We’ve been laying low since Melissa and Angelina left, taking in sites around our immediate area. I’ve found my favorite winery, and it’s not in Napa. It’s actually on the same road we live on. You just turn left and follow Saratoga Ave through the town of Saratoga, and then the road starts winding up the mountains and eventually reaches Big Basin.

There are a few vineyards along the way, one of them being Savannah Chanelle. I stopped there once on a day when I went for a run up in the mountains. I was the only one there for a while and chatted for quite some time while they kept pouring me extra tastings until I became a member. They can be very persuasive. I was a bit tipsy when I went running, but that’s part of my training regimine.

At the time I’m writing this, their website is permanently Under Construction. I gave a few tips on using WordPress for an intermediate site while they’re working on a new site which they admit probably won’t happen for a while. In exchange, they gave me a bottle of their 2006 Zinfandel, of which they’ve only got a few handfuls left. Score! That one, I’ll have to age. Their zinfandel was my favorite, closely followed by their diverse pinot noirs. Their reds were amazing and surpassed any others I’ve had on this trip. I’ve been there four times now. Now that I’m a member and they’ll be shipping wine to me back home, I get all the free tastings I want. I’m using my status for free drinks while we’re out here.

The plot on which they set up shop is amazing itself. They do a lot of weddings there and I can understand why. It’s beautiful.

If you walk down the path past the tasting room, they’ve got a nice little grove of redwoods by a stream. We took this shot while the two dorks were still in town:

We went again over the weekend because their manager, the guy who gave me the free wine, told us they had a couple guys coming in on the weekend to play some music up the hill by their vineyards. Hoping for more free wine and some great music, we went on Friday. It was a small crowd and great music. These guys played a bunch of music out of a request book but they kept pushing us to use their website to email them song requests. It felt a bit odd to be sitting twenty feet from the performers amidst a crowd of maybe twenty people, and having them ask us to email them song requests. The fact that no one really got good phone service up there didn’t seem to bother the performers. Anyhoo, it was a lot of fun and they played me some Toad the Wet Sprocket, so I left satisfied.

Being the exclusive member that I am, they’ll ship me two bottles every quarter. This is our first wine club membership, so we’ll see whether it’s worth it after all the shipping costs. We’ve got a pretty good stock of their wines that will be coming on the ride home with us, so we should be set for a couple days.