California Wine Country ’16 Trip: My Favorite Sonoma & Napa Wineries

Hi friends!

How was your weekend? I flew to Las Vegas yesterday for a work trip and will be in Sin City for the week. But today, I want to back it up a few weeks to my vacation road trip up to Sonoma wine country. I already recapped my favorite eats and reviewed my Sonoma hotel, so today I’m chatting about my favorite wineries of the trip!

Whenever I visit a wine region, I like to do my research to find wineries that I want to visit beforehand. During this trip we did a nice combo of tasting at smaller establishments and larger productions. It’s always kind of fun to compare and contrast, and I tend to gravitate towards smaller wineries. While I love wine and obviously appreciate the wine itself, what I also love is meeting the people behind the wine. I’m the same way with food: The people behind the product can really draw me in and make me love it more (or vice versa!).

Of course, I also live for oohing and aahhing at beautiful vineyards and tasting rooms. There certainly is no shortage of any of this in Sonoma and Napa! Everywhere you look, it’s just gorgeous.

Out of about 20 wineries that we picked to visit during this trip over the course of 3 days of wine tasting, here are my top 5 favorite ones:

Kunde Winery. I reached out to Kelly from Made in Sonoma to get her winery recommendations, and one winery that she mentioned was Kunde. Located in the Kenwood area of Sonoma, Kunde has been family owned and operated since 1904. Their wines are estate-grown and sustainably farmed, and they offer a mountain top tasting at 1,400 ft above the valley floor surrounding the vineyard. I wish we had the chance to do that, and the next time I’m in Sonoma, that experience will be high on my list! Instead, we did a regular bar tasting with a lovely Kunde employee, and I really enjoyed their zinfandel and cabernet sauvignons.

Kunde also hosts a hiking program, including a group dog hike and a hike & taste option. I’ve never done a hiking excursion that includes wine tasting, and combining two of my favorite things sounds pretty amazing!

Cline Family Cellars. Wine from Cline is typically inexpensive and easy drinking. I buy their wines all the time and have visited their tasting room before, and we made a stop in this time around because we all are Cline fans.

Kind of going against the statement I made about friendly people making me love a winery more, our server at Cline was a pretty cranky older woman… but since we already are familiar with their wines, we still loved them and bought a couple of bottles home with us. Plus, tastings at Cline are free!

St. Anne’s Crossing. This is the type of place where you can really chat with the wine bar manager and learn more about the company. It’s the type of place where the tasting is inexpensive – how it was before California wine country got really commercialized, and how I think it should be still – or free, if the winery employee at the end says, “You know what? Don’t worry about the tasting fee. Thanks so much for visiting us!”

This is the type of winery that I fall in love with. Each wine on the St. Anne’s Crossing Winery menu produces just 150 cases or less, and my favorite varietals were their zinfandel (their 2013 Rowe Reserve was my top pick) and chardonnay.

Sequoia Grove Winery. What I liked most about the winery was its uniqueness. Sequoia Grove’s Rebellious Red is a wine blend they make each year. A blend of what you ask? The varietals change each vintage… hence why it’s a rebellious wine!

I couldn’t stop staring at the monstrous bottles on display in their tasting room that were hand-painted with sequoia trees – they’re pricey (I asked, of course), but definitely pretty. We wound up taking glasses of wine and eating lunch outside of this laid-back winery in their picnic table area.

Crane Family Vineyards. Crane is a tiny appointment-only Napa winery, where the owner invites you onto his patio – literally, the house that he lives in – to sip some of his wines as he tells you about the history of the winery. The view instantly relaxes you, as you stare off into the vineyard as the winery dog, an old black lab, rolls around in the grass.

My hubby and I had visited Crane once before, and we took my parents back this time to experience it as well. Some Crane Family Vineyards wine is sold in Trader Joe’s throughout California. We nabbed a few bottles to take home with us for special occasions… and I probably will break one open sooner rather than later!

Honorable Mentions:

Gloria Ferrar. This winery had been recommended to me on previous trips by champagne lovers, but this trip marked my first visit. While I’m not the biggest champagne drinker, I liked trying them at Gloria Ferrar and comparing the difference between tastings. But, what I definitely was a fan of was their estate grown chardonnay. I was on the hunt for a really buttery, smooth chardonnay on this trip, and Gloria Ferrar was my favorite out of all those that I tried.

Plus, as you can see, the view from Gloria Ferrar is stunning! The winery makes for a perfect late afternoon stop when you’ve been wine tasting all day and want to slow down, take in the view, and enjoy a cheese plate with your wine.

I’d also like to mention J Vineyards & Winery in Russian River Valley. In all honesty, we visited J Winery towards the end of the day when we had rented a limo (you know what that means… lots of wine!), so I can’t speak all that much to which of their wines stood out to me, but we stopped in to begin with because my parents like their wine. My dad treated me to a bottle of their Nicole’s Vineyard 2013 pinot noir (for obvious reasons – you can’t refuse a wine named after you!), so I’ll get to discover more about their wine once I pop that open.

One of the main reasons for its honorable mention is… how fun is this wall décor in their tasting room? I’m pretty sure I spent half of the tasting staring at the wall reading the quotes instead of paying attention to the wine! I’m a real wine tasting professional. 🙂

I also want to mention that one winery that surprised me a little was Kendall Jackson. As such a huge wine production, I wasn’t really expecting a standout customer service experience, but the gentleman that handled our wine tasting was really friendly and informative. I don’t drink their wines often, but I really liked a lot of the wines that they were tasting and might need to look out for some KJ bottles to nab in the future. We took a bottle of their dessert riesling home to enjoy sometime soon.

All in all, our wine country trip was a memorable vacation and a ton of fun! As you may be able to tell, there was a lot of wine consumed on this trip. When we returned home, I took a few weeks off from any alcohol to give my body a chance to recoup!

Tell me… Have you heard of/been to any of these wineries? Drinkers – wine, beer, or hard liquor… what’s your adult beverage of choice?