Signature Required; Must be Over 21

Hey guys, sorry if it sounds like I’m shilling for VISA, but Kathy and I had a great excuse to wear a few numerals off of her new VISA Signature card this past weekend. We’d had such a great experience up north in Healdsburg, Sonoma County, with program-participating tasting rooms up there welcoming us with open bottles, that we thought we’d check out the Signature program wineries a bit farther south in the county.

Good thing we didn’t run into some of these joints the first time, a few weeks ago, that we mentioned Signature; we’d have blown off the whole program and demanded our annual VISA fee back.

I think I wrote last time about Kath and I preparing a script, fully expecting that we’d get blank stares when we mentioned that the Sig program entitles us to waivers of normal tasting fees and, in some cases, purchase discounts (“Well, we have the VISA brochure, and you’re listed as being a part of the program. We’re going to buy, so can you honor it?). Our first stop last time, in Healdsburg, was J Vineyards, and they not only knew the program, but treated us as if we owned a San Francisco wine distributorship. VIP ASAP all the way. In fact, we visited dozens of joints that weekend, and all but one threw open the doors to the Chamber of Secrets.

Last Sunday, not so much.

It all started with an e-mail notification from Cline in Sonoma that our quarterly wine club mix&match selection was available for pick-up. Last year, about this time, we’d divested ourselves of all our wine club memberships, and only recently $tarted tru$ting our finance$ to local fave$ we loved, and which would give us an excuse to avoid shipping charges as an excuse to take road tasting trips. Gotta love Northern Cali; that’s what I’m talking about.

So Kath had this cool idea to pick up our Cline (one of the two bottles was the Live Oak Zin from an Oakley vineyard located, interestingly enough, off Live Oak Avenue; that’s what made vineyard sleuthing so easy from Cline when we first started this blog thang), and then check out the fewer southernmost Signature-participating wineries that we hadn’t hooked up with when we went north last time.

Now, some of the VISA Signature joints listed close to Cline are notorious tourist traps. You know, capacious buses and super-stretch limousines full of bachelorette-party attendees sipping Cosmos from plastic cups in the back seats after they deep-throat that Viognier. So it’s no surprise that the closest Sig participant après Cline is a winery that seems more interested in trying to move merch than mouthfeel. Hey, it’s all good; even if Homes de Tasting Room sounded like he’d just awakened 20 minutes before his shift, he knew The Program. We bought our bottle of summer white big gulp and bailed before a sea of strapless sandals beat us up getting to the Lisa Marie.

It was actually a fun afternoon of tasting and touring in this Southee end up to the Sonoma Valley. But it wasn’t until, midway through the afternoon that we hit the emotional jackpot. OK, the setup probably promises more than it delivers, but, in wine tasting terms, this is dot, dot, dot.

OK, Kath and I dig. There are discrepancies. We got to Gloria Ferrer, but they were having a special event: tasting room closed. Dude, apologetically, offered us a coupon for a glass of wine on our next visit, even though our card SHOULD OFFER US MULTIPLE GLASSES OF WINE. All caps, so wrong; I’m sorry right now. But check out Kathy’s groovy, oh-so-centered-Diane-Arbus-like photo above. OK, Arbus-ish, but without the hairy dude. So, this is an “I Love You, I Hate You” winery joint, like that one hurdle in Healdsburg. It’s listed in VISA’s brochure; it’s absent from their web site. It’s listed as “Appointment Only,” And then, there are “We’re Open” balloons on a sandwich board. And they’re on our Sig list! If you can’t read the sign on the right, ZOOM in. Oh, this is not right.

“Tasting in the Barrel Room” point the arrows on the sandwich boards. We get to the front doors and walk through this great walkway lined with French oak barrels, culminating in a groovy, literally cool, lounge with couches and a tasting bar. Manager is regaling a party of six at the sofas. Homes at the tasting bar, talking to one person, tell us, as one winery (personified) did two weeks ago, that they have been trying to extricate themselves from Signature.

FYI, Homes at the bar made no effort to engage manager for our query. Manager finally stopped schmoozing party o’six, got the dope on the whole VISA Signature thing. He offered us a 2-for-1 tasting, saying something like, “Staffing and until we get the remodeling done.”

Declined. Oh, not by credit; by us.

But ya gotta know, we worked north to St. Francis from East CoCo County in Oakley. Rony Francisco Perez is a star. He pours at St. Francis but pours out more knowledge than wine. Homes can hook you up with Sonoma restaurants, and dude does not have to read a cheat-sheet.

Funny how you leave a region, a state, a province, or a country based on who you met. And that’s what tasting rooms are all about.