Last month, several of our staff made "the trip of a lifetime" out to California to tour some of Constellation Wine's wineries. For the next few days, we'll be posting notes and photos courtesy of Jeremy Fulmore, Regional Manager for the Gainesville area.
After a long day of travel on 9/23, we all met up in Sacramento. GM Tom Perkins, myself, WS Bill Stobbs, WCs Dave Chandler, Tegan Foster, John Weber and Cindy Michaels met up with our hosts from Southern Wine and Spirits (Alex Poreda) and Constellation Wines (Mark Bailey) and loaded up for our trip up to Sonoma.
A few hours later, we arrived in Santa Rosa and checked into our hotel, but we could not linger too long as we had to head back south for a 20 min…er...one hour drive to Ravenswood Winery. There, we were treated to a great tour of their estate vineyards and given the basics of testing brix, as well as tasting grapes from a few of their vineyards.
The night ended with a vineyard dinner accompanied by wines for each course, under the tent on their terrace looking out over the vineyards.
By the end of the dinner, most of us had brushed off the traveling blues, and we were in full California Wine Country mode—which was good, because we had a long, delay-filled, drive back to our hotel in Santa Rosa, courtesy of the California DOT doing roadwork.