Unlike a lot of the other Web deals of which we’ve availed ourselves, this one was all over the map (that map still being Sonoma County), but it did allow us to hit the valley north of the city of Sonoma with relatively few worrie$.
It’s actually pretty comical these days at small tasting rooms. They’ve all been hit by obvious telephone blitzes from the sales teams at sites such as Groupon, livingsocial, Amazon and the like. What Kath and I are seeing is more and more wineries signing up for all of the pitches, and then having to check their files to see the terms of the offer that we just presented. It’s of the order of, “Is this card for the complimentary tasting or the discount?”
We used our newly minted Sonoma Passport as an excuse to head up to Cline to pick up our latest club shipment, this one featuring a Zinfandel from our Oakley old vines at Live Oak Vineyard a few miles up the road from the manse, before heading up to a few joints, old and new to us, in the Sonoma Valley burg of Kenwood.
Kaz Winery is the very definition of shoestring: small production, limited tasting room hours, and wine poured by the winemaker-slash-co-owner-slash bottle-filler-slash-barrel-rotator. The card gave us a dollar-amount discount on purchase, but we were charged tasting fees, so it was a wash. Kaz’s wines were very distinctive: unfiltered, unfined and sourced from neighboring vineyards. They were also remarkably acidic; cellaring wouldn’t be just recommended, it’s probably mandatory. I’ll be dead in a year, but Kathy can hip you to tasting notes on the Kaz juice after a few anni. As befits K’s photo, winemaker Kaz is indeed the cock of the walk.
Motoring north on Highway 12 to the Versailles that is Ledson, we stumbled into the outrageously capable hands of tasting station agent Robert Blade, a law student working part-time at the winery, but who should own the friggin’ joint. Knowledgeable, personable and totally engaging, Robert upgraded our upgraded tasting to a bacchanal wherein the number of pours were written in invisible ink, and even the basic tasting fee miraculously disappeared. When we mentioned that we were touring from Oakley in CoCo, his eyes lit up: That Mourvèdre, still spelled “Mouvedre” on Ledson’s label, was one of the next in our glasses. Taste-tay.
Over the years at tasting bars, we’ve overheard some crazy shi-ite. A nouveau riche admiring a wine in a green bottle, not a wine glass (“Oh, look at that wonderful color!”); a beautifully bossy tasting room captain yelling at bar hogs to make room for us (“We have people who want to actually buy, here!”).
So when we heard the ignorami at the other end of Robert’s station go all “I don’t like this at all. I live in Europe” in a New Jersey accent, no less, the ears of Kathy and me went all Scooby-Doo.
Props to Robert, ever the pro. Should probably stand him in great stead with a judge as much of an a-hole as this tasting dude, once Robert passes the other sort of bar. But one could see that his party flustered him, not that said party cared about impressing anybody in the vicinity.
When Robert approached our bailiwick to pour some other special selection from what looked like Cost Plus condiment bottles, I made some lame remark about Homes, living in Europe, pissed that he couldn’t get Olympic Games tix. I needn’t have bothered: At Versailles chez Kenwood, protocol, like King Louis, rules. Screw cake, man: Let them chew Mouvedre.
And we stop, on the way back home, at VJB, also in Kenwood. It’s a winery specializing in Italian varietal wines, and the Sonoma Passport entitled us to freebie tastings at its new tasting facility. Nice stuff, and, like Jacuzzi down the road, they offer a Prosecco initially made in Italy. It did not hurt the final leg of the valley trip that the Old World patriarch of the enterprise walked into the tasting room and toasted Kathy and me with a “Salut!” as we held our flutes of bubbles.
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