Tour Talk

My time at Cakebread Cellars 25th Annual American Harvest Workshop has just flown by. There’s been so much happening and I wanted to give you an update as quickly as my head (and liver) would allow.

Friday dawned fresh and clean (albeit a bit foggy, not unnatural in this place at this time of year) and the group split up into those who wanted to golf with Dennis Cakebread and those who desired to float down the Napa River in a kayak with his brother Bruce.  Guess which one I chose.  However, I must admit that paddling was great exercise and the cool river water helped with the sweat.

Lunch was al fresco in the Foster Road Vineyard and I really enjoyed the Chardonnay Reserve 2008 from the Carneros portion of the Napa appellation.  Papaya and pineapple led to brioche and green pear on a high intensity, very long finish.  At the very last minute there was a burst of yellow apple that quenched thirst and made me want another glass.

That afternoon I attended a vertical tasting seminar for the Dancing Bear Ranch Cabernet Sauvignon, a special, Howell mountain vineyard purchased in the late 1990s by the Cakebreads for the express purpose of producing a reserve-quality red wine.  While I found most of the bottlings very good, my favorite was probably the purple-red 2006, bursting with dark chocolate, red cherry boysenberry and ginger.  The tannins were huge on this monster of a red wine, but they finished very clean and smooth, boding well for the bottle’s long-term aging potential.

After the seminar we joined the other 500 patrons of this spectacular event at a Grand Chefs’ Tasting, where more than 50 of Cakebread’s past invitee chefs collaborated on numerous small bites to accompany most of the winery’s current lineup.  There were lots of oysters, scallops and quail for the white wines and all sorts of duck carpaccios, lamb sliders and chocolate souffles for the reds.  After all of this I went back to my hotel and slept the sleep of the righteous, although I later heard that a few of the crazier chefs closed down the Westin’s bar late that evening.

There’s really too much going on this weekend to cram it all into a single column so I’ll relate Saturday’s happenings in the next edition.  Suffice it to say that things only get better.  Stay tuned!