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.
While snowmobiling, the idea of having my water bottles freeze concerned me. In fact, the idea of driving in the car with all the water bottles frozen concerned me too. I always liked to have an unfrozen water bottle that’s handy to take a drink. We worked out a system that worked well in the car. All the water bottles in the back would freeze overnight while we were in the car, and it would even freeze when they were left in the car for not too many hours. What we discovered was if we took the frozen water bottle and put it directly on top of the heater vent, it would warm the bottle up to a point where it would melted within about 20-30minutes. In fact at one point, the water got so warm I thought that we can make some tea that way, but we never actually tried it. In real life, if I were you, I’d be careful though, and make sure not to block the vents and not to start a fire. This is what I did, but please, don’t take it as advice as what you should do yourself.
Then, came snowmobiling. When we went snowmobiling, I was really concerned about what would happen to the water bottles if they would freeze, and how I would be able to take a drink of water. I was so concerned of this fact that I devised what turned out to be a huge experiment on how to make this work. I’m guessing that the temperature, when we went snowmobiling, was ranging between about 0 and 20 degrees during the day. What was funny is that we put water bottles in a variety of different places.
One thing I did was I bought a small ice chest, which was very well-padded and the flexible kind of padded ice-chest. Inside of it, I put heated water bottles that I’ve warmed up in the microwaves. I put in this product called Lava Buns, which is a big gooey hot pack that you heat up in the microwave. Then, in addition to it, I put in about 10-12 hand warmers to keep the water warm. I would have thought that will all of that around the water bottles, they would’ve stayed toasty all day, because the Lava Buns stays warm for many hours, and the ice chest, itself, normally keeps them hot or cold for many hours. The truth was by the end of a day of snowmobiling, that water was still defrosted, but it had gotten quite cold. I think if it had stayed much longer it would’ve frozen. That was an ice chest that was on the back of a snow mobile.
I also had on my camel back and on it I’d already had the bladder that holds the water. What I had done was, I put a water bottle into the camel back that was up against my back and thrown a couple of hot packs of hand warmers in there. I found that that stayed very warm even though I was wearing it outside of my jacket. So, the lesson learned from it was that it was either a combination of my body blocking the wind and the warmth of my body keeping the camel back warm, even though it was outside my jacket, and the fact that the ice chest was a few feet away from me where it was getting blown by a lot of wind and had no protection or warmth source. In the end when I do this again, I’ll just simply wear my camel back with a few bottles of water in it that are held against the back of my jacket, along with a few hand warmers inside. That should keep the water from freezing at least for half a day out and about.
Beautiful, fantastic, unbelievable. We just finished our dinner at Carneros. We sat at the bar so we didn’t have to order a traditional dinner, which is one of our great tricks to get all the best food for the best price. At Carnero’s they have a bar you can sit up that’s about 6ft that look over the kitchen. We sat right in front of an Argentine chef who’s putting together the most masterful dishes one at a time right in front of us. It was great because we were able to see what looked good before we ordered it.
The first thing we ordered was sea scallops that have some kind of foam on top that were incredible. The truffle foam on top was wonderful and the scallops were done the right way where they were only lightly cooked so they’re almost like sashimi when you eat them. Underneath the scallops were these tiny baby brussel sprouts that were buttery and a little crisp. I also ordered the foie gras. They give you a very generous portion. Underneath the foie gras was a piece of buttery toast and a nice thick slice of roasted pineapple. The combination of the three of them made it taste like dessert. We also ordered a beet salad with the goat cheese on. They were nice enough to put it into two portions and gave us each our own swan, which tasted like butter. I ordered two roasted oysters that came in little shells sitting on a bed of sea salt. Each one of them was perfect and unbelievable, screaming with flavor.
During the dinner, I’d been watching the chef cook this mixture of vegetables and I became more and more curious about it, because it was being used on many of the plates that went out. I asked our waiter about it and it was actually what they call “home fries”, although it looked nothing like fries. It was chopped potatoes, red peppers, onions, yellow peppers, and also pabuano peppers with bits of lobster. I know because I discussed it at lengths with the chef.
