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Del Dotto Cave Tour and Barrel Tasting, Napa (town).
There are wineries in Napa Valley charging as much as $25 for a tasting-room
glass so that you may sip a few precious, older wines. That’s
fine and part of the wine-appreciation learning curve. But no place
is more fun, or offers more educational sips, than Del Dotto.
Del Dotto Vineyards is a bit like crème brûlée –
it’s everywhere in the valley. The vineyards are in Rutherford…
the caves and tasting room are 15 miles south, in Napa town, in a 100-year-old
winery on Atlas Peak Road, a-quarter mile south of the Silverado Country
Club.
Dave Del Dotto (go to our search engine and pull up the full story on
him and his wines…the guy has more color than a Sherwin Williams
paint swatch book) wants visitors to his caves to have a good time.
And lots of wine. We’ve taken the $20/per head tour, which lasts
about an hour, and we can attest that both are achieved in spades.
The talented winemaker at Del Dotto is Nils Venge but the barrel meister
is Dave himself. An experimental type, Dave is attempting to push the
envelope of barrel aging. In his snaking, long cave tunnels, he has
more than 60 different types of oak barrels filled with his gorgeous
wines. He has whole oak barrels made of wood from Virginia, Minnesota,
Pennsylvania, and from at least a dozen different forests in France.
“We even have individual barrels made from the wood from 10 different
forests – just to learn if this improves aging,” says Bob
Groff, general manager of the caves and tasting room and one of the
expert tour guides (along with Chris Drumm and Ryan Waugh… you’re
in good hands with any of them).
Visitors are aggregated into small groups of six to a dozen for each
tour; you are lead into the deep, dark tunnels of the cave to sample
wines from the different barrels. The array of woods and the array of
wines (Cabernet Franc, Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, as well as Sangiovese,
each tasted multiple times from different wood) are dazzling. Because
most visitors are reluctant to spit, as professional tasters do, they
may consume 16-20 ounces of wine in a tour if they are not careful!
You will learn what “toasting” of barrels imparts to wine
as you swirl and sniff through a succession of different barrels, each
charred on the interior to a different degree; the 27-month-dried Demptos
barrels, for example, offer a wine that has rich, sweet notes of crème
brûlée, as members on our tour observed.
As the tour weaves through the cave, tasting from many different barrels,
the couples in the group start to open and exchange comments. (A combination
of the wine and the intimacy of the darkened, candle-lit tunnels.) “I’m
a special education teacher,” says a woman from Chicago. “That’s
why I drink!”
At the end of the tour, guests are lead into a terra cotta-colored room
where they are poured generous amounts of the bottled wines whose component
parts they have tasted in the cave. There are large quantities of cheese
and crackers to help absorb the wine – and learn something about
wine and cheese pairing. “People ask why we need to charge $20
per person for our tour,” says Dave Del Dotto. “We spend
$35,000 a year on cheese and visitors sip through well more than a half-bottle
of wine each…. we have to recoup some of these costs.”
Standing with a group of couples in the cave, we joked that this tour
is “the most fun you can have in the dark in Napa Valley.”
At this, one visitor on the tour eagerly poked her husband in the ribs
and piped up: “Excluding our hotel room!” Just the kind
of humor, among unknowns, that this cave tour generates.
Reservations are essential. Del Dotto Vineyards Cave Tour and Barrel
Tasting, 1055 Atlas Peak Road, Napa. 707-256-3332. Or check out their
site, www.deldottovineyards.com. |
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