​We finally were able to get back north to Sonoma for wine tasting, choosing to go when it wasn’t raining (Veterans’ Day weekend).  After a lastminute change of travel plans six of our intrepid group made the flight up to Sacramento and the drive to Sonoma.  Our plan was to visit four specific wineries, two that we visited in March 2023 and two that Doc Ed highly recommended.  As it turned out, the four were so good that we only had time to visit one additional winery (of which I will say no more about because it was a complete dud – awful wine!).
All turned out well until we headed home on that Sunday.  About halfway on our drive from Sonoma to the Sacramento Airport, we all got text messages from Southwest Airlines that our flight had been cancelled.  In fact, all flights out of Sacramento had been cancelled.  The earliest we could get back to San Diego by plane was Monday afternoon.  You see, because of the ongoing government shutdown flight controllers there were not enough flight controllers….  Fortunately, we contacted the rental car company and they were ok with us dropping off the car in San Diego – for a small fee, of course.  As some of us had to work the next day we drove to San Diego that night, a long and rather tiring drive to say the least.  (For my New Jersey relatives, this is equivalent to driving from New Jersey to North Carolina, except that our trip included driving the Grapevine – a winding mountain highway just north of Los Angeles – in the middle of the night).
On the plus side, Sonoma was quite beautiful, so I’ll end this post with pictures taken of a bridge and the nearby woods as well as the city Santa Rosa, with the reviews of the four good Sonoma wineries to follow.

​During our visit to the dreaded Finger Lakes of New York we stayed in the not-so-dreaded and quite wonderful town of Seneca Falls.  How wonderful is Seneca Falls?  Well, it was the model for the movie “It’s a Wonderful Life”.  It is also the home of the Women’s Suffrage Museum.  On the third day of our trip, we tried to visit the museum.  However, because of the government shutdown the various building were closed.  We did get some pictures from the outside:

​With the museum closed to us, we did the most obvious thing – went to another winery.  Our choice was Wagner Vineyards Estate Winery, located on the eastern shore of Seneca Lake.  Before heading off to the tasting room we had lunch in their very nice restaurant.

​Now Wagner also has a brewery, and both the brewery tasting room and winery tasting room are in a building separate from the restaurant.  Between the buildings one can get a great view of the lake.  After lunch we headed over to the tasting room building, entering their front room which sells their products – wine, beer, and a lot of other things. 

​We made our way to the tasting room in the back.  A really nice facility, and we had our own server for the tasting.  Of course, it being a weekday in October….

​The tasting menu is shown below and includes Gewurztraminer.  We couldn’t pronounce it so didn’t buy any.  Actually, it was pretty good, but the star of their wines is Riesling, and we bought a couple of bottles of the dry version for our eastern relatives to enjoy.  One is pictured below, a dry Riesling at a very nice price (~$15).  And we had a great lunch as well….

​We limited our first day of winery visits in the dreaded Finger Lakes of New York to the northern region between the two largest lakes, Senaca Lake and Cayuga Lake.  On day two we took the long drive to Keuga Lake, located to the southwest of Seneca Lake.  Our target was Weis Vineyards.  Why Weis Vineyards?  Well, they were known to have a pretty good reputation for producing quality wines, as shown below:

​The terrain in the Finger Lakes area is quite flat and largely agricultural (fields of corn, et al.), but the fall colors helped break up the monotony.  The best was near Keuka Lake.  Bright reds, yellows, and oranges.  We eventually found the Weis winery, a rather nice, modern facility.

​I was hoping that the Gruner Veltliner would be very good so I could – it is the leading Austrian white grape and known to make very good wines.  However, of the wines we tasted, it was not one of the two that proved good enough to ship to California.  The first was their “K” Reisling, a wine made in the style of the German Kabinett Rieslings.  In Germany, the Rieslings are graded according to the level of sugar in the grape at harvest.  Wines labeled Kabinett have the least sugar, followed by Spätlese, Auslese, Beerenauslese, and Trockenbeerenauslese.  The first can be anywhere from dry to sweet; the last two are very sweet, dessert type wines.  The Weis “K” version is off-dry (has a bit of residual sugar) and quite nice.
If that confuses you, then the second wine we really liked will drive you over the edge.  It is made from a grape called the Heart of the Lake, a hybrid developed at Cornell by crossing Riesling with Cayuga, itself a hybrid developed at Cornell from two – you guessed it – two hybrids.  So Heart of the Lake is a hybrid of Riesling with a hybrid of two hybrids….  The result is a very nice, light, medium sweetness, extremely drinkable wine.  It was sweet enough to meet the approval of Livia, who is definitely not the first Empress of Rome.  Please ignore the fellow standing behind the wines.  He followed us home from a holiday party....