The Argentine chef who I got into a discussion with, turns out that he grew up in the northern part of Argentina and we had the opportunity to discuss Argentine barbecue. I asked him if he could give me the smallest spoonful of it at the end just so I could taste it and that was after we had our dessert of basal lemon pound cake with lemon gellato triangles and a dab of (???) cheese. Again, we were given two portions of it when we only ordered one and asked to have it split in half.
We also had espresso, wine and hot tea. And then, in the end when I asked him for a tiny taste of the home fries, he actually gave me a bowl with no charge. We walked out of there stuffed and the entire bill would’ve been about $85 except for the fact that the guy sitting next to us had a coupon for 10% off he got for staying at the hotel that he generously gave to us. Once we put the 10% off, it only came to 75%. We gave the waiter a $25 tip because he’d done such a fantastic job and we walked out there extraordinarily happy and satisfied.
The restaurant was beautiful. When you first see it, it looks very unassuming on a busy street and it’s off the side of a nondescript hotel almost looking like it’s in a mini-mall and you would never think that it was one of the most marvelous meals we’d have had in our life. The hotel is called the Lodge In Sonoma.
On December 23rd, we arrived at the Wind Hotel just a few days after the Encore had opened; in fact it may have actually been the next day. The first thing we noticed was that the Wind was a lot less crowded than it normally is. We went shopping at the Wind shops and the bargains were absolutely ridiculous. I found a pair of Seven jeans for $50 and my wife got a couple of dresses for around 75% off, and these weren’t just junkie - they were absolutely the best of the best.
We decided to walk over and see the Encore, and they had remodeled the passageway through the conference rooms and even the hallway through the conference rooms was absolutely gorgeous - decorated with beautiful art and unbelievable carpeting and roofing. When we walked into the Encore, it had the same feel as the Wind. It had the butterfly motif, but it also had something different. The casino was divided into sections and they had big overhead skylights to light it. There was a garden area outside that had a light so bright that you could swear it was daytime when you looked outside. There were a lot of new restaurants and we walked from restaurant to restaurant, checking the menus and figuring out where we were going to be eating in the future. The attention to detail in the decorations was outstanding and everywhere you look, you can see the butterfly pattern repeating itself.
When walking through the Encore, we saw upon the wall this beautiful glass dragon that must have been 30ft long and was made of thousands of pieces of crystal glass. When we went in, we were surprised that they were able to take us right in and have dinner. Both of the hostesses who worked there were gorgeous. They’d obviously sifted through a lot of various employees to find these two.
The inside of the restaurant was beautiful and in keeping with the theme of the Wind and Encore restaurants, it was open on one side of the casino so you know you’re eating at a fancy restaurant , and you could look out watching the people walk by.
Most of what we had to eat was sushi and the quality was unbelievable, which was amazing considering the 350 miles from the ocean. During dinner, the chef (we were told he was very famous) actually walked around each table saying hello to everyone. They really seemed to care whether we liked the food or not. Everything we ate was absolutely fantastic, and for dessert, we ordered ice cream. The waitress warned me against ordering the green tea ice cream, saying that many people didn’t like it. It did taste too strong. Of course then, I had to order it so that I could try it, and I wouldn’t say I liked it, but I’m still glad I ordered it. It tasted like green tea ma-cha with condensed milk that had been frozen. The amount of tea in it was absolutely staggering, almost as if you were eating tea. So, I wouldn’t say it was something I liked, but it was truly one of the most fascinating things that I put in my mouth.
The whole time we sat there, we were continually dazzled by the dragon on the wall. The thing must have weighed a thousand pounds and all we could imagine was what would happen if there was an earthquake. And I kept thinking about how much work it must be for them to try and keep it clean over time, especially since it’s in a restaurant. It looked like the type of thing that one would see in a museum, not the kind of thing one would see on a wall of a restaurant. In fact, it really amazed me. I don’t even think that something like that would’ve been possible 10-20 years ago if it wasn’t for computerized designs that they have now to make things like that.
Where I grew up, it was really sunny and dry. In fact, it hardly ever rains. So for us to take a drive up to Yellow Stone in the winter was a very daunting experience. In fact, it scared the crap out of me. What happened when we hit the slick ice, the ice gets too slippery and we can’t even go up the hill? Why do people snow shovel anyway? How do you put on tire chains? Where do you buy tire chains? I had to figure all of these out before we took the trip. For anyone that knows me knows that I’m an over planner.
