Wine tour with actual photos of Mommy

I don't try to select photos of Max and myself, but it's very hard not to. Mom is nowhere to be found, despite the fact that she spends way more time with Max than I do. Why is this? Because she's also the only one taking pictures.

So I took actual photos of Delia last week, and am presenting them here. Let's get started.

Max at Smith Vineyards.

OK, technically this photo is of me. Delia took it. So Nevada County, the area in California where we live, isn't known for a lot of entertainment, but there are events that are extremely cool. The Northern Sierra Wine Trail is one of them. Once a year, the wineries in this area open their doors, bring in musicians, and serve lots of food. Perhaps their serving lots of food is a bit of an exaggeration, but we certainly eat lots of the food they serve... For those of you who have been to other wineries, particularly the behemoths in Napa, these wineries are different. The operations are very small, and one winery even operated literally in the garage of a guy's house in Colfax. You'll often find yourself going through 1-lane dirt roads in the middle of a forest to find them. But the settings can be spectacular and the people are usually quite friendly and informal. The wines generally sell only locally, which means you probably haven't heard of any of them. Smith Vineyards has one of the better food spreads, and had barrel tasting as well.

(Useless sidebar: Wineries are often known by their county - Napa County or Sonoma County - and we live in Nevada County - so why are our wineries known as Northern Sierra or Sierra Foothills wineries, and not Nevada County wineries? You might wonder. More likely, you don't. In any case, here's your answer: It's marketing. One of the oldest cities around here, which starts a short walk from our house, is Nevada City, California. Nevada is Spanish for snow. However it wasn't originally called Nevada City, CA - it was called Nevada, CA. Later, the state of Nevada was founded, stealing the proud name of Nevada and forcing our fair city to have the awkward name of Nevada City, CA. We still live in the confusing area of Nevada County, CA. Now, no one wants to go to Nevada County wineries because people (a) don't want wines from Nevada, which is basically a desert, and (b) people, I am guessing, don't want casinos in the tasting room. So there you are.)

Back to the photos:

Here's Delia! A nice lady volunteered to take this photo for us. I didn't actually take a photo, but there is indisputable evidence of Mommy.

OK, let's try again.

Delia and I at a food/wine pairing line at Lucchesi vineyards.

Delia was with me the whole time. I wanted to highlight the forest in the back by contrasting the green with the red canopies in front and...oh, I didn't take this picture either. OK, here we go:

OK, now here's my wife. I took this photo. As I wine taste, Delia's with her beverage of choice (Sprite) - she generally avoids alcohol until she's done with breastfeeding. Max isn't exactly in this photo, but I believe he's in the area.

Delia reading the wine trail pamphlet with Max.

Success! This is an actual photo of Max and Delia that I took.



Another example of Delia and Max. This photo shows the backdrop of Lucchesi. The vineyards are in the foreground and the Sierras are in the background.

This photo shows us picnicking in Solune Vineyards, which is about halfway between Grass Valley and Colfax (on Highway 80 going to Tahoe, which is about 15 minutes from Auburn...ahh, you don't care.) Solune, if you're ever in the area, makes very tasty wines if you're willing to pay for them.

We made it to three wineries. We have extensive photos of the first two, and the third one, Avanguardia, blends Russian graps into white wines. They can actually taste like reds. Very unusual, actually avant guarde....oh, that's the name. Anyway, it was a good setting but we were basket cases by the time we got there. We missed a turnoff, but our GPS navigator told us to make a different turn off the highway. We could barely find the turnoff - it looked like a small dirt driveway. And that's where GPS, and Nevada County, get very interesting.

I think one of the best ways to find the character of an area is to get lost. And, as we took our Honda Civic through increasingly rutted and narrower dirt roads that cut through 10-feet high thorn bushes, we started to wonder who actually lives here. The answer came when we saw a gentleman in his front lawn (loosely defined), smoking marijuana while wearing a football helmet, near a large boiling pot. I think we saw a leg sticking out. Soon, the GPS told us to take a right, which may have been helpful except it required us to mow a tree over. Luckily, there was a place to turn the car around before the dead end. We ended up finding a road with some sign of long-gone pavement, and eventually made it to the winery. Tracing backward, we found the winery was off a major road, but our GPS navigator evidently has a sense of humor.