The Best for the Last

OK. I lied about no wine tasting today. Of course there was wine tasting. We started with the daily mimosa and then the fabulous Carlos presented us with French toast stuffed with cream cheese and walnuts and topped with a multi-berry compote that was to die for (he chose not to make the promised eggs benedict with home-made croissants because of the lactose allergy of Jacob, the other guy at the B&B who had to put up with us for 2 days). Be sure to check the video of the day to see him describe the ingredients!

We packed up the cars and stopped at the nearby Sunshine Foods to pick up some of that fabulous L'explorateur cheese (which I'll take to Santa Barbara for Christmas)

Then we were off to the Vincent Arroyo winery in Calistoga, at the far end of the valley. We had visited this winery before, three years ago on our last Napa Get-Away weekend. The drive was gorgeous, since there was a dusting of snow on the mountain tops from that storm we had yesterday and so much of the vegetation was sporting a fall rust color.

Arroyo's is one of Char & Mike's favorite wineries and Vince was a friend of a college friend of ours. I loved it when we were there last time because they have this great dog who would run up a stack of wine barrels and fetch balls and they also had clothes for little kids, "designed" by the dog (an obvious gift for Brianna). Well, the pile of barrels is now gone (replaced by a more efficient system for wine storage), so no dog activity to videotape, and the kiddie clothes are gone too, so all there was was wine and, frankly, I felt really "wined out," especially for red wine, which was all they were pouring.

Instead, I went outside and took pictures of the dog, and the building, and the vegetation...and the wine.

Rich and Pat left us at this point as they needed to be home, but the remaining four of us pressed on to Char's very favorite winery, Pine Ridge, where Ray, the man in charge, reminded me a lot of my father.

This was, by far, my favorite winery. It may be because the wines we were tasting sell for prices in the $60-$135/bottle range, but they were really so good I finished all of my "tastes." And here I thought I was "wined-out" for the week. This wine was so good I was actually starting to believe the poetic hype on the labels and did taste cherries berries, orange zest, kiwi and citrus but try as I might, I couldn't pick up chocolate, cola, or tobacco. One description reads "silky yet firm chewy tannins" and I swear I thought it said "chewy tampons."

Char and Mike bought enough wine to start their own (small) wine bar. While we liked the wines, we decided that we'd reached our limit on wine purchases (for "we" read "Walt," since I never drink wine at home). We wonder if the type of wine served at Mike & Char's indicates the rating of the guests at their house and decided we should invite ourselves to dinner and see if we get served Pine Ridge or Gallo.

I hated to come home. It was a wonderful get-away being literally wined and dined for three days. I was afraid I was going to have to cook dinner tonight, but Walt volunteered to pick up some Chinese food at the fairly newly opened Panda Express so I could work on getting photos and videos organized.

I have to admit that I had a macabre reaction to returning home. As our wheels turned off the freeway, I was thinking of coming home to no puppies, and feeling sad about Tosca and Poochini. But then I remembered Tosca, the opera. You remember Tosca, the opera. How does our heroine die? She commits suicide by hurling herself off the castle parapets. How did Tosca the puppy die? She fell off the top of Nicki's cage.

This is the last time I name a dog after a tragic heroine!

Saturated

I have had more wine today than I have had all of last year, I'm sure.

I slept so-so on the couch here and was so intent on making sure I woke up before anybody discovered me there that I actually woke up every hour until I finally got up at 6. Then I realized that I had left the computer in the bedroom, where Walt was sleeping and I didn't want to wake him up, so I sat here listening to music on my iPod until Mike finally woke.

When I finally checked e-mail, there was sad news. Poochini had died, Ashley reported. It was not unexpected. I'd been suspecting that the little guy wasn't going to make it. She said Tosca was doing fine.

Carlos came in around 9 to get us started on our gourmet breakfast (Belgian waffles, apple sausage, broiled grapefruit) and to report that Bush had shoes thrown at him in Baghdad. I'm afraid we giggled. He suggested I look on You Tube to find the video, which I did. As we were watching it, my cell phone rang Ashley's special ring (a dog barking). I answered it and asked how she was "not good," she replied.

