Editor's note: Welcome to "A Northern California Wine Bootcamp Adventure." Over 6 days, writer Trevor Felch took on the task of visiting a variety of wineries and eateries in Wine Country to make an "as close as possible" definitive Napa Valley-Anderson Valley-Sonoma County list. Use his journey as a jumping-off point fo your own. Cheers!
Like many ambitious ideas — some good, some less wise — this idea started during a wine-filled evening. I don’t remember exactly where or when, but at some point during the summer of 2018, I gave an idea to my girlfriend Meg’s stepdad John that instead of explaining for seemingly the 500th time in my life to a non-Bay Area resident that Sonoma and Napa are not the same place, why not come west and I’ll show you firsthand how complex the many Northern California wine regions really are?
I figured it would be laughed off but John was dead serious in agreeing to my not necessarily serious idea. Quickly, it became serious. I design the trip. He books his flight. I recommend hotels. I’ll arrange the wineries and do the driving, plus connecting all the complex dots.
Fast forward to the week after Thanksgiving and away we go on NorCal Wine Bootcamp, partly a nod to John’s past military experience and partly because this was going to test how much these wine lovers really loved wine.
The initial idea was for seven regions in seven days. However, there were all kinds of technicalities which made that not realistic.
In my prior role as Zagat’s Bay Area editor, I had the rare task in food & drink journalism of having to know pretty much everything about everything in the Bay Area — burritos, coffee, croissants, Manresa, trattorias, cider, dumplings, Ethiopian cuisine spots, on and on. There was no single niche. Part of the job also involved trying to answer the question of what the “best” wineries were to visit in Sonoma and Napa counties, so I tried to meet with as many wineries as possible, which is a very different field of study than checking out restaurants.