So, I read and I studied, I studied and I read, and I put together what people in the know really suggested was important. The truth is that in big SUVs like the one I’m driving, you can leave someone into complacency and thinking that nothing is going to happen. But the truth is that people do get stranded in snow storms, and they can actually die because they’re unprepared.
First thing I learned is that it doesn’t take too many layers of high quality clothing to stay warm even in the most cold of conditions. If you have on a pair of Ugg boots, a good pair of socks, two layers of high quality thermal underwear, a sleeveless vest, a pair of snowpants over it, a couple layers of thermal underwear on top, and a nice thick snowboarding jacket with a hood, provided you’re inside of a car and away from the wind, you can survive in practically any temperature that you’re going to get in North America. I suppose if you have to sit there day after day, it might eventually get cold, but from my experience, that was plenty of clothes. Oh by the way, don’t forget a pair of thick gloves. I had a thinner pair of snowboarding gloves, and that was one of the only parts of my body that did get cold when it got really cold and windy outside in Aspen. We learned that that’s what glove liners are for, and it’s also what thicker gloves are for. And don’t forget the hand warmers, too! My wife loved the hand warmers. She had them shoved in every possible pocket and place on her entire body.
So, what do you need to bring in the car? Well, an ice scraper. I didn’t really get what it was for, until I realized that after you’re driving for awhile, the snow gets in your windshield. It melts a little because your car is a bit warmer and then, it freezes again and starts to form sheets of ice on your windshield. If you didn’t stop for awhile, it can form a nice ¼ - ½ inch thick layer of ice on the windshield. And if you turn on the windshield wipers and they’re locked in there, they can actually break off. So, an ice scraper, which is $5-$10 at most gas stations in any wintery area, will scrape the ice right off. Another thing to carry is antifreeze windshield wiper fluid, which is a special windshield wiper fluid that they sell by the gallon in every gas station in the cold areas. I never quite understood exactly how you’re supposed to use it except anywhere where the ice had built up too much. Just pour it on and watch the ice dissolve away. Then, I’d have to get an ice scraper and knock out the big chunks. I also read that you’re supposed to bring a snow shovel, so I kept looking; but by the time the trip ended, I was never able to buy one.
Being the overpacker that I am, I also brought enough power bars with me that they’d last a week. I also brought along a whistle and a compass. The compass is, God forbid, if you ever lose your way and you’re not supposed to leave your car or if you ever ended up separated from your car and didn’t know where to go, you got a compass to let you know. The whistle’s there so other people can find you. We also had a couple of blankets in the car - emergency blankets - and they’re supposed to reflect heat back on you in an emergency. We never really had a chance to use them.
I also brought enough food that would’ve lasted us at least three or four days in an emergency. The funny story about the food was that I bought these wonderful zone bars that I really liked. A few weeks after the trip, my wife says to me,
“Do you still have any of those zone bars?”
And I said, “Oh yeah!”
She asked, “Are they the chocolate, peanut butter ones?”
I say, “Yeah, we’ve got those. Do you want one?”
And she said, “No, but we got a letter from Costco about them.”
I said, “Really?” And I went and read the letter, which said that the bars had been re-called because of the possibility of Salmonella poisoning. I thought this was rather funny because I looked and found that I’d already eaten 1 ½ cases of them. Luckily, nothing had happened.
One of the other things that I read about that was a really good idea was to bring along little pea-like candles or some other tiny of candle that you can burn, along with putting it in into a coffee can. I don’t know how safe it is to burn candles inside of a car when the windows are up, but if you do get stuck in a car in the middle of winter, you are going to want some sort of a heat source.
One thing I never expected or worried about was the fact that the water bottles freeze when it gets that cold. We would (???) up in the car and realize that our case of water bottles had all frozen until all the water bottles had frozen shut. In fact, keeping the water bottles from freezing is a whole other blog.
This is a new restaurant that just opened in San Francisco about 3 weeks ago by the same guy who did The Slanted Door. Robert (???) hooked us up and was nice enough to reserve a little table in the lounge area for us. It was a very hip place with a bar and restaurant seats, and had a very young, hip crowd.
The food was interesting, different and couldn’t be classified in any one category, but was almost all really (???). One of the items we got was a clay pot with rice noodles and shrimp. The waitress said she loved it, my wife thought it was okay and I thought it was okay.
