Review of a Tour of Cakebread Winery, NAPA, California
If you are going to do any tour at all in NAPA, this is probably by far the best deal and since Cakebread has fabulous wines, you can get your taste on.
We ended up paying $10 for a tour that included just the two of us, which was really nice, since I’m not a huge wine connissour, so I could ask all the stupid questions I wanted without feeling like I was going to be judged.
For the $10 admission, we got to see the following:
The bottling staging and the assembly line that was there: that in of itself is very small and almost like what you probably saw 40 years ago, as far as how many people were in the line. It was about 5 people in the room, bottling everything up and boxing it.
We got to see where they keep the barrels, and got to see the different distillers. We got a taste of one of their white wines in glasses that we got to keep after the tour.
In all, we tasted 6 different wines, starting from the most mild, ending to their strongest red. Our guide even gave us a taste of a high end, much older red wine to show us the difference aging does to the palette.
I learned that fruity flavors come out in young wines and the more oaky, wooden flavors of the barrel come out with time. The final red I tasted, I actually liked (not being a red wine fan) was delicious, and at a few hundred bucks a bottle, it better damn well taste good. They also have a connoisseur that mixes different percentages of wines together to make an entirely new wine. I’m not sure why they do that, but it’s interesting.
Our guide was nice, not too knowledgeable and never, not once did he talk down to us. I wonder, were we supposed to give him a tip? Nothing had been mentioned, so I guess not? That would be a good thing to find out. OH< you can get your own private tour for $25, but like I said, the $10 was totally worth it, and their groups never get larger than 8.
Their reserve Chardonnay was and still is the best wine I’ve tasted. At $50 a bottle, (of course so much more at a dining vicinity), it’s a steal….
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