California is Amazing

I spent the long weekend in Northern California, and although I have visited here several times, I always come away impressed with the scenery.

I traveled instead to the wine regions of Northern California: Napa, Santa Cruz, and Sonoma. These areas are ridiculously beautiful, even if you have no interest in Wine (I might even post pictures later). If you are a wine person and haven't been to these places, then holy crap, why haven't you?

Everyone knows Napa, but have you tried the Robert Mondavi reserve wines? Wonderful wines and (relatively) cheap. My favorite part was the final tasting at Mondavi where I could tasste the 2005 Stags Leap Reserve Cab against the 2006 Oakville Reserve Cab. These growing regions are maybe 10 miles apart and the difference between the two is very discernible - it's like a wet baseball mitt versus a dusty mocha-like wine, respectively.

Santa Cruz has two of the highest quality wineries right now (IMHO) and I went to a tasting at one of them: Ridge's Monte Bello vineyard. Again, even if you don't like wine, you should go here. The area is located at the top of a mountain in Cupertino and has a free picnic area. Next to the picnic area is a garden that overlooks the valley, allowing you to see all the way to the San Francisco Bay. A gorgeous view and the wines were pretty good too.

The highlight of the weekend, though, was Sonoma. If you like oysters, cheese, baked goods, and/or wine, you really want to go here. We grabbed a few dozen freshly harvested oysters, an amazing strawberry/apple/peach pie, and some wonderful cheeses (more on that in a minute) and headed to the beach to eat. After we ate, we went to Copain Vineyards, which just might be my new favorite vineyard - the Kaiser en Haute Pinot Noir was that good.

So about the cheese. We went to the Cowgirl Creamery in Sonoma and found a cheese made at Jasper Creek in Vermont. Jasper Creek is an aging facility that allows small cheese makers to have a sustainable business, which provides consumers with some incredible cheeses. We found a cheese called Oma, made by the vonn Trapp Farmstead and it is de.lic.cious. It's washed in lambic beer - need I say more? We bought some more cheeses from the creamery and they are all outstanding. The cheese and the creamery are highly recommended.

When I post about wines, I plan to append tasting notes that I leave on grapestories.com. In the meantime, you can just look up the profile "dtodd" on said website to see the notes.

First (and hopefully not last) Post

I am vacationing in Northern California this week. I'm not sure why, but I always have the urge to blog when I travel even though the urge may be to blog about non-travel things. I don't know how many blogs I have started over the past 5 years, but I typically lose interest after a week. I expect the same result this time, but my plan will be a bit different.

In the past, I always tried to focus my blog on a specific topic, but no more. This blog will have lots of unrelated stuff in here and I have no intention of weaving a red thread through it all. At this point, I think I will use the following topics/tags for my posts, in order of what I assume I will talk about the most:

1 - Drink; this refers mostly to wine and beer, since I have had a fascination of both for over ten years. Also, I have way more than a week's worth of wine in my cellar, so even if I lose interest in blogging, I shouldn't lose interest in finishing off my wine and commenting on it.

2 - Food; my wife is really into cooking. She has at least 100 cookbooks (no, this is not an exaggeration) and her cooking abilities have greatly improved since we married 3 years ago. I would expect this to become a large part of my discussion because, well, I eat her food and I try to pair my wines with her cooking. Also, eating out will be included here.

3 - Exercise; I often become obsessed with running. This is because running is the easiest way to build up endurance for what I really like to do: bike and snowboard. Unfortunately, the time commitments for biking and snowboarding doesn't allow me to do them too often, so I end up running for the sake of running. I would expect all topics to be discussed at some point.

4 - FOB; stands for "fresh off the boat". My wife is a foreigner and I've been letting the fact that she's a FOB slide for far too long. When we were leaving for our vacation, she came to me and asked if she should bring "sneakers". After a few minutes of apparent confusion, she went to the kitchen, grabbed a Snickers bar, and presented it to me. She obviously meant "Snickers". This is the crap I have to live with, and it will be documented.

5 - Travel; this would have been more important a year ago when I worked for an airline and could travel more easily. I still do travel (after all, I'm in CA this week), but I have no idea how much this topic will come up. Still, I feel the need to include it to keep me motivated to blog.

6 - Random; just like the Animal Kingdoms use "worms" to describe any animal that doesn't fit into any other category, I'll use it for my posts as well.


I have plenty in the archives that I plan to re-post. I think this blog can last at least a month...