Napa Valley Butler Style

So we were sitting around on a quiet Friday evening trying to decide what to do this weekend. Since we don't know anyone in the Sacramento area, except co-workers, we decided to take a trip to Napa on Saturday. Once this was decided we polished the evening off with a trip to our local dive bar (more on this later) and went to bed early.

Trisha and I woke up early today with visions of vast grape fields and glorious wine goblets in our heads. The drive to Napa Valley is fairly nice, spending about 45 minutes on the freeway and another 45 minutes on country roads surrounded by grape fields.


According to some suggestions Trisha found on the Internet we stopped at Domaine Chandon for our first tasting. For those of you unfamiliar with this particular vineyard, think of Moet Chandon....You guessed it Champagne. Trisha and I each got a different set of samples and happily shared with each other. Since I am not much of a champagne drinker they all tasted about the same.

Our next stop was Stag's Leap. This is one of my favorite wineries. They are famous for their Cabernet Sauvignon. Trisha started off with the Sav Blanc and I went right for the Chardonnay. After our allotted four glasses we made our way to the Oakville Grocery. This is an amazing little market on Rt 29 that offers made to order sandwiches, various local condiments, and a vast selection of wines and beer. We ordered a couple of sandwiches and ate them right outside.

After lunch we drove about 20 feet to Opus One. Opus is a collaboration between Rothschild and Mondavi. They produce one style of wine which is a blend of Cab Sauv, Cab Franc, Merlot, Malbec, and Petit Verdot. A bottle goes for about $175 and a tasting costs $25 a glass. Since they only make one type of wine, there isn't a huge selection. However, we did find out that the grapes that aren't good enough to be bottled as Opus One are sold as Overture. They didn't provide any samples of this wine, so we picked up a bottle for home. Hopefully this is almost as good as the Opus.

This ended up being a great day for touring around Napa. The weather was in the mid 70s with a nice cool breeze. Trisha and I are already getting excited to take all of our guests for a tour! We only went to three of the wineries in the area....about 200 more to go!