Fine weekend... fine wine

Stef and I went to Napa this past Saturday for a beautiful day of wine tasting and catching up. We took a random road off of Highway 29 to get over to the Silverado Trail and away from the overly crowded wineries along the main route. Luckily it presented a very nice photo opportunity:

We started off at Mumm Napa Valley. Their tasting experience is a lot different than I've seen before. We saw a lot of people sitting at tables and thought it was a cafe, but realized no one had food. You actually sit on a nice patio at tables with umbrellas and they bring the tasting to you. Nice! Stef tried their Pinot Trio and I had their Signature Sparklers. They give you a lot of wine too:I really liked the Cuvee M and came home with a bottle. It was my favorite wine of the trip!

We headed to ZD next, just down the road from Mumm. This is one of Stef's favorite wineries, and where I took the grapevine picture at the top. There is a grapevine arbor on the path to the tasting room, ending with a fountain. The tasting room was very pretty too, with two big chandeliers that remind me of Mom Schafer. The wines were nice too, though I don't remember which we tasted (I meant to take pictures of the tasting menus, but only got Mumm's - oops!). Here's the two of us under the arbor:Then we went to lunch at the Silverado Resort, where Stef holds her big work function each year. The food was very good - we both had the onion soup, I had a vegetarian wrap (made with spring roll wrapper, yum!) and Stef had the French Dip. The service was incredible too. As soon as we appeared to have our minds made up on our orders the waiter appeared. As soon as I put my soup to the side it disappeared (I didn't even see them do it!). Good service always impresses me at a restaurant. The resort was very nice too - casually elegant without being pretentious.

After that we were ready for more wine. We headed to Darioush, with its building modeled after a Persian royal palace. The building definitely stands out along the Trail, and inevitably draws more crowds as there were many people in the tasting room. The wines were fine, though I wasn't trilled with them (but I don't really know anything about wine - I usually buy pretty labels).The last stop of our trip was Clos Du Val, another of Stef's favorites. I liked the label. :) We called Liz outside of the tasting room to tease her that we were drinking wine and she can't, because we're mean like that. But we really wish you were there Liz!

We drove back to San Ramon and played with Ayla a little. Then we went out to dinner in downtown Pleasanton at Pasta's Trattoria where we sat on the patio since the evening was so nice. There was a breast cancer benefit walk going on, so streams of people wearing bras decorated with lights and everything else streamed by, reminding us to get mammograms and protect our ta-tas by megaphone - it was interesting. The dinner was quite enjoyable nonetheless.

It was such a wonderful and decadent day, I had to recuperate on Sunday! Chris and I took Ayla to the local park to play some fetch. Then we just hung out at home and relaxed. I hope your weekend was at least half as good as mine!