Ten Tips For the California Wine Country Traveler

Tasting rooms in town save driving but you miss the experience
Napa, Yountville, Healdsburg, Sutter Creek, Murphys, you name it, they all have tasting rooms where you can walk outside your hotel or B&B and never get into a car to taste a plethora of wines. The one thing these tasting rooms lack is wine country.

Ann Kraemer, Master Vineyard Manager and Yorba Wines

Ann Kraemer

There are 34 acres planted on the 185-acre ranch, with Zinfandel and Syrah making up the largest plots and Tempranillo, Petite Sirah, Monvedre, Granache and Viognier making up the smaller plots. Thirty percent of the vines are used for Ann’s Yorba label; the rest of the grapes are sold to ten different winemakers.

Top Wine Country Photographs 2010

What a great year of tasting delicious wines and taking photographs of the all the beautiful wine regions we visited. These are our favorite wine country photographs from the year 2010.

Kick Ranch Vineyard and Wine Bloggers Conferencing

I’m attending the first annual North American Wine Blogger Conference in Sonoma County. The event has attracted 170 wine bloggers and we have been wining and dining from the get go. The opening event was a wine tasting and lunch held in the vineyards at the beautiful Kick Ranch Vineyards.

Kick Ranch is located in Sonoma’s Rincon Valley at the foot of Spring Mountain off Calistoga Road. It is a spectacular plot of vineyards with a great view of Sonoma County. Some very well-known wineries such as Paul Hobbs, Rosenblum, and Lynmar source their grapes from Kick Ranch. There are also a number of very small wineries, some just emerging, that have contracts with Kick Ranch.

Twelve wineries were represented at the luncheon, pouring wines all made from Kick Ranch vines. We enjoyed all the wines we tasted but a few were really impressive.

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