Quixote

One of my resolutions this year was to go wine tasting two places a month, which to me is a whole lot of wine tasting. So last week I went to visit Quixote.

I know wine tasting is what a lot of people do for fun and on vacation but I really have to force myself to go out tasting because it usually feels like work.  I've worked in Napa since 2007 and have only visited a handful of wineries in the last 6 years.  It's a little embarrassing.

I chose Quixote this month because it's so whimsical and fun.  I knew nothing about the wine, but loved the building, I saw it in an architecture magazine a while ago.  It's hidden away in the Stag's Leap District in Napa, you can't see if from the road and it's appointment only so it's impossible to stumble upon.  If you are going here it is very much on purpose.

The winery was designed by the Austrian artist Hundertwasser, whose work I was unfamiliar with but reminded me of Guadi's mosaics in Spain.  Very colorful, no straight lines, no repetition. Unfortunately during this time of the year the vegetation is all cut back.

This is a picture I did not take but want to include because it shows how beautiful the building looks nestled into the hillside.

Excuse the glare.  I would not include this picture except for how much I enjoyed seeing the large printed canvas covering the tanks.  This is the eternal dilema of esthetics in a winery.  You can make the building and tasting room beautiful but the cellar has to be a functional cellar and those are much harder to make beautiful.

Decorating Tip #1: Cover the tanks with a canvas or stick a picture of Audrey Hepburn on there to beautify the tanks.

Decorating Tip #2: Paint barrel rings to add whimsy to any barrel room.  

Unfortunately the paint tends to chip easily and they only look amazing and fun for a short time.  Still, I'm a big fan.  In my dream winery all the barrels are painted like this.

This is the lab space.  It's a lot more sparse than my lab but it's one of the nicest I've seen at a winery.  You know, compared to the other 3 wineries I have visited in 6 years.

Actually, it almost looks like a kitchen that also happens to have instruments and glassware.

This is the tasting room where I tasted 7 Quixote wines.  Four were Cabs and three Petit Sirahs.  Due to the Stag's Leap appellation and the exclusivity of the winery, I was expecting the wines to be expensive.  They were not and they were delicious.  If the wines had been $90 to $150 I wouldn't have thought twice about it.  But that some were $40 or $60 was pretty amazing.

Also, all the wines were screw caps!  Two of the wines from the early 2000s, so they were early adopters of the method.  I am a big fan.  The winery was beautiful, the wines were very impressive and the packaging was innovative.  

I would like to bottle my wine with a screw top, but unfortunately the first vintage will have to be cork because it's being put together with a hodgepodge of materials.  I've been a fan of alternative closures for a while, but had not tasted much aged high-end red wine with a screw cap.  I am more convinced that this can be age-able without the drawback of cork (i.e TCA, high cost for good quality).  A good cork can cost over $1/cork.  A screw cap can be as low as $0.17/cap.

One down, one more winery to go this month.  Also, need to bottle the white wine in my garage this weekend.  

I've been putting that off for the last 3 weeks. . . . . 

-L