Napa Valley

You are currently browsing articles tagged Napa Valley.

Bottega, Yountville

Of all of the places we have eaten in Northern California, Bottega is my favorite. The Yountville eatery of famed chef Michael Chiarello, Bottega combines laid back California relaxation with a touch of old world Italy for an unforgettable dining experience.

Bottega Yountville Bottega Yountville

Zazu, Santa Rosa

Zazu is a roadhouse in the heart of Sonoma wine country with an intense focus on fresh and local food. Most of the ingredients at Zazu are grown on the property or within a few minutes’ drive, and when we dined there last summer, our meal was blissfully simple and perfect. Zazu also offers a fun blind tasting option on their wine list so you can see if all of that wine tasting has paid off!

dinner at Zazu

Scopa, Healdsburg

Nestled in a narrow space in a row of restaurants and stores, you can easily miss Scopa, but it is definitely a fantastic find. Just be sure to make reservations. Scopa offers a variety of Italian small plates, pizza, and pasta in addition to Italian and local wine in a very cozy atmosphere. A great place for dinner for two!

arancini

Oxbow Public Market, Napa

Oxbow Public Market is almost everything to almost everyone. Want a pint of beer and some oysters? Wander down to the Hog Island Oyster Bar. Interested in having the best English muffin in the US? Model Bakery is there for you. Or maybe you are craving a good old burger and fries. Oxbow Public Market has that covered with Gott’s Roadside. And there is so much more. You could eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner at Oxbow, for days, and never eat at the same place twice!

Oxbow Public Market

Dry Creek Kitchen, Healdsburg

Light, airy, with a wall of windows open to the outdoors, Dry Creek Kitchen is comfortable elegance with beautiful cuisine. Chef Charlie Palmer’s “Progressive American Cuisine” is like art for both the eyes and the palate. To top it off, you can bring your own wine to Dry Creek Kitchen, and there is no corkage fee if the wine is from Sonoma County.

Dry Creek Kitchen

 

Meghan Malloy is the blogger behind Travel, Wine, and Dine.

Tags: Dining out, Food, Healdsburg, Napa, Napa Valley, Sonoma, Sonoma County, Travel, wine, wine country, wine tasting, Yountville

One of the highlights of our recent trip to Napa and Sonoma was our visit to Venge Vineyards. Venge was a recommendation from Chef Robin White and since they don’t hold public tastings, it was quite the special experience. It was certainly unlike any other tasting experience I have had before, and it definitely spoiled us for crowded public tasting rooms!

Venge recently moved to a new location on the Silverado Trail in Calistoga, CA. Up a long driveway flanked by vines and beautiful greenery, Venge’s tasting room actually used to be a private home. When we arrived, we weren’t sure if we were in the right place! It is a breathtaking view from the top, and because it is set up from the road, it is very quiet. The house is sunny and sparkling inside, immaculately clean and comfortable.

 

 

Venge Tasting Room

We were welcomed by Lin, the Director of Hospitality for Venge, and I took a few photos while we waited for the other couple tasting with us.

A long wooden table was set for the tasting, complete with cheese, crackers, and grapes.

Venge Tasting Table

This was the view from my seat.

View from Venge

Through the wine glasses

 

image

 

 

cheese and crackers

Some of my notes on food pairings for the wines that we tasted

Venge tasting notes

 

Venge wine

The lineup of wines we tasted with their lovely, varying label designs

Venge wine

Venge makes small amounts of high quality wines. Several of their wines have been given 92 points or higher by Robert Parker. All of the wines that we tasted were spectacular, but I enjoyed the following the most. Venge is such an interesting winery that I have copied some information about each wine from their website. If you are interested in wine at all, I would definitely suggest visiting their site for more information.

 

2008 Maldonado Vineyard Chardonnay, Dijon Clones (Source)

The Maldonado Vineyard has produced wonderfully again this vintage. 2008 was a bit cooler and longer, ripening nearly two weeks later than in 2007. The longer season combined with the Dijon Clone of Chardonnay has attributed fantastic nuances of tropical citrus notes with and undertone of barrel toast and vanilla creaminess.

I LOVED this Chardonnay. It felt like the wine that I should be drinking, looking out over the valley on a hot and sunny day.

2007 Gladys’s Vineyard Syrah

We could speak for hours about our adornment for this property’s owner, Gladys Boyd. This is not just 2/3rd acre of Syrah vines. It is a piece of her adored garden. She knows nearly every vine by shape or by name. She has a warm heart, a great story and a small and wonderful East sloping Syrah vineyard in Dry Creek Valley in Sonoma that she calls home. It is our privilege to make her grapes into wine. The vines had no problem reaching optimum maturity with excellent hang time. Gladys’ small acreage yielded a mere 1.81 tons; this represented a very balanced crop for the 2/3-acre planting. The concentration and focus of this wine takes benefit from such low yields. Muhlner Vineyard provides the rest of the Syrah from Napa Valley and the Viognier comes from Baranek Vineyard, Clarksburg.

2007 Late Night Harvest Zinfandel (Source)

This sweet-dessert Zinfandel will entice all of your senses. The deep, alluring color pulls you in with inviting visions of black and blue. The aromatics are very ripe with dried currants, vibrant blueberry and blackberry liqueur. Later in the nose arrives scents of barrel vanillin, campfire and a touch of bacon fat. The flavor speaks entirely of chocolate dipped coffee bean and viscous black cherry. The tannin of this wine is very integrated and can be perceived for many lasting moments in the finish. It is both a seductive and exciting bottle of wine!