There was something in her voice that made me ask if Tosca had died and she said that she had. Apparently Tosca had managed to get herself out of the box she was in and into the cage and from there thru the bars of the cage and she fell onto the floor. I don't know how long she was there, but Ashley thought she was OK when she put her back in the box, but then later she found her dead. As I thought about it later, that floor is awfully cold and if she was there for any length of time it could have so shocked her that she would not have recovered. I feel very sad about it, but sadder for Ashley. We knew going into it that saving the puppies was going to be iffy. Not only were they very young, but so very, very tiny. It's why I didn't let myself bond with them yet. I'm sorry that it had to be Ashley who had to deal with both deaths.

We got on with our day. Carlos gave us a fascinating history of Ambrose Bierce, a writer for the San Francisco newspapers, who actually lived in this house, a few blocks from his friend, Robert Lewis Stevenson, who suggested Bierce move here for his health. We are on the second floor of the house, which was originally the ground floor. When they decided to expand, the roof could not hold the weight of a second floor, so they raised the original house and built another floor under it.

Bierce was eventually killed in Mexico when he went down to be an observer of fighting there. His body was never recovered. Gregory Peck apparently visited here when he was preparing to play Bierce in the movie Old Gringo. In fact, he sat in the very spot where I am sleeping. I feel so special.

We were meeting our friend Audrey at a restaurant at 1 p.m. and had time to kill beforehand so, naturally, we looked for a winery to visit first. We ended up at Mumms Napa, the champagne/sparkling wine folks. We were too late for the most recent tour, but we sat in the tasting room and tested some of their wines,

after which we took a tour through their photo gallery, mostly photos from the Ansel Adams gallery in Yosemite (though not photos by Ansel Adams himself...or of Yosemite either!). I think this was one of my favorite photos of the day.

We had a fabulous lunch at Bistro Don Giovanni, where we all had raviolis with lemon cream and/or butter herb sauce.

But my favorite thing written on the menu was meant for the younger set. It reads: Pizza per Bambini, Tomato, Mozarella, fries, no green stuff. (Pizza and french fries and no salad for little kids!)

After we left Bistro Don Giovanni, we stopped at Merryhill Winery, where Audrey had told us we could have free wine tasting. They had a gorgeous formal tasting room, all decked out for Christmas...

...and after Char discovered she and the barkeep shared a love of college football, he couldn't have been nicer to us! (Go Bears!)

But the best of the day was yet to come: Castello di Amarosa, which I described as "Disneyland for the wine lover." An authentic faux Medieval castle which opened its portcullis last year at the northern end of the valley. It was built by Daryl Sattui, who also owns a former monastery and a Medici palace in Italy, as well as the V. Sattui winery here in the valley (my 6 degrees of separation here is that the founder of the winery is related, somehow, to the woman my father dated before he met my mother).

It was pouring rain when we arrived and I felt like a drowned rat by the time we found shelter. It was also snowing along with the rain and Walt said my hair looked like it was frosted with silver.

We were too late for a tour, but we did see most of the castle, including the magnificent Great Hall and the tasting room downstairs. I will get up a folder of pix when I get home. I took lots. We did miss the dungeon, which is supposed to be set up with torture equipment such as a rack and an iron maiden Sattui apparently bought for $13,000 in Pienza, Italy (no water boarding equipment, tho).

The nice thing about visiting an authentic faux castle is that nobody is going to yell at you for taking flash photos of the authentic faux frescos.

We returned to the B&B just in time to meet John and Lisa, the real innkeepers, who are friends of Rich and Pat, and who joined us for cheese and...more wine! If you'd like a cheese recommendation try to find l'explorateur, a triple cream brie as smooth as butter. We're going to try to find some at the local gourmet market tomorrow before we go home.

No time for games tonight. We sat around the table having our "dinner" (pita chips, guacamole chips, and veggies) and how the discussion progressed from Prop 8 through the planet Xenu to the Foucault Pendulum at the new Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park is a testament to how easy conversation flows when you have friends you have known for nearly 50 years. (If you want to know how the Foucault Pendulum keeps swinging, there's a bird dunking his head in a big bowl of water over and over again at the top, unseen by visitors to the museum!)

