Napa/Sonoma Day 1: We're going back to Cali, back to Cali

We didn’t intend to come to Napa this year. Originally this was supposed to be a trip to Peru, but in the Fall. But through a series of negotiations during our annual New Year’s Eve planning meeting, we agreed that a spring trip to the Valley with the trip to Peru coming next year was a better idea. We’ve really go to start taking better notes at that meeting.

Anywho, today’s entry is short because it’s a travel day. Directly flight from CVG to SFO at the butt-crack of dawn. Our Lyft driver was super chatty and we had an interesting conversation about his work in the car repo business. I was reminded that I hate flying on the weekends, especially when the Orlando flight is leaving out of the same little gate area…Amateur day galore!

After an uneventful flight, we arrived at SFO. We ended up on the train with a group from Cincinnati on their first trip to San Fran. We helped them find the rental car building (Pro tip: Get on the train. Stay on the train.) I once again rented from SilverCar and while their off-site location adds a bit of delay to the process, I think the total time spent is actually less. The hassle and aggro factor is definitely less! I texted them while we were still on the train, the van picked us up for a two minute ride to the lot, the confirmed my driver’s license (It had expired since I last rented from them,) I scanned our car, loaded our bags and we were gone. Note to AudiUSA – Since you own SilverCar, figure out a way that A4 owners can port their seat, radio, and car config settings between vehicles. It was nice to not have to figure out a new car when we arrived, but it would have been AMAZING to have my seat exactly where I like it and the radio tuned to my favorite XM channel when we rolled down the road.

We took the Golden Gate up to Sonoma and on a while decided to stop at Ram’s Gate. We had passed this winery many times on our way in and out of Sonoma but I didn’t really know anything about it. They have a fantastic ‘board’ with a selection of 3 local cheeses, a couple of bread/toasts, 2 meats (we had chicken liver pate and a smoked trout dip of sorts,) a dried fruit (in our case apricot mustardo that was devine!) and a couple of sweet bites (candied almonds and an amazing salted chocolate toffee.) This was our lunch and I would totally stop there for this again. The wines were less than memorable, although the Blanc du Noirs they splashed us with (which is technically a ‘members only’ pour) was the best thing we tasted. They do two tasting menus that are nearly identical; the vineyard select has two additional pours and subs out their base pinot for a single vineyard. Fairly small production w/~13000 cases.

We wanted to stop by our usual ‘first stop’ in the valley, Domaine Carneros. Apparently they are everyone else’s favorite first stop as well though because they were not only slammed, they were reservation only! Do they not know who we are!?! As we trudged back to the car, I was actually secretly relieved though because the lack of sleep from a late night/early start and travel hit me like a ton of bricks. So, up to Windsor we headed to check into the hotel.

After checking into our weird timeshare/resort/condo/hotel community thing, we crashed out for an hour. We then go cleaned up and headed into Sebastopol for, what else, ramen! We hit up a place called Ramen Gaijin. Holy crow! This place had the best Japanese food we’ve had since we left Japan. We started with grilled chicken thighs and a grilled rabbit sausage. The thighs were good and the sausage was amazing! We ended up ordering another round of rabbit and a slab of pork belly, which was also fantastic (Tip: put some of the super hot mustard from the rabbit sausage on the pork belly. We also had the smoked potatoes pictured below.

 While tasty, they were missing the smoke flavor implied by the name. For the main event, we had two different types of ramen. Kris went non-traditional with a Chinese influenced dan-dan ramen, while I had a more traditional version topped with a chicken roulade. 

Both had that unctuous depth of flavor of a true ramen, but if I’m honest, Kris’ was better because the spicy notes really punctuated the broth to make something special.

Full and happy, we wandered back to the hotel to crash and hopefully get a full night’s sleep for tomorrow’s adventures. Fingers crossed that there’s no 3am wakeup call due to time zone confusion!