We enjoyed our last ride through Napa Valley today. There are so many incredible places to visit here. But even with unlimited time and money, I couldn’t spend much more time here. Even I need a break from drinking wine and going out to eat!
Nothing in life is free. But when you’re a member of a winery’s club, you have bought some privileges. And when you live far away from said winery, it is in your best interest to maximize those benefits while in town. We are accountants, after all. And so today, we went back to V. Sattui.
Our membership includes complimentary tastings in a variety of venues on property. As mentioned, it’s a big place. So we enjoyed a new experience today.
We arrived early for our 10:30 tasting to ensure a good parking spot. The weather is much cooler and it was an overcast day, and so we were able to park in the main parking lot today. We took up two spots, but figured that wasn’t a big deal on a Sunday. We could already tell that the valley was significantly less crowded than it was yesterday. Daisy was safe and comfortable.
Arriving on the grounds is just so stunning..
While we didn’t walk away with any wine today, we did purchase some “futures”, meaning a case of wine will come to us once fully matured and bottled in a couple of years. It’s an exciting way to buy wine, especially one that we have really enjoyed. It happens to be an “Ancient Vine” Zinfandel, likely to be the last, if not one of the last, harvests from this particular vineyard. Yes we are wine geeks. But we enjoy it.
Then it was on to lunch and shopping! We had another wonderful picnic lunch (complete with a diet coke, thank you) and bought a couple of other goodies from their extensive market. After all, our wine will need some good cheese and chocolate to accompany it over the next couple of weeks.
On our way out, we drove again through Vittorio’s vineyard, where we took the pictures of the beautiful ripe grapes on the vine just two days ago. Guess what? They are all picked! I’m so glad that we got to see both the before and after. What a neat experience, again, for wine geeks like us.
We were back in the RV park and settled before 2 for our final Napa nap. The remainder of the day included some cleaning, prep for being back on the road and a wonderful home cooked pasta dinner. No wine, either; and while there were plenty of options to go out to dinner, we just craved our normal routine of a home cooked meal. It was delicious. We are so grateful to be well equipped to enjoy meals “at home” vs going out all of the time. I would never enjoy it if we had to go out all of the time.
Tomorrow we formally begin our trek East! We have a couple of weeks and 3 National Parks to go (if they remain open, of course). We look forward to each step on the journey, but it will be nice to know that each day we are closer to home.
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