Once, to celebrate Valentine's weekend, my husband took me to Napa Valley. We love Napa Valley. We love the architecture...the vineyards...the cute towns. Napa Valley was one of our favorite places to go on a day trip. The funny thing is...we don't really love wine!
Don't get me wrong...we like wine. We buy wine on occasion and we'll even share a glass of it once every couple of months. But we are definitely not winos. We know nothing about pairing food with wine, and we only swirl and sniff in order to make each other laugh. We never drink red wine (apparently, if you are truly a wine lover, you like it red). We like it fruity, sweet, and generally drink it out of an Eskimo Joe's cup.
But we love Napa. And since I cook with wine, I thought I would showcase the winery we visited on this particular occasion.
Castello di Amorosa
Castello di Amorosa is a relatively new winery to Napa Valley, but it's already made a name for itself. Why? Well, take a look.
That's right...that's a winery. It's recently received fame for being featured on the Bachelor (or so my sister tells me) as well as Disney's Bedtime Stories. I haven't seen it in either of those productions...but I did get to tour it!
You can't see the castle from the main road. And when you pull into the drive, you have to drive almost to the top of the hill before you can see it. When we arrived this weekend, the castle was shrouded in fog. It was beautiful!
The castle is amazing. The grounds are huge, complete with vineyards, a pond, jousting grounds, and even servants' quarters!
It's also got a moat...
...and a cat guarding the entrance.
Doesn't my husband look absolutely grand sitting atop his castle?
We took a guided tour of this winery that lasted almost two hours. We got to see the beautiful grand hall - it has hand painted murals covering the walls and a fireplace that predates Christopher Columbus.
We also got to go into the underground caves that house all of the wine barrels (and a torture chamber!). In this particular room, we participated in a barrel tasting...
And finally, our tour group was ushered into a beautiful room for a private tasting.
We tried a white, a rose, and all of the dessert wines.
Man...they were amazing...
...even for non-winos like us.
(I also enjoyed the complimentary bread sticks...)
We had a ton of fun and even found some new wines that we liked. Our favorites? - all the dessert wines. :-) My favorite was the La Fantasia - it was a sparkling red wine (yes...red!) that tasted wonderfully of cherries. My man's favorite was the Il Raggio del Sole, a muscat wine. I think we're going to have to go back and buy some.
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