I don't think there will be wine tasting tomorrow, other than our breakfast mimosa. I think we are just going to turn our wheels toward Davis once we have finished the eggs benedict. But it's been a great, if brief, getaway. I feel sad that I'm going home to only 3 dogs, but I'm glad Ashley was there for Poochini and Tosca when they died.

I Want to Cry

After spending AN HOUR writing this journal entry, the laptop froze and I had to exit and now I am starting all over again. It's nearly 12:30 a.m. and all I want to do is sleep, but it's now or never...so here we go once more....

As I started to say before I was so rudely interrupted, wifi is not all its cracked up to be. We are at a lovely B&B in the Napa Valley, which comes with wifi, but it doesn't seem to be very fast, it won't download things I want it to download and wouldn't upload a photo to Flickr.

Also, I forgot that the last time I used this laptop, Movie Maker wouldn't work and I intended to figure out why, but I didn't and I can't get it to work now either, so you're stuck with Cousins Day Christmas until I get home again.

The morning started early for me, 5 a.m. (after not getting to sleep until after 1 a.m.). It wasn't Nicki or the puppies who woke me up--I just woke up. So I got up and cleaned some for Ashley. I got all packed for our trip and fed the puppies twice, I was pleased to see that Tosca finally shows a weight gain--a whopping 4-1/2 to 5 oz (depending on where she stands on the scale), but Poochini is still at 3-1/2 to 4 oz, so I'm glad that Ashley will be with them for a couple of days so she can assess if there is a problem with him.

We left home around 10 and drove to the Napa Valley, where we met Char & Mike and Rich & Pat at Goosecross winery.

They were several "tastes" ahead of us and we had some catching up to do. The wine was good and each of the 3 couples bought some to take home, so I'm sure they were glad for our business on this rainy Sunday.

When we left there, we headed to Mustards Grill, which turned out to be the perfect place for a leisurely lunch (which we had already decided would also be "dinner" as well).

The sign in front boasts "almost a million pork chops served," so I felt compelled to order their "Famous Mongolian Pork Chop" which lived up to its promise. It arrived juicy and succulent (first time I'd been served pork medium rare, with real pink in the center) which came with their homemade mustard sauce and some pretty delicious sweet and sour cabbage. Mike and Rich also ordered the pork chops and seemed to enjoy them as much as I did. (Walt was eating lamb shanks, char her seafood tostada, and Pat a vegetarian dish.)

The restaurant also boasts a pretty extensive wine list.

After lunch we made our way to the Ambrose Bierce House in St. Helena. Rich and Pat are in a room downstairs and the rest of us are in adjoining bedrooms upstairs, adjacent to the sitting room and the dining room, where breakfast will be served tomorrow. I plan to sleep in the couch in the sitting room and hope that I wake up before our host, Carlos, comes to fix breakfast.

There is a great guestbook here, though, and I must share an entry with you. One guest complained about difficulty getting upstairs for breakfast and conditions of the dining room. There was an "Innkeeper response" highlighted with blue marker which read

For those of you who are staying in the downstairs room, how hard is it--really--to get to the dining room? One staircase. Is that difficult? What a shmuck.

Another guest complained that the meal was "not gourmet" and the "innkeeper response" was, What did he want? Caviar on his eggs benedict? What a shmuck.

I can only assume that the "innkeeper" wasn't anticipating return business from people!

Char had brought a game called the Mexican Train game, which is a game played with dominos, little train engines that look more like jujubes, and a noise maker that has to be experienced to be understood (when I get the video done, you'll know what I mean)

Lemme tell you, this ain't no bullet train! It's more like the little engine that could. Except the hour we took out to indulge in the free wine and cheese cocktail hour and discuss everything from the Loma Prieta earthquake to the battle of Gettysburg and the attacks on Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as critiquing Bill Richardson's beard, we played that damn game for FOUR hours. In the end Pat won, I came in second by only a few points (obviously beginners luck), and everyone else was behind us.

We don't know what is on the schedule for tomorrow. We are meeting other friends for lunch at 1 and there are a couple of wineries people want to visit, so I don't know if we are going to winers both before and after lunch or what.

But that's the nice thing about an impromptu getaway like this--it doesn't matter, does it!

Now let's see if this will post or if I have to have a tantrum!