Highway 12: Ledson, Landmark, En Garde and Kunde Wineries

With an infallible sense of the adventure my husband chose Highway 12 as a spectacular wine tasting road for our weekend with friends in late December last year. It was a sort of Pre-Christmas happiness that brought us together, and we were drifting from one winery to another with no purpose more apparent than our desire to taste wines and catch the changing colors of the valley and the dramatic Mayacamas mountains in the distance. 

Rising like a gothic dream out of rolling, vine-covered hills, this French Normandy Castle is simply spectacular. The Ledson family specializes in small lots of hand-crafted impressive wines: Merlot, Pinot Noir, Syrah, Zinfandel, Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, Riesling, Rosa, Madera port, and others.   

Located at the foothills of the Mayacamas Mountains on the corner of Highway 12 and Adobe Canyon Road in Sonoma Valley, the Landmark Winery offers complex, aromatic wines with deep, lasting flavors. 2013 Pinot Noir and 2012 Syrah are terrific!

The En Garde Winery is a little tasting room with remarkable red wines and happy atmosphere whose winemaker and proprietor, Csaba Szakal, is a fourth generation winemaker from Hungary. Csaba is famed for his passion for Cabernets of high elevation sites (Diamond Mountain District in the Napa Valley) and Russian River Valley Pinot Noir. 

Kunde Family Winery is a winery with incredible history that shows family's great passion for life, land and winemaking. Five generations of the Kunde Family have carried on the tradition of crafting delicious, estate-grow wines. Kunde Sauvignon Blanc, Sonoma Valley, has been my favorite white wine for a long time. It is a rich, refreshing, elegant Sauvignon Blanc with bright citrus notes and soft melon flavors. Kunde Syrah and Kunde Zinfandel (both Sonoma Valley) are also my favorites.        

More wine, please!

Castello di Amorosa: Creating Beauty of Medieval

I now fell into a regular routine of wine tasting life, which was recently varied beyond just tasting wines. I may mention at once that visiting the Castello di Amorosa (Castle of Love) was a very special cultural event to me. The April weather was delicious. The sky was blue. The stone walls and towers were soaring high over the green lawns, over the cheering crowds, over the lazy fat sheep, over the exotic Indian peafowl. The Castle was more beautiful and peaceful that I thought it would be. 

Determined to build his own Tuscan Castello in the Napa Valley authentic in every way, Dario Sattui used only old, hand-made materials and employed the same methods and techniques that would have been used some 800 years ago. It was interesting to be in the strangely real medieval Castle in the heart of California Wine Country, and imaging the pictures of the life that I would never lead. Where was a light melancholy wind around the Castle, which awakened a tender emotions in me. I felt as if the time stopped in that mysterious place, and, while I and everybody else inside and outside the Castle were still modern, the Castle itself stood in the middle ages.

With regards to the winemaking, The Castello di Amorosa specializes in producing small lots of high quality wines. My favorites are 2013 Pinot Noir, Terra de Promissio (delicious bouquet of cherry with a hint of black tea) and (of course, конечно, naturalmente) 2012 "Zingaro" Old Vine Zinfandel, Russian River Valley. I love the Old Vine Zinfandel wines from Russian River Valley vineyards!