We also got a dish that was their dan dan noodles and was not done the way it usually is with chicken, but instead, it was done with, I believe, tofu and lots of incredible sauce with egg noodles. I thought this was the best thing we got there. It was out of this world.
I got a puffed pastry with ground beef in it. It was curried and you dipped it into a mint sauce, which was awesome.
We also ordered basil ice cream that was to die for. I was already full before we ordered it, but once I saw basil ice cream on the menu, I realized that it was something I never tried before, and I had to try it because I always liked to try something new. They couldn’t have done a better job with it. It tasted like a really creamy gelato and was absolutely fantastic.
I also got an elderflower soda, which, I believe must be from the flower, from an elderberry. It was really interesting and really good, although I made the mistake of ordering two of them. I think I was charged for both.
The prices were very reasonable. We went there hoping for a very inexpensive dinner because we’ve been spending so much money on our trip this time. Most of the items are under $10, although we still managed to walk out of there with a bill that was $75, including drinks and tips, by the time we left. It was more than what we wanted to do, but it was an awesome meal and I’m not going to complain about it.
Robert was fantastic, finding us a table. The seating was really comfortable in the bar area. The waitress was incredibly nice and had a very cool Mohawk. You can even go there just to have drinks and possibly, a pop of tequila(?), if you like it.
On a Christmas trip, I continued what I’ve been doing lately of renting a car instead of using our own. Our Range Rover (?????) miles on it, and the thought always is at the back of our minds that it might break down. And besides, as we’re driving 3,000 miles all the way to Yellow Stones, we wanted to make sure we had a car that was really, really reliable.
I tried to get my regular car at Enterprise, but they didn’t have any four-wheel drive cars. We ended up getting one from Alamo instead. The guys at Alamo at San Diego airport have really earned a place in my heart lately because we’ve rented from them a few times. This time they’ve got us into a Suburban, which took us quite a bit of work to find. But they found us this four-wheel drive Suburban that we could have for 12 days. Over the 12 days, we put close to 3,000 miles on the car. It was actually a fantastic car to drive. I’m not really one who’s used to driving on snow or ice. In fact, the concept of having to drive on snow or ice terrified me. My wife was much more comfortable with the whole idea, but the thought of driving in the snow or ice scared me.
The second day we woke up in Utah, and we had a 200 miles of isolated snowy (???), and the road looked like we were driving on 3-4 inches of ice the whole time. I started off the day very timid, very slow and very careful until the TV show, Ice Road Truckers, crossed my mind. I looked over at my wife, said, “Ice Road Truckers”, hit the gas, took it up to 80 and we drove at 80 miles/hour for hours on nothing but ice.
The question comes to mind - Is it better, in a situation like this, to be driving in our own car or better to be renting one? When you work out the costs to purchase a car and maintain it, and you compare that against reliability of always driving a new car, what I figured out is that if I’m going to be taking a road trip and driving for 1-3 days of long driving, it’s usually cheaper to drive our own car. If I’m going to be in an area that’s isolated out in the desert in the summer or out in the mountains where there’s snow in the winter, then I’d rather have a brand new car that you can get when you have a rental car. So, it turns out that the rental car, not only is it more cost-effective, but it also gives you that safety and security.
One of the big problems I run into, though, is trying to find, for a trip like this, a 4-wheel drive rental car. In fact, in town renting 4-wheel drive cars is very, very uncommon. Enterprise claimed they didn’t have any. Alamo had a few. When I talked to the people at the Las Vegas airport locations, almost three rental car companies had nothing but 4-wheel drive SUVs in Las Vegas. When you’re taking a trip, like a longer one where you’re going to be driving, say 500 miles somewhere, where you’re going to be driving 500 miles back, it’s probably cheaper just to take your own car. But if you’re going to be taking a trip where you’re putting a lot of miles on the car every day, it’s always going to end up cheaper getting a rental car, plus, you have more reliability.
The Suburban, by the way, has been fantastic. It’s got excellent satellite radio, which I’d never used before. And we found a station on it, called Coffee House, which plays nothing but popular songs from the last 20 years played acoustically by their artists. It’s such a big part that when you’re inside you feel like you’re in your living room and the weather (???) are absolutely trinormous. It makes driving along thousands of miles at a time and listening to the Coffee House even when there’s howling wind outside where it is 10 degrees below 0 and everything is covered with ice or snow, an incredibly relaxing and comfortable experience.
