Today we drove from Redwood National Park down towards San
Francisco. We stopped in Sonoma County
(wine country) on our way. We went to
Benziger Winery and did a winery tour. It
was a cool experience! We have been
looking for winery tours for awhile now.
We didn't know if we'd do one in Oregon or California. We didn't quite find what we were looking for
in Oregon, so we decided on California.
We are most definitely not experienced wine drinkers and were a little
bit intimidated by the wine tasting scene (should we just swirl the wine
around, smell it, and pretend that we know what's good?)… we wanted to go on a
winery tour to see how the wine is made and the processes it goes through to
get to the bottle.
Benziger Winery is a biodynamic farm (if you want to know
the actual definition, look it up).
Basically, it's "better" than organic. They are a self-sustaining farm. Out of 80 acres of land, only 30 of it grows
grapes. The rest of the acres are used
to create a natural environment to be able to grow their grapes without any
pesticides or outside influence. The
remaining acres house animals and insects.
They have created BEAUTIFUL habitats for the natural "good animals"
to thrive! It was a very interesting
tour and the barrel cave was impressive with 3,000 barrels of wine in it. It seemed enormous!
After
the tour, we got to taste some of their wine.
Let's just say it was much better than what we're used to. (We usually
go for the semi-cheap wine). The lady
that was talking to us about each wine was really nice and did not make us feel
"dumb" for not knowing much about wine tasting. Overall, it was a great experience, and we
are coming back to MN with some Benziger wine!
Just arriving at the winery
Many rows of grape vines
Beautiful vineyard
Our tour guide in front of the barrel cave
Barrels
Look at how far that hallway goes down there!
In front of some of the grape vines
Awesome experience!
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