Road Trip

The call of the photographer .....   My friend Diane finally retired from the same office I did, and since I previously drug her to my photography classes, she is hooked also.  Her project this year is Wine ... from grapes to the glass, so we headed off to Kautz Ironstone Vineyard in Murphys California.  Upon arrival, we met James, their head chef, who offered us wine and cheese.  Alas, we said, we are here for the pictures ... whereupon he gave us a special tour of the wine process area, as well as the caves.  We soon found out that NO tours were being offered that day, and so felt pretty special.  Upon his recommendation, we had poached salmon with aioli sauce and orzo.  It was awesome and I highly recommend lunch here.

The flowers of course are gorgeous ... they have caretakers JUST for the blooms.

An amazing place to have a picnic or spend the day, it is entirely surrounded by garden walkways.

Back in Murphys, we tried to turn around in a driveway when Diane shouted ... "there's stuff falling off that machine!!  Lets stop here!!"  And so we stopped at Val du Vino where we met Jeannine and Jonathon whose small family was processing grapes right in their little shed.  This is the entire operation!!  They invited us in, showed us the process and let us take all the pictures we wanted.

Up top they pitchfork the grapes into the machine that crushes and takes out the big stems.  The grapes and juice fall in the first bin, the stems in the second.  When the first is almost full, they wheel it into their building, add yeast and cover it up (this is red wine), starting the fermentation process.

After sitting for a few days, the grapes are then pressed and the juice filtered and placed in this tank.  You can see this vat is not full yet.

From here to oak barrels, 80% of which come from France and max out at 7 years.  The remaining 20% come from US Oak barrels which max out at 10 years, but give the wine a different flavor.

Around the side of their building, I couldn't help a few parting shots of fall color!!

From here we headed off to Moaning Caverns ... which Diane has never seen.  Do you know they have zip lines there now???  Next trip ......