After escaping the snow and cold of Idaho, we arrived in Napa Valley amid sun, warmth, green grass, and blooming flowers. Heaven!! We couldn’t resist a patio table at Bouchon Bistro in Yountville (French Laundry owner Thomas Keller’s more casual eatery) and basked in the sun while enjoying a bottle of Vine Cliff Chardonnay with some great French bistro food. After lunch we fought the Saturday Highway 29 traffic into St. Helena. Since we would be spending the next 3 weeks in Sonoma, we needed to find the best route over the Mayacamas Mountain range that separates Napa and Sonoma.

Since we are lovers of most things Italian, it is only appropriate that our first winery visit would be to a fourth generation Italian family winery. Edoardo Seghesio founded the winery in 1895 when he planted his first vineyard on the Home Ranch in Alexander Valley. Ironically the immigrant from the Piedmont region in Italy found himself opposite a train station named the "Chianti Station". He planted the grapes that he thought best suited to the region—Zinfandel and Italian varietals such as Sangiovese and Barbera. Over the next century the family has collected more than 400 acres of prime vineyard land in Sonoma.

In the heart of the very large Sonoma Valley appellation is a very, very small appellation. Bennett valley is a small, hanging valley in the middle of the Sonoma Mountain appellation. We visited one of the pioneer, and only, wineries—Matanzas Creek. Founded in 1978 by Sandra MacIver, it is one of Sonoma’s best. When it was opened the original winemaker was Merry Edwards. At the time, it was a true pioneer, one of the first with a female owner and winemaker. Edwards created some stunning Chardonnays and Pinot Noirs before finally moving on to her own label. The vineyards, once a large dairy farm, are in a unique microclimate. The valley funnels fog and cold air from the San Pablo Bay and seems to be a perfect climate for Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. And strangely enough, it is a great spot for Merlot. Many Napa wineries have decided that the cooler Carneros region is better for Merlot and that seems to be the case here.

Joined by friends also escaping the snow for a few days, we decided to make a jaunt over the mountains into Napa Valley. The twisting drive over the Oakville Grade takes about a half hour and in retrospect is ever bit as winding and narrow as the Spring Mountain Road we took a few days ago. But as it drops into Napa Valley as you pass by the old Vichon Winery (now called Diamond Oaks) the view of the valley is stunning.

When you make arrangements for a winery tour a couple of weeks out, sometimes you end up with an in-depth tour and a fabulous tasting of current releases, reserve wines, and sometimes barrel samples. It gives you a chance to see what subtle differences one winery has that sets them apart. But other times, the winery figures you have been to so many wineries (in more than 30 years in the wine business, I guess that would be right) that all you really want to do is taste some wines. The previous day’s tours of Hall and Cain had been informative and the tastings were great.

We desided today would be a good day to once again hop over to Napa, but this time we were concentrating on the Stags Leap district, the area in the southern part of Napa Valley just off the Silverado Trail on the eastern side of the valley. In contrast to the Mayacamas Range on the other side of the valley that is lush and green, the Vaca Mountain Range is dry and rocky. The small Stags Leap appellation lies under a craggy bluff that legend said a magnificent stag jumped over while being chased by Indian hunters.

There are many routes that people have taken to the wine business. Lately it seems you need to be a corporate executive who retires to Napa Valley to build a multi-million dollar winery so he or she can realize a dream to become a farmer and winemaker. Usually managing a rock band is not the accepted route. But Bruce Cohn, who discovered a rock band named Pud in the 1970s and promptly renamed them the Doobie Brothers, seems to have handled it just right.

Another quick trip over the Oakville grade (I am practicing for the next trip to Italy) and we were in Napa for a couple of tours. It’s kind of nice to alternate valleys; it breaks things up so you don’t get bored. Our first stop was the very, very small Pardigm Winery. It is just a short drive up Dwyer Road off of Highway 29, just past the sign that reads "No wineries on this road". You get the idea that they like their privacy.

Wednesday morning signaled a change in the weather. For the first time since we had been in Sonoma there was a cool fog covering the ground. This is fairly common later in the spring and summer as cool marine air from the San Pablo Bay works its way into the valley just to be burned off by the sun before noon. Today had the feeling that we may be in for a bit of a cooling trend. We took the morning off from wine touring, which gave me a chance to work out at the YMCA in Santa Rosa about 15-20 minutes away. Tasting as much wine as we do and eating as much great food absolutely requires some time in the gym, so the Y has been saving me. After a light lunch at home we met our friends in the Sonoma part of Carneros.

Our first rain of the trip hit during the night and by Thursday morning, it was cool and wet. We drove through the town of Sonoma then made our way on the Carneros Highway 121 towards Napa. Domaine Carneros is just on the Napa side of Carneros and is an imposing building set on a hill. The winery is owned by the French Champagne firm of Taittinger, one of the several California sparkling wine producers owned by French firms (the acreage in Champagne is maxed out so if you want to grow you need to go elsewhere and California, Napa in particular, seems to be the favored spot). The winery is modeled after the Taittinger winery in Champagne and is very elegant and upscale.

