Hooked up with the couple who invited us on the CA trip and headed to Sonoma to see some wineries.

First stop (and it's one of the first winery you meet on the way into the Sonoma region), Gloria Ferrer. What better way to start a gorgeous summer no-work Monday than with some champagne sparkling wine on the patio overlooking the vineyard ?

We got four different glasses and passed them around, and around, and around. Ah... delicious. Bought a couple of bottles for the road.

Then up the road to a much smaller winery, Homewood, where they hooked us up with many delicious samples, and where we ordered many delicious bottles. Homewood, like the majority of the wineries we visited, is very small, and does the majority of their business by selling wines mail-order directly to consumers - they don't distribute to stores at all. I'd never seen that before. I've done wine tours of New York's Finger Lakes and Oregon's Willamette Valley, but you could always find those brands on store shelves somewhere (at least in the local region - I don't see any NY wines here in North Carolina, but they're easy to find in NY). But I didn't know there were vineyards so small that you couldn't find them on any shelf, anywhere - I like that there are.

There are plenty of well-known, mass-market, wineries in Sonoma and even more 20 or so miles east, in Napa, but we stuck to smaller places, mostly. The grapes above were growing across the road from the only huge winery, and the only one I'd even so much as heard of, that we visited while we were there, Coppola - as is Francis Ford Coppola. We've always liked 'his' wines; they're consistently good and inexpensive - and we are, umm, pretty familiar with most of them, so we didn't do a tasting there. But instead, we did a winery tour, drank wine right out of the cask, ate lunch overlooking the vineyards, etc.. Totally fucking idyllic, etc.. Etc.. It was all arranged, and paid, for by a friend in the grocery business. A good time.

This is in the Coppola winery. The casks aren't all Coppola wines, though. Their facility is so big that they handle wines for other people in order to keep the place running at full utilization.

We stayed at a B&B in the town of Sonoma itself: had some fantastic Thai food at a place right off the town square, drank lots of the wine that we'd purchased at the various wineries, wondered why the Town needed to do street work at 7am every day, etc.. Nice place.

Pavement has a great song called "Unfair". It starts like this:

Down from Santa Rosa, over the bay
Across the grapevine to L.A.
We've got deserts, we've got trees
We've got the hills of Beverly
Let's burn the hills of Beverly

And because Santa Rosa is right in the middle of Sonoma county, and we drove through it like four times, and because 'the bay' presumably refers to the San Francisco bay, that song was stuck in my head the entire trip. I do love the song, but I might have worn it out by mentally singing it to myself for eight days straight.

The coast, next...