Wine-Tasting in Napa is not a Serious Issue

We visited my cousin, Yezmin, in San Francisco. While we stayed with her, we all decided to take a trip to Napa and do some wine-tasting in Napa Valley. It’s only about 3 1/2 hours from where my cousin lived and we all remember having a great time a few years back, when Yezmin came to visit us in France, and we all went wine-tasting back then. It was my husbands birthday, so we celebrated it with a full day of wineries; it was unforgettable, especially when Yezmin and this stranger totally hit it off.

But, this wine-tasting experience was very different. The road took us along Northern California’s rugged coastline, taking us past craggy clifftops, lonely lagoons and exclusive beaches. We turned East (inland), which took us through very lush valleys full of grapevines and olive trees that were in stark contrast of the bright blue sky. We felt like we were in paradise. We knew there would be no way to do all the wine-tasting in one day, so Yezmin pulled up the Internet on her Iphone and found us a nice place to stay and booked a room for the three of us in the town of Napa.

After we found the hotel and checked in, which was great by-the-way! I mean, just how easy it was for us to book a room from a phone; today’s technology is astonishing! We immediately went out to start our wine-tasting fest. Our first stop served a tasty antipasto and a cheese platter with the wine we tasted. We already knew how to taste wine, but the couple next to us didn’t, so the tour guide explained to them about how to raise the glass to the light to test the wines clarity, then shove their noses deep into the glass to smell the aromas, then swirl it around and finally taste the wine for flavor, sweetness, ripeness and bite. But, what I really appreciated from this tour guide was she told us how to come up with some really exotic words for our taste experience. She let us create several comments, like ‘this wine has a pizazz of infused oak flavour’, or ‘Succulent, yet not overstimulating’! We all had so much fun making up random sounding names .

We visited about 7 wineries during our two days in Napa, but we all agreed, that first winery was the best, because they let us know how to have fun with wine-tasting instead of acting all pompous.

Related posts:

1. Old Annapolis
2. Fabulous Farmers Markets in Frankfurt
3. Touring the Island of Phuket
4. A New York Family Tradition
5. M Cafe in Los Angels