Overdoing it on the Napa wine trail

Tag : embossed velvet


The Robert Mondavi Winery in Oakville sets the Napa Valley standardfor good taste, and tasting protocol. It is one of the most visibleand popular destinations in the Valley – the encroachment ofthe car parks into the prime vineyard land that surrounds it isastounding – and visitors pay either $15 for a taste of threewines at one of their two tasting counters, or $25 for aneducational tour with ‘private’ tasting at the end ofit. Ex Disney president Rich Frank’s Frank Family Vineyardsin the historic Larkmead winery is unusual in offering tastingsfree.

But then his winery is in Calistoga at the most distant end of theValley from San Francisco, where the buses and limos full of winetourists tend to start out from. Every weekend they stream acrossthe Golden Gate and Bay Bridges in search of the Napa Valleyexperience. The most sobering part of it is often the sheer weightof traffic on Highway 29, the main road through the valley flankedby the most obvious tourist destinations. The single most usefulpiece of advice I can give to visitors to the Napa Valley is to useinstead the parallel but much quieter Silverado Trail –although it is windier.

A designated driver or hiring one of the many San Franciscans whohave set up limo services for Napa Valley tasting trips is stronglyrecommended , particularly since so many tourists and those who cater to themseem more concerned with consumption than connoisseurship. Istarted out at one small winery on the Silverado Trail where mypre-booked $25 tour got me an enthusiastically bibulous young tourguide all to myself. At 10 in the morning, in the wine caves heguilelessly claimed were rat-infested, he seemed keener to consumethan I did. “You’re real disciplined,” he saidwith some degree of wonder as I prissily sought out somewhere tospit (not a common feature on wine tours in my experience).“Some people spend two and half hours in these caves tastingfrom barrel."

Caves are a big thing for Napa winemakers and tourists alike.Burrowing into the hillsides is a thoroughly ecological alternativeto expensive cooling systems, and provides visitors with the coverof darkness for their drinking exploits. I told my young guide thatnext on my itinerary was a $50 tour at the new Del Dotto EstateWinery and Caves just south of St Helena, the busiest town in theValley. “Del Blotto, we call them,” he said knowingly.

Flamboyant Dave Del Dotto amassed his fortune by way of late nightinfomercials and his sales technique has not deserted him in theliterature announcing what he calls his “wineexperience” - although somewhat ominously he assures us that“it will prove to be the ultimate wine tasting in theworld!”

His semi sunken “Cathedral” defies architecturalanalysis. Let’s just say Versace goes to Vegas (see www.deldottovineyards.com ). “Everything you see in here has been brought fromItaly,” our guide assured us in the marble columned entrancehall at the start of the tour I shared with two couples fromArkansas, adding, “apart from the sound system and thediscoball.” He was at pains to add respectability to thislast item by explaining its connection to the etymology of ballroomdancing and at first I was impressed by his erudition. Doubt set inwhen he told us that the British introduced the Shiraz vine totheir colony Argentina.

Having established our first names (me Jane) and told us a littleabout the heady introductory Grenache in our generouslyproportioned but rather thick embossed tasting glasses, he led usto the other side of the heavy velvet curtain and “antiqueportal from 1760 AD” (Dave Del Dotto again) that separatesthe airy entrance hall from the long, echoing, candlelit tunnelswhere most of Dave’s wine experience takes place.

According to the tour guide, “we make world class wines, allof them rated between 90 and 100 points” but although DelDotto’s top wines have indeed been rated highly byAmerica’s top wine critics, there was little evidence of themin ten wines we were served in the raucous Caves, even though therich, oaky style of the lesser wines we were offered was admirablyconsistent. Disco Caruso is piped at high volume but was drownedout by the two or three other groups of wine tourists who reallydid sound as though they were taking part in some Roman orgy.“Napa flu” is apparently a well-known local euphemismfor over-doing it on the wine trail.

Nodding towards a fancy-looking dining area, our guide told usabout the special privileges accorded to those visitors with VIPstatus. I was genuinely interested in how you qualified as a VIP.“Very Intoxicated Persons”, I was told.

That said, I take my hat off to the prevailing Napa Valley habit ofoffering some superior edible titbits at the end of a wine tasting.A Del Dotto tasting experience ends with some great cheese,prosciutto and pizza, and virtually all the most serious smallerwineries who offer personal, pre-booked tours to small groups willalso provide some evidence of Napa Valley’s culinaryreputation – possibly in the form of co-operation with alocal cheesemaker, for instance.