The roads stretched out in front of us, wind­ing from one win­ery to another. There was a win­ery at every cor­ner as we drove into Sonoma, our first stop on the wine tour.

If you’re a wine afi­cionado vis­it­ing the val­ley area, you’ll prob­a­bly be rec­om­mended a tour of the Cal­i­forn­ian wine coun­try. It would be unwise to leave with­out a cus­tom­ary visit around this wine pro­duc­ing region, respon­si­ble for pro­duc­ing 90% of all US wine.

The day actu­ally began on a gloomy note. Our guide for the day, Vlad, a Russ­ian set­tled in San Fran­cisco, assured us that it would not be long before the weather cleared and the sun shone down on us. And he was right.

As soon as we reached the out­skirts of the city across the Golden Gate bridge, the skies cleared and mag­i­cally the sun was out. We were quite cheer­ful already. To which Vlad added that we shouldn’t rejoice too early, as we would prob­a­bly have trou­ble find our way back by the end of the tour.

We started with the Viansa win­ery. It was tourist sea­son (and a long week­end) so there were droves of tourists ahead of us. Vlad warned us. He also said he would try and ensure we could avoid the rush by get­ting there a lit­tle ear­lier than the other tour buses. But then every­one was think­ing the same way.

Viansa is lodged on slight incline and before us lay the wide expanse of the vine­yard. Rows and rows of grape vines, all neatly trimmed, were quite a sight. We enjoyed the rather warm weather and picked up our first set of wines. I liked a rose, which I decided was going to be my first pur­chase of the day and it wasn’t a bad choice (it was pol­ished off quickly on my return).

After going through the wine shop and fin­ish­ing our tast­ing there, we headed to the Jacuzzi win­ery. We had now trav­elled from Sonoma val­ley, into the adjoin­ing Napa val­ley. And yes, this turned out to be the same fam­ily which patented the jacuzzi. And if that wasn’t a lucra­tive enough inven­tion, they now run a win­ery. So you might not be able to afford a jacuzzi in house, but you could prob­a­bly afford a bot­tle of their wine!

I liked some of their offer­ings — though it was quite a fight to get some space at the tast­ing tables. If the jostling wasn’t enough, you also had to con­tent with a wine glass in your hand and oth­ers push­ing against you while you tried to take a sip. I sur­vived though, thanks to all the for­ti­fi­ca­tion of the dif­fer­ent wines and with another bot­tle in my bas­ket, I went out­side to enjoy the beau­ti­ful gar­den of the win­ery.

We real­ized that we weren’t hav­ing any luck dodg­ing the crowds by now.

Time flies, when you’re sip­ping wine on a lazy Sun­day after­noon enjoy­ing the warm Cal­i­for­nia sun and win­ery hop­ping. Soon after, we were trans­ported to a lit­tle pic­ture per­fect town called “Yountsville”. The only prob­lem was that find­ing seat­ing at a restau­rant as a “sin­gle” trav­eller was quite chal­leng­ing! I decided to ven­ture out into a bak­ery instead and after a long queue, man­aged to get myself a bite, which I enjoyed on one of the many lawns.

After an hour or so, we were headed towards our third stop of the day; this one being a “kosher” win­ery called Hagafen. By now, I was lean­ing heav­ily towards the whites – caber­net, sav­i­gnon, chenin etc. Vlad kept us enter­tained with a ongo­ing com­men­tary about Cal­i­forn­ian wines and by then, a lot of the con­ver­sa­tion was begin­ning to sound like a pleas­ant dron­ing in the back­ground.

Our last stop for the day was the Andretti win­ery. It’s claim to fame – it was started by the for­mula one race dri­ver Mario Andretti and it was prob­a­bly one of the most pic­turesque loca­tions of them all.

By this time, every­one was quite happy (the wine def­i­nitely had some­thing to do with it). Our shop­ping bas­kets were full. I was con­tem­plat­ing how many bot­tles I’d have to drink to avoid cart­ing my load back to India.

Vlad packed us into bus for our jour­ney back and announced that he would now leave us to enjoy the after taste. No more com­men­tary from him. We enjoyed some peace and quiet on the return, under a wine induced coma (albeit a pleas­ant one), pass­ing by expanses of vine­yards, try­ing to enjoy as much of the sun as we could before pass­ing into the fog-laden har­bours of San Francisco.

It was a far cry from our morn­ing moods when we had left the city under a pall of clouds and fog.

For one, we were all def­i­nitely in high spirits.

MORE INFORMATION
Wine tours from SFO: The more rea­son­able ones cost around 80–100 dol­lars. Take your time and do a bit of research first. Read the fine tune. Many of them charge for every tast­ing. Many of them are all inclu­sive. I per­son­ally pre­ferred the lat­ter so it removes the has­sles of reach­ing out for change every time you reach a place. Most of the wine tours will pick you up from your loca­tion in SFO.

– San Fran­cisco Wine tours

– Cal­i­for­nia Wine tours

– Green Dream Tours: I wanted to try this green tour, but it was already booked

– Wine Train: The wine train sounds really inter­est­ing and I would def­i­nitely do this if I had company!

– More pic­tures from wine country

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