Our "strategy" on this trip has been to hit as many wineries as we could manage during the week, but to skip the weekend, when all the "day-trippers" from the Bay area descend on Napa and Sonoma. Each region in Sonoma has had a barrel tasting weekend since we got here. First Dry Creek, then Russian River. This weekend marked the barrel tasting event for Sonoma Valley. People buy tickets (the money goes to charity) then make their way around the valley to participating wineries to taste barrel samples of wine.

We had been alternating between Sonoma and Napa for the past two weeks, so it was definitely time for a change in scenery. Good friends and customers had moved to Livermore from Idaho Falls last year and wanted to show us their local wine scene, so on Sunday we made the 2 hour drive to this historic wine region. Wineries and vineyards have been in this area for well over 100 years. In fact, the largest winery in Livermore Valley, Wente, has been family-owned since 1883. We arrived around 4:00 and our friends immediately ushered us to their car so we could see the first winery before their tasting room closed at 4:30 since they wouldn’t be open on Monday.

After our whirlwind tour through the tasting rooms of Livermore, we hit the road just past 9:00 a.m. Ordinarily you just hop on I-680 and eventually on I-80 near Sacramento and Fairfield before catching the highway into Napa. Of course we didn’t factor in rush hour traffic, so when I-680 started slowing to a crawl, we did what any patient traveler would do. We took the first exit and started looking for back roads to get where we were going. This is Jeannie’s forte. She navigates back roads all over Tuscany and we have rarely been lost.

When we were in Livermore at the Safeways store, we met a representative of Francis Ford Coppola’s Rosso & Bianco Winery in Geyserville. This is the old Chateau Souverain Winery that Coppola bought 2 years ago. Prior to that, he had been making his popular Coppola wines and the Diamond Label wines at a few facilities in Napa. His historic property and winery in Napa, the Niebaum-Coppola Rubicon Winery, was the home for his signature wines (Rubicon, Cask Cabernet, Edizione Pennino Zinfandel and a few others of a stature befitting the old Inglenook Winery).

Thursday was to be kind of a down day for us, so after lounging around in the morning, we made our way into Sonoma to make one last visit to our favorite trattoria, Della Santina’s. As usual, the food was great (this time Jeannie had the pappardelle with wild boar and I had duck). The owner, whose name is Quirico della Santina but who typically goes by Dan, is a very distinguished gentleman whose family hails from Lucca, Italy. After talking for awhile, he came back with three restaurant suggestions for the next time we go to Lucca. We have been to one of them, but the other two are new to us, so maybe this fall we will try one of them. After lunch we stopped in to say hello to Alex at the Enoteca next door. In a previous posting we had prematurely promoted her to proprietor, which caused some amusement on the part of Ron, the actual proprietor. Oh well, we stand corrected. The four of us had a nice conversation about wines, Italian in particular, and we were pleased to see that they carried a few wines from our friends at Small Vineyards. Ron said before we left Sonoma we should get a tour at Hanzell, so we called and made an appointment for Friday afternoon. In the meantime we had made contact with Carol Shelton and were going to meet her at her new winery. Carol had been at Vino Rosso last summer for a tasting, but as we were in Italy then, we didn’t get to meet her.

Friday was to be our last day in the area before we start to make our slow way home (the snow’s not quite gone at home yet). Thanks to the suggestion of our friends at Enoteca della Santina in Sonoma, we had made an appointment to tour Hanzell Vineyards. Talk about history! In three weeks we have seen some very, very new wineries, some that go back all of 20 years, and some that exist only "virtually". Hanzell is one of the most significant wineries in California in the last half century. In 1948 James Zellerbach (from the paper family) bought 200 acres of land in the Mayacamas Mountains just a mile or so from the Sonoma Plaza.

The "Sideways" phenomenon hit even small burgs like Idaho Falls. Shortly after we opened in 2004 the movie came out, with just a short run in Idaho Falls. But the film featuring a wine snob in search of the great Pinot Noir around Santa Barbara certainly had an impact. Our Pinot Noir sales soared and have remained strong to this day. Last week we had a chance to spend a few days in the Santa Barbara area and were determined to avoid all of the Sideways hoo-haw. Granted January is not the best time to experience any wine region. The vines are pruned and dormant, the green is mostly gone, but then so are most of the tourists. We arrived in Santa Barbara along with the first major rainstorm they had had in weeks. Our arrival also coincided with the Santa Barbara Film Festival, so I’m not sure if the city of 90,000 is really a bohemian kind of town or if the attendees just gave it that appearance. At any rate it is a charming town with a great downtown. We immediately found a great wine bar (Intermezzo, which is a part of the Wine Cask Restaurant). We had dinner at the restaurant (excellent food but a little fancy and stuffy for us) then adjourned to the wine bar for a glass of wine. Monday we decided to explore downtown with a little side trip to Montecito on the beach, where we found a great Italian restaurant named Tre Lune.