sonoma: porter creek

Sonoma is like the farmboy version of Napa. Sure, there are some large estates with fancy architecture, but we only stopped in a couple just on the off chance their high consistency, high production wines (try 40,000 - 200,000 cases) were actually good. A couple were. I'll get to that later.

The Russian River valley is rolling hills surrounding the steady flow of the river. A large opening in the California coastline widens up where the Russian River pours out into the Pacific. This allows the cool evening fog coming off the Pacific to roll in every evening as the sun goes down, covering the grapes with cool moisture throughout the valley. We watched the fog burn off in the mornings as it slowly returned to 85 degrees and full sun. The location, the hot sun and cool evening moisture, is what makes this such a great wine growing region.

Keely and I had a great view of the valley from a 26 acre hill-top farm we stayed at run by Tim and Tony, two very laid back gay farmer dudes who provided us with a braying donkey,

morning rooster crows, and our own little cottage overlooking the valley.

Oh yeah, we had an outdoor hot tub too. We used it to wake up in the morning and smooth out the wrinkles at night. There's just something about making love in the hot bubbly under the stars thats unstoppable. I know you needed to know about that. Did I mention there was a mirror covering both doors of the closet running the whole length of the bed?

Our first stop in wine country and favorite was Porter Creek. The tasting room is a tar paper shack, or the equivalent, in shed form. No air conditioning here. But the pinot was fabulous. I wish we hadn't stopped there first, because by day three of tasting, I had started to forget just how good Porter Creek was. We should have gone back. I've got a bottle or two to remind myself though.

I came to Sonoma for the Pinot, though Keel ended up persuading me to taste and eventually buy other varietals. In any case, Tony (of Tim and Tony) works at Porter Creek and so we had a nice first entry into the local wine scene. Drinking some of the best from a place that only produces a couple thousand cases was the perfect starter. Mike, the guy who poured for us was at the end of his day, or else we might have had better conversation. We were the last ones out. Sometimes its hard to decide whether to buy that strange but good bottle of 100% Carignane. We were still packing up the couple bottles we bought while Mike walked down the gravel lane to change the hanging "open" sign to "closed".