Sonoma Wine Tasting

After a while without writing, I'm back to this page. The past few weeks have been filled with moving boxes around and celebrating my birthday over several weekends. Lucky me, I know.

The first weekend celebration was a delightful trip up to Sonoma and San Francisco with my favorite one, Jenna. The second weekend was spent with a larger group of friends in a house on Big Bear lake where we also celebrated Laura's MBA graduation. Here is the first part of this great birthday experience.

Chapter A, Part I: Sonoma Wine Tasting

We left Los Angeles early afternoon on Friday and headed north. We arrived late at night in Santa Rosa where Jenna had found a room in someone's house using Airbnb. We strongly recommend this website if you want to find good deals for staying in unique rooms, lodges, boats, teepees and even tree houses! The room we stayed in was in a beautiful mansion. Barbara, the owner who lives on the property, was very resourceful about where to go, where to eat and what to do around her city. She is also a great host and your stay there will be amazing. She usually only rents one room but this time, she opened up an additional one for another couple, Keely and Paul. After sharing some late night wine, we decided that we'd start our Sonoma visit together the next morning.

Keely had already spent much time in Sonoma and therefore was our guide. She brought us to this great little winery, Lambert Bridge on the hills of Healdsburg.

Lambert Bridge Winery

Though pricy for its tastings, the wines there were good and the winery itself was gorgeous. But let's be honest here, the star of the show was their fluffy 160lb St. Bernard, Princess Bernadette.

Princess Bernadette, the St. Bernard dog hard at work guarding the Lambert Bridge Winery

After the tasting, we headed to the Ferrari-Carano Winery where the establishment is more interesting than the wines it produces. They weren't as memorable and the staff didn't seem connected to their product.

The wine tasting team at Ferrari-Carano: myself, Jenna, Keely and Paul

The winery itself though, and its gardens, are worth a stop. I was too busy tasting so you'll have to see for yourself what I mean when you visit.

Flowers at Ferrari-Carano

Once our wine thirst was taken care of, we had to satisfy our bellies. We ate at the Diavola Pizzeria, which was very highly recommended and well reviewed though our experience there was quite different. Our food took about an hour to come even though the restaurant was fairly empty when we ordered. The lunch break ended up lasting almost two hours, which is very frustrating when you want to maximize your winery visits in the day. And the food wasn't that memorable. We might have been unlucky but I discourage anyone from going there (no real effort was made to make us understand the situation or give us a better customer experience).

After the disappointing meal, we left Keely and Paul and stopped by the Geyser Peak Winery for a few more tastings. The wines there were pretty good, nothing too exciting.

It was getting late and there were still a couple things we hadn't checked off the list yet: bicycle riding and playing pétanque. The staff at Geyser Peak Winery told us where we might be able to play the game so we headed there.  We parked about a mile away from Michel-Schlumberger winery and jumped on our bikes.

Riding our bicycles through the vineyards

Unfortunately the winery got rid of the pétanque field a couple years before so we were stuck with the difficult task of more wine tasting. The wines at Michel-Schlumberger were pretty good, nothing too impressive either. We were probably biased though since we couldn't play pétanque.

Wine tasting at Michel-Schlumberger Winery

This was our last winery stop for the day and we headed back to clean up for our dinner in Sonoma. Even though our first choice, The Girl And The Fig was booked way before we decided to do our trip (which was just a few days prior to the said trip), Jenna found an amazing backup plan. She had made reservation to Harvest Moon Cafe where we had a wonderful meal and tasted the best lamb plate we've ever had. After a great dinner and a little walk around the Sonoma square, we headed back to our room in Santa Rosa for the rest of the night.

In the morning, we would leave for the coast to drive south toward San Francisco for Chapter A, Part II of our little adventure.