Napa Valley Day 3
Today we visited Charles Krug who are the other and long estranged half of the Mondavi Family! The winery opens at 10:30 so a later start for us which was lovely!! The drive through the Napa Valley is very picturesque and rivals any wine region we have been to! At Charles Krug we had a choice of three flights ($15, $25, $40) - I took the first one as it was primarily whites, and Ralph had the reserve flight at $40. The reds were around the $100 mark and the Cabernets were good. Of great surprise to me, I was able to drink and enjoy the Sauvignon Blanc - unheard of in Australia!!
Our hostess was very friendly, the winery is unassuming but the wines are well worth a visit! They are currently rebuilding so it sounds like great things are ahead!
We then went to Anderson's Conn Valley Vineyard in the hills above St Helena. Once a hay farm this property was purchased by Todd Anderson and his father after a year long negotiation. Such was the determination of Todd (a geologist by training) to have the property. They have 28.5 acres under vines and produce about 10,000 cases a year. A couple of years ago the winery made a special barrel for the Napa Auction, an annual charity event. The barrel was sold for over $1million and was scored a 98 by Robert Parker.
Towards the end of what ended up a private tasting for the two of us and after hearing about this and the Ghost Horse Wine (sells from $500 - $5000 a bottle) produced by Todd at his private vineyard, in walks the man himself. Todd was there to show Alicia how to use an implement that draws wine from a bottle without opening the cork and replacing it with inert gas which in turn keeps the remaining wine fresh. He had a bottle of the Ghost Horse Spectre with him to demonstrate. He offered us a taste and we weren't going to say no!!
A casual lunch at the local bakery - great salads and sandwiches!!
Then it was on to Opus One - a very different experience. This is an amazing building and incredible attention to detail in their winemaking but a surreal blend of the old and the new worlds. This winery was a collaboration between Robert Mondavi and Baron Philippe Rothschild who together set out to make the best wine possible in this growing and largely undiscovered wine region in the 1960s. The tour was very technical and a detailed description of the wine making process. The wine of which only one with a non-distributed second wine is full bodied, elegant and one of the better Cabernets in the valley. Their singular focus is certainly getting the results at $300 a bottle!!
Dinner was champagne, cheese and crackers and a good bottle of red!!