A little smoky, rich, sweet, and heady, this Zinfandel is the ultimate dessert.

image

Lin was extremely hospitable and knowledgeable about Venge wines, and her warm personality and humor made everything even better. The other couple in the tasting were wine club members and had more experience with Venge wines than we did, so it made for a fun dynamic. We talked about wine, life in California, TV shows, and movies, and I laughed harder than I had in awhile. We were very lucky in that Venge does ship to Massachusetts where some wineries do not. I was the happy recipient of several bottles of Venge wine this past week, including Gladys’s Syrah and Late Night Harvest Zinfandel.

Tasting at Venge was like drinking outstanding wine in a friend’s beautiful hillside home, and I was honored to have had such a rare and special opportunity on my birthday no less! I can not wait to return to Venge and will hopefully get to meet winemaker Kirk Venge on our next visit.

Important news- my raffle to raise money for The ALLY Foundation ends on April 1, and I will randomly pick the winners then. The prizes are great and include a $100 gift card to Williams Sonoma, a winery tour for 10 at Westport Rivers, and a case of wine. For details please visit http://firstgiving.com/meghanmalloyteamally . ALL proceeds go to The ALLY Foundation.

Tags: California, Calistoga, chardonnay, cheese, Food, Napa, Napa Valley, Sonoma, Syrah, Venge, vineyards, wine, wine tasting, Zinfandel

Good evening everyone! I am busy getting ready to head to my mom’s tomorrow for Christmas, so I am posting about one of my favorite meals of this past autumn, a post you may remember from Emily’s blog. I loved this part of our last wine country trip, so I hope you don’t mind rereading if you have already seen it. I will be back tomorrow with my review of Wine Secrets. I am done with work until MONDAY!!!!

 

Travel is one of the things that makes my world go round, and the travel I do often focuses on three things, food, wine, and the outdoors. Our most recent trip was to San Francisco for the Foodbuzz Festival, a gathering of food bloggers where eating, drinking, and blogging talk filled the days. Following the festival, my husband and I took our second trip in two months to California’s wine country.

Wine country in November offers a sharp contrast to the East coast. Autumn was alive and well, but the temperatures were near 70 making it easy to wander around vineyards and to take hikes along the Sonoma coast. All of the outdoors activity made for extra large appetites, and I was more than willing to take part in wine country cuisine.

On the last day of our trip, we had lunch reservations at the Wine Spectator restaurant at the Culinary Institute of America at Greystone in St. Helena. The history and architecture of the CIA building is interesting and impressive.(The following information was provided on a handout at the CIA Greystone building. Completed in 1889, Greystone Cellars was once the largest stone winery in the world. After a phyloxera epidemic and prohibition kept the winery dormant until after the Great Depression when the winery was passed amongst several owners before gravity-flow winery was back in production. In 1950, the Catholic teaching order, the Christian Brothers, purchased the winery to increase the production of their well known wines, brandies, and ports. In 1990, just after an earthquake that made a portion of the building unusable, the Christian Brothers brand was acquired by Heublein, Inc. Through the generosity of Heublein, the CIA was able to acquire the building, surrounding grounds, and the 15 acre merlot vineyard for roughly 10% of its $14 million dollar valuation in 1993.The 90 foot high entrance atrium displays flags that represent the major wine producing regions of the world.

CIA Greystone Napa Valley   Greystone Napa Valley CIA

image

The food and beverages were outstanding and local, as you might expect from one of the most well known culinary schools in the country.

I started my meal with a Lost Coast tangerine wheat beer which was light, fruity, and refreshing, a perfect contrast to all of the wine that we had tasted earlier in the day. We also ordered “Today’s Temptations”, a selection of the chef’s choice of starters which included smoked salmon lollipops, dates with blue cheese, polenta with a beautiful roast tomato sauce, and shots of cauliflower soup.

Lunch at the CIA Greystone Napa Valley Culinary Institute of America, Greystone

For my entree I ordered two appetizers, pumpkin empanadas with pumpkin seed salsa, cumin-lime crème fraiche, and cilantro salad and an apple salad with spiced walnuts, endive, shaved celery, and walnut-Dijon vinaigrette.

CIA Greystone lunch image

My husband had the pan roasted day boat scallops.

image

Everything was delicious, and it was a fun experience to watch chefs in the open kitchen as they moved briskly about preparing food.

image CIA Greystone coffee

After lunch, we took some time to wander around the building. A chef’s dream-come-true culinary store with every tool and gadget imaginable resides on the first floor of the main building. I stayed away as we had limited ourselves to carry on luggage! You can also view the Vintner’s Hall of fame and the grand entrance. While we were visiting, all of the students were gearing up for a big event with chefs from around the country. I wanted to stay!

Even if you don’t consider yourself a huge foodie, I would definitely recommend a visit to the CIA Greystone and the surrounding area. In addition to food and wine tastings, you can take a walk through a petrified forest, visit a geyser, and spend a lot of time in the great outdoors taking in beautiful scenery and fresh air.

Tags: CIA, Dining out, Food, Napa Valley, restaurants in wine country, Travel, wine country, wine tasting

« Older entries § Newer entries »

new restaurant
WordPress SEO fine-tune by Meta SEO Pack from Poradnik Webmastera