Napa Valley Trip

Ashley and I recently visited Napa. I was in San Francisco for business all week, so we decided to fly Ashley up Thursday night.

From Napa Valley Trip

Click here for a picture slideshow.

If you know us, you know we love going to the wine country. This time around, instead of hopping from one winery to another spending little time at each place, we wanted to spend more time at each winery we visited.

Friday, we drove up from San Francisco and lunch with our Fort Worth buddy, Quinn, who was also traveling on business for IBM. Afterwards, we went straight to the valley and had a private library tasting at Cakebread Cellars.

A private library tasting isn't your average tasting. For one, its done in an upstairs VIP room, all the fine glasses and the wine you taste is from the Cakebread library. Meaning, they set aside several cases of every production for themselves. Over time, the staff comes back to taste to see how the wine is aging. As you've all heard, "wine gets better over time." We ended the day dining at Celadon, recommended to us by some friends that had visited recently.

Saturday was exciting because some friends of ours from San Francisco drove up to meet us for lunch at Taylor's (a local hamburger joint). After lunch we visited Envy Wines where our friends, Andrew and Emily Smith, had volunteered to help bottle earlier in the year. Two hours later, we had to part ways so that Ashley and I could get to our private vineyard and cave tour at Beringer. Which was cool, because our tasting was done in a room carved into the cave. Ashley really enjoyed the barrel tasting, where they use a device to extract wine that is aging in a barrel. There were 4 others on the tour with us, which were all brothers from Dallas. Small world. One of them was a TCU grad. After leaving Beringer, we went back to the hotel for a couple of hours becuase our diner reservations at the Culinary Institute of America wasn't until much later. Dinner at the CIA was a really cool experience and a fine capstone to the entire trip.

Sunday, we left Napa at 9 am and walked in our front at 9 pm - spent all day traveling.

Samye was happy to see us to say the least!

We loved it. Had a great time. Again, here is a slideshow of a few pics we took.