Day Trip: Bay Area Wineries and UCDavis Winery

It's been a busy time collecting wine for the comparative tasting.  I went down to the bay to pick up a few more bottles.  First stop was Rock Wall Wine Co. on the naval base in Alameda.

They have the grapes trucked in from all over and brought to the naval base where they make the wine in old airplane hangars.  I'm not sure if they use the cranes for winemaking, or just for hanging pretty paper lanterns.  It's a very different scene walking into a cavernous wine warehouse vs a highly stylized tiny Napa tasting room but it's totally awesome.  I picked up a bottle of Carica Sauvignon blanc, Kick Ranch, a place we get fruit from as well.

 Also in the Bay is Urban Legend in Oakland, near Jack London Square.  A mom and pop organization in the middle of the city, tried the wines, bought a bottle of the Tempranillo.  Very cool place.  The labels reflect the location of the winery near the shipping docks in Oakland.  I would like to make wine in the city in the near future.


To UCDavis:

Went to UCDavis for the bran new LEED Platinum certified winery opening.  UCDavis has been working on this winery ever since I left Davis, so I had to go back and check it out.  Before 2011, the winery at the world famous winemaking school was from the 1920s, which when I was going to school there I found charming.  I liked that I was learning on the same equipment that the greats before me learned on but seeing the shiny new equipment got me over that real quick.

These are small tanks for students to do small scale fermentation experiments.  They are temperature controlled and hooked up to a computer so you can see the stats (temperature, brix) remotely.  When I was going to school (and this was only a few short years ago) we were doing our small scale wine experiments in jugs not dissimilar to giant milk jugs with handheld thermometers and hydrometers.  Oh I am so jealous.

These are the boots of all those lucky bastards.

 Wandering through on the grad student labs, a friend pointed out The Sniffer.  This instrument breaks up a wine sample into it's aromatic components so you can smell them one at a time through the funnel.

 Even more construction up ahead at the UCDavis campus!  I really miss that place.

-L