I love Christmas, I love my family and I love not being freezing cold so basically I’ve been having a pretty great time lately. The fam just headed back to the East Coast after a very full week and a half or so of visiting here with me on the Central Coast of CA. There were various travels and fun times and great weather and one very cramped apartment, but by far the best time we had was our day trip on Saturday to Napa Valley. The brother of one of my parents’ good friends from back home (whew) owns a winery there in Rutherford called Frog’s Leap, and it is beautiful and totally organic and most importantly, their wine is delicious.

Brother and boyfriend tasting on our tour by the vineyards

It was a few hours away, so we headed out nice and early for a slightly overcast and very curvy drive up to Napa. We stopped at a cute little grocer for breakfast and then headed down the road to the winery. What’s so great about it, besides the fantastic wine of course, is the overall incredibly friendly and homey feel. We had thought we were going to miss the scheduled tour, but as soon as we got there they let us jump in with a tour that had just started. It was very small and informal and the tour guide was just a really nice normal guy who obviously loved his job. Not that I blame him.

In the wine cellar

He took us out to the actual vineyards first, because he wanted to make sure that we understood just how much work it really is to pick these grapes, and he wanted to give credit to the actual field workers. They don’t hire migrant workers, they have a full-time staff that harvest who get full benefits and a whole month off to recuperate. They seem to be one big family, where the boss (my parents’ friend, whom I have met and is a really nice guy) actually knows everyone’s name and cares about them and they in turn can’t say enough good things about him.The employees don’t even have specific job titles, because they are all expected to help out with whatever needs to be done. Our tour guide was able to talk about first-hand how grueling bottling time is, because he’s put in his time on the line. Basically, by the end of his tour he had all of us ready to do whatever we had to to get his job.

Yummy wine on the tour

As we walked around through the grounds, the cellar with barrels of wine aging, the barn filled with vats fermenting we got to have a little tasting as well. Our guide carried a super-cute basket with a few bottles and filled us up with a different wine at each stop. Now, I am no wine connoisseur, but I have definitely had my fair share. And probably more than my fair share of crappy wine. As in, wine in a glorified juice box. (College, what do you want?) I am usually of the sissy needs-really-sweet-wine camp, but wow. We tried the Sauvignon Blanc, Zinfandel, Rutherford (Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc) and Merlot. And they were all incredibly delicious. Even the Merlot was so smooth and had no bite to it at all.

Especially awesome about this winery, and an obvious point of pride for them, is that their entire operation is organic: no pesticides, no irrigation. They even have a big garden behind the main house with all sorts of fruits and vegetables. Not impressed? How about organic cage-free eggs? Yeah, they sell those to the fancy restaurant down the road. The main house was built with (if I recall) almost 100% reclaimed materials, and the other buildings use similar materials as well. One was built using wood from an old bridge in Canada. This of course appealed to my hippie tendencies and impressed my “waste not, want not” parents as well.

After the tour we got a cute little room to ourselves to sit and have a few more glasses of whichever wine we liked best (since we had essentially had our tasting on the tour), with a little plate of cheese, crackers, nuts and dried cranberries. All in all, it was just a perfect experience which was very much worth the drive. And we all came back with many bottles of delicious Frog’s Leap wine.

We bought so many bottles of this delicious wine