Know how knowing the less about something leads to experiencing it more?
Imagine never hearing about the Grand Canyon and one day you're driving down a random dirt road in the South West and you come upon it. Or imagine studying the Grand Canyon, reading up on it, looking at pictures of it, watching movies, talking to people who have been there and then going to see it for the first time.
Which way would stagger you backwards? Which way would lead to a sublime spiritual satori?
Friday morning found Annie and I in Calistoga. After a hot tub, coffee and muffin, we get on the road to Headsburg. Picking up a car full of wine from a storage unit. It's Jack and Michelle's wine, I don't know how many cases they made that year but we have 8 of them in the car at this point.
We're heading back now the way we came. Back through Anderson Valley, hitting and taking that 90 degree onto 128 and then through Knight's Valley before dropping down into Napa Valley. Somewhere along the way we are going to stop to taste some wine. We don't know where yet. But it's going to be somewhere random and somewhere with no previous knowledge of it. I want to taste something in one of the two valleys before Napa Valley. I don't want to go to some winery I've worked for or tasted at before. The big names are off the list too. The Wisteria is in bloom, we've talked about it driving up...just how special Wisteria is, the smell, the hanging visuals, how it's real early this year. Annie decides we stop at the first winery we see that has Wisteria somehow connected to it. We pass a winery that was named something like Stuhlhiemer and I say "Ok, no winery with the word Stool associated it". Annie spots a winery with another name that had body functions tied to it....no wineries with anything remotely body function like.
We're seeing nothing so far that fits the criteria....Wisteria, no stool and no other body functions. Thinking maybe we need to broaden the search words. We're through Anderson Valley and just about to drop down out of Knight's Valley. And I mean right before, there it is a winery sign with Wisteria in bloom around it. Brake, a U turn and down the road, park and walk into a mobile bottling operation going on, music blaring, fork lifts, all hands on deck people. We walked completely around the place looking for the tasting entrance until a worker directs us into the stainless tank area.
Instead of the de rigueur counter with pourers behind and tasters in front, there's a ten foot picnic table. A big group of people are sitting and tasting. There's room for us. $15 gets you 9 pretty healthy pours, a bit of pound cake with a wine sauce and a whole plate of salumi and pane. This is way tasting should be done, something that many wineries have lost in their rush to "a wine experience". We meet the others. A couple from Florida with two of their grown children and their young kids. There are two winery dogs that meander around us, waiting for just the right time to snatch that bit of pound cake off the table. Forklifts are picking up pallets 15 feet away. The wine on the whole is pretty good. Right away Annie has decided she's getting some of the first wine of the taste. It's a Rosé of all things!
The last little bit of surprise is the walk into the caves to taste one last wine. All their barrels are stored in the tunnels they dug into the hillside behind the winery. That's not that unusual but inside these caves were alcoves with a couple dozen at least marble busts of random people. Ronald Reagan, a Pope, Gandhi, a lot of Italians, Einstein.
Annie buys her three bottles of Fiore Rosa D'Amore. It was such an enchanted little place made better by not knowing nothing. Maybe not staggering backward nor sublimely satori Grand Canyon-ish but it was something.
We have to stop at one more winery, I have to pick something up from a past photo shoot. This one requires an intercom to the winery to let you in the gates and a voice that tells you which "level" you've been assigned to and where to park your car.
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