Data Geeking and an old friend

First stop today was at Flying Goats in Healdsburg. Great little coffee shop with pretty decent pastries. Downtown Healdsburg is super cute, especially in the morning when there aren’t as many people here. After our coffee, we made the long trek down the to the bottom of Sonoma and over to Napa for our first stop of the day.

For this trip, we got a little data happy. It turns out that the counties of Napa and Sonoma have databases of all (well, most) of their wineries and they capture things like annual production and annual visitors. So, Kris and I got a little nuts and started scraping and organizing said data into spreadsheet that allowed us to slice and dice on things like annual production and number of visitors. We’ve found that we usually like places with small to medium production and not a ton of annual visitors.

It’s from this list that we found our first stop of the day, Tulocay. Tulocay is run by Bill Cadman and his daughter Brie recently started stepping up as the winemaker. Bill doesn’t grow much if any of the grapes he uses on-site. Instead, he buys from various vineyards in the area. The tasting takes place in Bill’s dining room. Bill can spin a pretty good yarn while he’s pouring his wines. The hit of the day was his non-vintage Syrah. Very tasty!

From there we headed to visit an old favorite, James Cole Winery. We stumbled upon James Cole a bunch of years ago and revisit them from time to time. They have a very rock n roll feel and make some mighty fine wine. We slotted them in on this trip because they were doing an Alice in Wonderland party, complete with taco trucks and a magician. They switched wine makers a few years back and we didn’t love the direction that they were headed. This trip, however, everything was delicious. All in all, the new winemaker is settling in and the wines are steadily evolving.

After escaping the clutches of the magician, we headed north again to catch a tasting room in Healdsburg that had closed just as we had gotten there yesterday. Rockpile Vineyards had just opened 3 month prior. They are sourcing exclusively from the Rockpile area and are doing some really interesting stuff. We ended up with two of their Zinfandels before we had to duck out to get to our dinner reservations.

We managed to score early seats at Valette. This ambitious joint is doing some very pretty and very ambitious food. The bread is made in house and reminded me of a cross between a Parker house roll and biscuit. We ended up ‘Trusting the chef’ and had a 4 course meal. The food was very French in that sauces were the star of many of the best dishes. All in all good, but I’m not certain I’d go back. Too many other, wonderful places to go here!