In St. Helena next to Press, which is a fantastic restaurant where we ate on the patio last trip is a little market called Dean and Deluca. It’s nothing like any market you’ve ever seen before. When you walk in the door, they have a nice variety of local produce, which is good to start with and they have things like a (???) by the town and you can buy one or two (???). Their meat selection has things in it like wild boar, (???) and wild boar sausage and things like duck sausage. They have a beautiful set of baked goods out and one of the things my wife loves to buy there are these crackers that are imported from Spain that have aniseed in them called “Torta De Asete”. Then in the back they have a gorgeous deli where we just got a roasted beet salad that also has orange peel, onions and blue cheese in it.
Although we haven’t tried the baked goods yet, they looked world class. They looked unbelievably beautiful. They also have a coffee shop that my wife says has great coffee. I went to the cheese department, which is my favorite section of any gourmet store. The guy who worked there was very generous and gave me samples that were so big, I almost got (???) just tasting the samples. My biggest disagreement with all cheese stores that is the minimum they sell, even if I asked them for the smallest possible amount, is still about the quarter pound of cheese. I like to try lots of different cheese so I wish I could walk into a gourmet store and they would sell me 20 different ones that were a 1/10 of a pound each or maybe even less than that - maybe 1/20 of a pound. We also bought an unbelievably good curry chicken salad that had so much flavor I thought it was about to explode out of the container. An excellent (???) to the day?
“The best place to eat on Valentine’s even with a lot of people.”
We didn’t want to have to sit at a formal dining room table and feel forced to order big entreés, so we managed to get reservations in the cellar at the Martini House in St. Helena. The Martini House is the newest restaurant of Pat Kuleto. He renovated what looks like a nondescript, older house, which was probably 50 years old, that’s in St. Helena, California. He took it and turned it into a funky, cool and chic restaurant. When you walk into the door, the first thing that greets you is the unique decorations, such as the row of old prophets(?) on the wall, and in another place, a row of old wine corks.
The place is up the road in 15 miles from Dean and Deluca, my favorite deli and upscale grocery store. The furnishings of the Martini House are mostly antiques and other used furniture. Up above on the roof, they’ve got what looks like a huge piece of driftwood with candles on the top of it. The kitchen is open, and it’s probably where the original kitchen of the house was. You go down a set of stairs into this bar, and when you get in the cellar, there’s a loud bustling bar with a beautiful fireplace, cool decorations and lots of fun people.
Our table was positioned by a window where we could also watch the people at the bar. As the show went on, which was of out-of-town wedding-going sisters being wooed by a drunken local on Valentine’s Day (by the way, the two sisters have children and were married), we sat and watched while dining on course after course of unbelievably great food.
The first thing we got was a salad with cherries, goat cheese and (???) that was out of this world. Then, I ordered their cream of mushroom soup, which I was told that I couldn’t leave there without getting and I understand why. It would’ve been a meal in itself for two people and I almost wondered if I should’ve stopped ordering after I had ordered the soup.
The guy who runs the place, the chef, is a master of mushrooms. We kept joking that because we had so little love on Valentine’s Day, they made us eat in the basement, and we had to dine on the mushrooms that grew there. The next thing we got was the lobster tail, which had been cooked for about a half an hour in butter making it soft. Usually, I honestly can’t stand lobster because it tastes so rubbery, but this one was much softer than most lobster. It wasn’t as soft as the scallops we almost ordered that they ran out of, though. We did, however, sit down to eat at 9:00.
The final thing that I got to eat was a duck tureen. I honestly didn’t know, for sure, what a tureen was. I thought it was simply something you served soup in. It looked like a mixture between chopped duck, bits of nuts, vegetables and a duck pâté all packed together into a compact cylinder. It was surrounded with bacon and had a wonderful, smoky taste. It was served on strings of apple and, I believe, celery with a little dressing, which was out of this world. The sauce underneath the lobster looked like a sherry reduction. It was so good that I scraped every drop of it clean with little pieces of bread.
All-in-all an unbelievable experience. The atmosphere was out of this world, and it’s definitely now on my list of top 10 favorite restaurants.
