napa, day 3
223/365 taste the rainbow
Originally uploaded by embem30Oh look, it's October and I still haven't finished posting about our anniversary trip that happened almost two months ago... The in-laws have been here, and work has started up again, so I've been a little busy. But that's another entry (or two).
Where was I? Napa, day three. Tuesday, I believe. Good thing I have pictures to remind me what we did.
Tuesday, unlike Monday, did not have any set schedule for wine tastings. As a result, we were able to take our time with breakfast. We still got up relatively early, partly because we went to bed early. I've realized that I go to bed earlier while on vacation when I'm sharing a laptop with Steve and don't have a DVR to keep TV interesting.
Anyway, we decided that the hotel breakfast was old hat and walked to Bouchon Bakery for breakfast that morning. Why eat at the inn when you can go to a Thomas Keller establishment? We had been inside briefly two years ago when we ate at The French Laundry, but we didn't buy anything for fear of spoiling dinner. This time, Steve got coffee, and we shared a chocolate eclair and a citron tart. The tart was very good, but pretty intensely lemony. The eclair was ever so slightly disappointing, just because Steve and I prefer them with vanilla custard or pastry cream in them. This one had a chocolate cream inside. Good, but not as good as it could have been.
After breakfast, we walked back to the hotel and got in the car. We decided to drive up the St. Helena Highway this time, more or less parallel to the Silverado Trail, which we took the day before. There are wineries up and down the highway between Yountville on the south end and Calistoga at the north. We drove all the way up to Calistoga to start (about a 40 minute drive) and then made our way back over the course of the day.
The first stop was Chateau Montelena. Besides the wine, the main draws were the Chinese garden on the grounds and the chateau itself. When we got there, however, we found out that the garden was closed for renovation, so there wasn't much to see besides the chateau and a little bit of landscaping outside the visitor center.
Pretty, but not as exciting. The wine turned out to be good, but apparently it's available in a few places that are accessible to us. No reason to purchase it there if we can find it at BevMo.
After that, we drove back to Calistoga to find some lunch. We had spoiled our dinner the previous two days by eating too late, so we made a conscious effort to eat lunch at the right hour this time. We ended up at a Mexican restaurant on the main street of Calistoga. I didn't bother taking pictures, but it was decent.
Back on the highway, we stopped at Markham Vineyards, which was also on my list of places to visit. They had koi ponds out front, as well as an exhibit of rock music photography inside. The exhibit was pretty cool--a lot of Rolling Stone covers from the '60s--and we spent a little while walking around and looking at it before we went to the bar to taste the wine.
There were a few choices for tastings, so we asked the pourer which one was her favorite. She suggested one, which we shared, and then she threw in a free extra taste of her favorite wine, which had been part of a different tasting. We didn't buy anything, but we got some recommendations from her for other places to visit.
Heading south again towards St. Helena, we stopped at Dean & Deluca next. It's the same ownership as the NY chain, since the owners live in the area now. A pretty sizable market, it was fun to look around and see what they carried. If we hadn't already had lunch, it would have been a good place to get supplies for a picnic--salami, cheese, bread, etc. That had been my original plan, but it was smart of us not to wait until we made it back to that area to eat.
The next stop was a short one, and I didn't post any picturese from it. We went to Milat, one of the places recommended by the person at Markham. It was a tiny winery, which was different from the ones we had visited before. I thought their wine was decent, but Steve wasn't all that impressed. I think he was getting red wined-out, and the port that we tried from them wasn't his style.
We continued on, back to Yountville, and went to one last winery: Domaine Chandon. They specialize in sparkling wine, which sounded good at that point. When we got to their tasting area, we saw that they were also serving oysters with their sparkling wine. So we ordered two tastings to try (7 wines total) and a half dozen oysters. The oysters turned out to be Marin Miyagis, which we've had and liked before, so it was a good choice. The sparkling wine tastings themselves were good, but it proved to be a lot of wine. I was feeling tipsy by the end. We also got to keep our Domaine Chandon flutes as souvenirs, included in the price of the tastings. That was a bit of a turn-off for me. (Cheesy much?) However, we decided to take them anyway. We had four nice champagne flutes at home, and we occasionally have more than four people drinking champagne. It couldn't hurt to have two extra on hand, even if they do have a logo on them.
Aside from the obvious cheesy touristy thing with the glasses, I had mixed feelings about this place. The tasting room was relatively nice, with a large sliding door that opened behind the bar to let in natural light and fresh air. However, our service wasn't great. We kept getting passed off to different pourers, which was a little obnoxious. Then again, the oysters were really good, and the bubbly was decent. Given the choice, though, I prefer Gloria Ferrer's sparkling wine.
One of the main reasons I wanted to visit Domaine Chandon, however, was their grounds. I had seen pictures online, and it looked really pretty. I don't think it quite lived up to those pictures, maybe because the light was difficult to photograph in. (Spotty shade=too much weird contrast in pictures.) They had a cool little forest of stone mushrooms, though, and we saw a red dragonfly by the water, so I found some things to keep me busy.
After that, we were quite ready to get back to our hotel room. I was happy to just chill on the bed, zone out to some Food Network, and let the alcohol wear off a bit before it was time to change clothes and go to dinner.
Our reservations for Tuesday night were at Bouchon, next to the bakery. We were seated against inside, against the back wall. It was next to the door to the kitchen, so it wasn't the most subdued spot, but I was taking some pictures anyway. It's not the most subdued activity for a restaurant, but French bistros aren't necessarily supposed to be very subdued anyway.
Despite our efforts throughout the day not to spoil dinner, we still weren't terribly hungry. Nevertheless, we ordered three dishes to share, as well as dessert. There was the French onion soup that Steve wanted to try. It wasn't my favorite thing; I prefered the macaroni gratin (baked mac & cheese) that we also ordered.
For a main dish, we got the leg of lamb with potatoes and Swiss chard. Then, we ordered the profiteroles for dessert: cream puffs (without the cream) with ice cream and chocolate sauce. We probably should have gotten the chocolate mint thing that was a special that day, after seeing it go to another table. It was really pretty. The profiteroles were good too, though.
After dinner, we decided to walk down to The French Laundry garden again. The night before, I hadn't had much time to inspect the garden itself and take pictures of it before it got too dark. I had been too busy adjusting the tripod and taking pictures of the restaurant.
On the way, we stopped at a little park to see if there were pictures to be taken there too. Indeed, there were--big surprise. There was a fountain and several roses, so I got some good stuff while Steve chatted with a couple from Texas.
Meanwhile, I was also experimenting with backlight and lens flare, since it was the right time of day for it. The first picture is from that little park. The second is from the FL garden. It's harder to get light like that in the city, maybe because the sun is behind the buildings by the time it gets that low in the sky.
While we were at the garden, we looked around at the various plants, trying to identify some of them without looking at the labels. There were a lot of tomatoes, both inside and outside the greenhouse. Here are the ones inside the greenhouse:
My other favorite shots were the baby rainbow chard (picture at the beginning of this post), asparagus berries that looked rather Christmasy, and some young English cucumbers.
For a few of these, I used my extension tube to get the closer macro shots. I was even practically lying on the ground sometimes to get close enough. It was a good thing I had leggings on under my dress.
Finally, the daylight was fading and we had to walk back to the inn. It was too bad, because I was having so much fun. I have to say, that was one of my favorite stops on our trip.