Thanksgiving in Napa and San Francisco

Well, not to diminish our Canadian Thanksgiving in Seattle, but this past weekend in Napa was pretty sweet.

If you're a sucker for punishment you can check out all the pictures here.

Megan's family invited Cheryl and I to join them in their Thanksgiving celebration at Razi Vinyards (owned by her relatives - Fred and Cathy). The winery specializes in Chardonnay, but we had plenty of opportunity to taste a wide variety of wines this weekend.

Our first stop when touching down in Oakland was to grab dinner at In-N-Out Burger (which doesn't exist in Washington State). After ingesting some pretty sweet burgers we got on the road and headed straight for Napa.

The first winery we decided to hit was the Robert Mondavi Winery:

We jumped across the street to find the Silver Oak winery:

That's Megan and Cheryl enjoying a sip of Silver Oak's 2002 Napa Valley Cab, it was one of our favorites.

From there it was time to go meet Megan's family. What a great time! At the winery they had a poolside bar set up - beer, wine, and spirits. They had hay rides around the winery for the kids, and on Wednesday night they set up a Luau as part of the celebration.

Thursday was all about the Thanksgiving meal. Cheryl and I tried our best to help set up (though they were working like a well oiled machine, so we didn't really speed things up much). After getting the tables set, the wine poured, the turkeys out of the oven, and deep fryer (yup), and the inflatable turkey plugged in it was time to eat some amazing food - After a quick presentation from Megan. It was Fred and Cathy's 40th Anniversary, so Megan had prepared a presentation of old pictures and videos just before sitting down to eat.

We ate outside on the patio deck:

Friday morning Cheryl and I headed out to a few more wineries. Hess Winery was the first on our list - very nice, and not too expensive - then it was off to our reservation at Opus One... Opus One was the only reservation we made on our trip. At $180/bottle it was also the most expensive wine we had the pleasure to taste. At $30 per 3oz taste it was not a cheap proposition, so Cheryl and I split the tasting.

The Opus One winery was pretty spectacular:

Moving on from there we went north to visit Freemark Abbey where Cheryl and Megan sat in the grass while Shawn and I brought progressively more tannic wines their way. We found that here the more expensive wines were not the ones we liked - a good thing as far as I'm concerned.

Moving on from there we went to Duckhorn Vineyards who accepted us without a reservation. We sat down in their tasting room where Shawn and I had a heated battle to see who could prune out the most obtuse flavors actually noted in the official tasting notes. Somehow we both lost...

Off again, we attempted to go to Stag's Leap, but they closed just as we pulled in. No problem, we went just down the street to Clos Du Val which proved to be great as well. Although the pours were not as gracious as the majority of the wineries we visited the wine was good - it was the 5th winery of the day, so I probably didn't really get the most out of my senses for this one.

It was getting dark, so we headed back to the winery to pick up our stuff, and it was off to San Francisco. After a night on the town we headed in for the night.

Our hotel was a bit more opulent than we were used to:

But anyhow.... We spent Saturday doing all the regular touristy San Fan stuff - you know, trolleys, china town, sea lions, towers. We didn't go to Alcatraz but instead opted to spend more time walking around the city - and just for Cheryl I went by Macy's to try and catch the lighting of their Christmas tree.

Saturday night we headed to a play - Beach Blanket Babylon "the longest running, hit musical revue in theatre history". The show was booked, but we got a screaming deal from someone who was trying to get rid of their tickets just before the show.

Anyhow, we had fun. Sunday we flew back to Seattle, so now it's back to work!

Again, more pictures here.