On my recent trip to the Napa Valley, I visited so many tasting rooms that pretty soon they all began to look alike: polished wooden racking, dark marble bars, big windows for lighting, a few stained oak barrels for ambiance, and maybe a small rack of assorted kitschy trinkets for sale – you know, corkscrews and golf balls and baseball caps, that kind of thing. Beautiful though these places often are, my favorite experiences in the Napa Valley, I have found, are almost always had outside. Often, however, one runs into the difficulty of not being able to both simultaneously be outside and taste the wines, and when presented with such an unfair ultimatum I generally tend to opt for the latter, propping myself up at yet another polished marble bar in order to taste the precious nectar that lured me so far from home to start with, and usually purchasing yet another waiter’s key to take home and add to my ever-expanding collection… [read more]*

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