The Berringer Wine Tour
After we had breakfast this morning, we went to take a tour in Berringer. At first, I hadn’t been so interested in it because I thought Berringer was a big commercial winery where some of the others that were smaller and less established would be more interesting. But it turned out, in fact, that the Berringer wine tour was one of the best ones of all.
On a busy day, they can actually sell out their tours. So if you call in advance, you can get a reservation and pay for it, but even if the advanced reservations are sold out, they do reserve a certain number of the tours that can only be purchased in person. What we did was we swung by early, walked in, bought the tickets (which are sold in a building closest to the parking lot and were $20 each), walked out and went to breakfast.
The tour was a half an hour long, and starts off in the old wine making area that the Berringer family used 100 years ago. It turns out that the Berringer Winery is the oldest winery in the valley and that it was one of the only 3 wineries that stayed open during Prohibition in Napa Valley. They reason they stayed in business and got special permissions from the state of California was because they were selling wine as a medicinal wine through drug stores and you had to have a prescription for it. They also sold their wines as sacramental wines to the religious organizations that used them. The sense(?) that we got from the guide was that a lot of the religious and medicinal uses of the wine were simply the same reasons that people drink wine today.
They took you on a tour through a short section of the caves that they used in the past. The caves or tunnels were used to keep a constant 58-60 degrees temperature whether it was winter time or summer time. The tunnels were quite beautiful and they had lots of the oak barrels that they used to make wine. They gave us 3 different wines to try and as a new wine drinker, or actually, more of a sipper as I’m more likely considered, I’m finally starting to be able to taste the differences in different wines. One of them tasted like French onion(?) soup, another one had this weakened(?) taste like vanilla. At least, I was starting to be able to tell the differences. I still don’t swallow though; I spit them out.
They had a few other tours that we talked to the ticket-seller about, but the main difference with the other tours, I believe, is that one of them takes you into the other buildings and another one of them takes you out into the vineyards. The vineyards are not the actual vineyards where they raise the wine-producing grapes, but simply a sample vineyard so you can see how it’s done.
We found out that the Berringer Winery has gone through many owners, and it’s currently owned by an Australian company that also own Stag’s Leap Winery and 35 other wineries worldwide. I also found out that grapes can be transported about 12 hours from the time they’re plucked until the time they’re squeezed for wine. This means that the vineyards don’t need to be in the exact same place as the winery, but it’s more of a historical thing that they do.
