Saturday, February 28, 2009

Napa Valley – Robert Mondavi Winery Part I

So we headed out to Napa Valley in search of a winery.  Well more specifically the Robert Mondavi Winery. I did not know what to expect as I am not into wine, but hey I went with the flow.

The drive up was fun especially since we headed off towards the Golden Gate bridge, stopped off at a view point took some pictures and then hit the road again.

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More about the “Golden Gate Bridge”

We got to the Robert Mondavi Winery at 10:55 with just about 5 minutes to spare for the 11:00 clock tour.  we are the last minute kind, in spite of the fact Margaret vehemently disagrees with me.  A couple of quick photo ops and we got into the tour.

Now the history of this place is pretty interesting. Apparently Robert and his brother inherited the business form their father, but never could see eye to eye on the business direction. Who could have guessed that siblings could not get along :). Mostly a case that Robert was all in to changing the business of wine making.   Robert in 1965 set off to do his own thing and created the Robert Mondavi Winery in 1966. Everything since then is his legacy in making.  Of course I am not writing his biography here, follow the link to Wikipedia and you can get all that you need to know about Robert and more.

The tour itself lasted an hour and half, really could not tell the time pass by. The open fields with the grape trellis was fascinating. I could tell that immediately that this was no easy process to setup. Apparently the grape wines are not strong enough to support themselves and they require this complex mesh with carefully measured spaces between the vines for the grapes to grow properly.

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We went through the regular “Oh there are many types of wine, …… blah blah blah” you know the spiel. Here is a quick visual summary of a few.

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After spending about 1/2 hour on the field learning about how the grapes are grown, the soil conditions they need, how the climate shift in the valley helps balance out the acid etc (trust me there is some deep stuff here) we went to the factory where the wine is pressed, aged and bottled.

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oh yes the photo quality is not that great, hey they where all taken on an iPhone and honestly given the lighting i think they came out great. Here is a learning, next time i should bring my SLR along. But there is no guarantee that the pictures will come out any better.

Now the bottom right image is the the interesting one.  This machine is used to crush the grapes so that they can extract all the juice from it. Apparently based on the speed of the press the color from the skin can be controlled.  This was fascinating to learn that the color of the wine actually comes from the skin.  Now this is priceless, the switch used to control the speed of the press. Check it out, the tortoise and the hare.

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To be continued ……

Over and out, Raj

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