Wine Daze

If you have ever looked at wine at a store in America, you have most likely noticed that a lot of the wines come from California. A healthy chunk of that wine gets made on the on central coast. That’s where we live. We live in wine country. There are grapes growing everywhere. We have learned a lot about wine and wine making since we have been out here. For one thing, there is a difference between vineyards (growers of grapes) and wineries (makers of wine). This may seem obvious, but we have kind of realized what that difference means since we’ve been living with it. The grapes growing everywhere are for the most part just vineyards. The grapes are grown and then sold off to wineries. The really big California labels that you might have heard of: Barefoot, Almaden, Gallo, Turning Leaf and the like are all a bit more north and central California, but they likely buy grapes from all over. What we have a lot of around here are “mom & pop” type wineries, a few of which have their own vineyards. They are small, usually a family business, specialize in a few kinds of wine, and they focus on quality over quantity. These are wine makers you most likely will never have heard of unless you have been to them before. It’s their small size that keeps them unknown to the world at large because they tend to make great wines! Wineries are thick on the ground in central California, but nowhere are they thicker than in Paso Robles.

The city of El Paso de Robles is forty miles north of us, but still in San Luis Obispo County. It is “The Pass of the Oaks.” When it isn’t called just Paso, it gets called “PAA-so RO-buls” or “PAH-so RO-blays” depending on the speaker. We use the later. We happened up on Paso Robles back in 2005 on our honeymoon. We have been excited about going back there to try some new wines.

We went to one new winery and one “old favorite.” The new winery was Wild Coyote. They are a vineyard, winery and bed & breakfast. Their approach to wine-making is that if you want to drink, say, a merlot wine it should be made from just merlot grapes. Apparently, many wines are blended from various kinds of grapes to maximize the flavors. Sometimes up to 15% of the wine is some other kind of grape. Not so at Wild Coyote. Their merlot was the best we have ever tasted. It was so good we bought a bottle of it even though we don’t typically like merlots. They also had a really good zinfandel port. In fact, all of their wines were really good.

The other winery we visited was Castoro Cellars. We first visited it on our honeymoon and at the time it was the best wine we had ever tried. Now that we have tried and enjoyed so many more wines we weren’t as impressed by Castoro. We tried their cabernet-sauvignon, which is usually our favorite varietal (a fancy wine term meaning “kind”), but we didn’t like it too much. We didn’t waste the visit however, we bought a bottle of an off-dry gewürztraminer that was quite good.

We got three bottles from Paso Robles. Those, plus the ones we already had from the local World Market (they always have a great selection!) means that we had a lot of good stuff to drink.

Of course, Paso Robles has other things to partake in. We ate at a Mexican restaurant, which turned out to be not that great. We did a little shoe shopping. We also went to an olive farm. There was an olive market in the town proper that we weren’t that impressed with. We were hoping for a lot of olive choices but they mostly had olive oil and products made from olive oil. Still, it was better than our stop at the actual olive farm. It was closed! That’s okay, we’ll be back again someday soon…

A quick P.S. from Matt: If a zombie outbreak occurs, one of the safer towns to be in will be Paso Robles. The main cemetery in town in isolated from the rest of the town by a big ditch. It looks like a little island in a valley off to the edge of town. Anything that helps to slow down the undead hordes is a good thing.