Is everyone here from Napa? A trip to SFMOMA

This past weekend was my first opportunity to enjoy a two day weekend since August and I was eager to get out of Napa.  Part of the weekend was spent celebrating the success of good friends of mine.  

 {This space is reserved for when they are allowed to disclose the good news}.

Nothing says celebrating success like sparkling wine.  A sparkling rosé of Malbec from Argentina to be specific.  Sparkling is great for celebrations and inconspicuous early morning drinking but I try to have it as often as possible.  I want sparkling to become more of an everyday wine instead of a special occasion wine.  I hope you will all help me. 

Since I was already in the bay, I spent Sunday in San Francisco checking out SFMOMA's new wine exhibit "How Wine Became Modern, Design + Wine, 1976 to Now"

 I thought the exhibit was very comprehensive, educational material in addition to gorgeous portraits of the Napa Valley.  It covered soil types and weather in different winemaking regions like Europe, South America, California, New Zealand, Australia and South Africa.  On display was even a vine they had dug out of the ground to demonstrate where the rootstock and grafted plant come together.  This is called the scion and it's the little round notch seen in the picture.

 Fun Fact: this particular vine came from Opus's vineyards.

They also had a wall that catalogued the different types of wine labels.  The bottles were grouped according to the type of label they had. 

Categories included : family owned, animals, good vs evil, understated, sex, cheeky and my personal favorite:

Also for our viewing pleasure were all kinds of wine paraphernalia like crazy decanters modeled after the human heart.

 And single serving glasses of wine packaged like pudding cups.  Yes please.

  

I did a poor job of photographing the models they had on display of wineries.  Last post I talked about two of my favorite wineries in the valley, but I have three.  The third is Dominus.  Below is a scaled model of the Dominus building.

  

It looks like a boring dark rectangle but I love the non-intrusive architectural philosophy behind the design.  The walls are made from stones stacked in a wire cage.  

When you look at the building from afar it blends into the mountains and is barely visible.

Lastly, there was a Smell Wall with glass bowls filled with wine and a particular odor: "jammy", "floral", "citrus", "cat pee", etc.

I was thinking to myself that is was nice to see how well attended the exhibit was.  I was feeling glad that all these people came and paid money to see an exhibit about wine.  It made me feel validated about my work and I was feeling pretty cool when I ran into a friend from Napa in the industry.  And then 5 minutes later into another.  And then another.  In the short time that I was at the exhibit I ran into 3 different groups of people I know from Napa in the wine industry.  I went to the city hoping to see a different audience but ended up running into my same homies from Napa, who were in the city trying to do the same thing.

Oh well.

Guess next time I'll have to go a bit further to get away.

If anyone has time to swing by SFMOMA to check out the exhibit I highly recommend it, and if that's not what you're in to, on the opposite side of the floor they have an exhibit on Voyerism.  It gets really creepy really fast.  Otherwise, swing by Napa and I can show you some dirt and vines and pudding cups.

-L