Angel's share

The Great 72 Hour Wine Escape - ESCAPE TO SONOMA

Kenwood Inn and Spa, private tasting Chateau St. Jean Winery, private tasting Loxton Cellars, Mayo Winery, MoonDance Cellars, Sullivan Birney Winery

Arrival at Kenwood Inn & Spa

Rated “Best Wine Country Retreat in All of California…10 Best of Best of the World”

--Food and Wine Magazine

The first things that strike you at the Kenwood Inn and Spa—your homebase for a three day excursion into Sonoma’s best wineries-- are wonderful honey-colored Italianate buildings, the flower-filled courtyard, and the pastoral views of vineyard-covered hills. Fond memories of Italy, it’s enough to make any northern Italian homesick. Every room here is lavishly and exquisitely decorated with tapestries, velvets, and antiques; each has a fireplace, balcony (unless you're on the ground floor), feather beds, and expansive down comforters. You can begin your day with an impressive gourmet breakfast, served poolside or in the Mediterranean-style dining room; you might find a poached egg accompanied by light, flavorful potatoes, red bell peppers, and other roasted Sonoma vegetables fresh from nearby farms, followed with homemade scones with fresh berries and lemon tart. Yum!

The central cloistered courtyard is perfect for relaxing, and enjoying a fine glass of Sonoma cabernet amongst the fig, olive and persimmon trees. Included in this package are treatments at the exclusive Caudalie spa—one of only three worldwide. The celebrated “Vinotherapie” is a new approach to anti-aging, using exotic grapevine extracts in the treatments that will leave you incredibly restored, relaxed and rejuvenated.

Day 1

We begin wine tasting by visiting Chateau St. Jean, famous for excellent wines including the much heralded “Cinq Cepages.” The current release of Cépages ("Five Varieties") is a Bordeaux-style blend consisting of Cabernet Sauvignon (76%), Merlot (10%), Cabernet Franc (9%), Malbec (3%), and Petit Verdot (2%). Each component is aged separately for two years in small French oak barrels before blending. Once the wine is assembled, it spends six months in the bottle before release.

Fruit for this Cabernet Sauvignon was selected from the finest Bordeaux variety vineyards in Sonoma County, to assemble a wine that showcases the best vines and growing condition in Sonoma County. The Alexander Valley grapes highlight bright berry with back notes of dried herbs, while the Sonoma Valley fruit is from the St. Jean Estate Vineyard, and brings black and dense mountain fruit to the blend. The Knights Valley fruit adds a firm mouthfeel and pronounced tannins and the Dry Creek Valley grapes tend toward dark, dense black cherry and berry fruit flavors with a rich texture in the mouth. This is the wine which Wine Spectator rated 90 points:

"Smooth and harmonious, with ripe, supple plum and blackberry fruit shades by cedar, anise, black cherry and spicy attributes...A very well-made wine...Firms up and flexes its tannic strength on the finish. Drink now through 2010"

Why wait till 2010? We’ll enjoy it as our first sip along the Sonoma Wine Trail.

Next we visit a true local treasure, Loxton Vineyards. We’ll not only visit the vineyard, but meet with winemaker Chris Loxton and take a personal tour of his vineyards for some ultimate Syrah and Zinfandels. This guy is a real artisan, he makes wines to showcase the varietal and vineyard site where the grapes are grown. An Australian by birth, Chris comes from a winemaking family in Southern Australia. His wines are excellently balanced and true food wines, fruit-driven, complex and with depth of character without being heavy or alcoholic. You’ll find his approach is deliberately low tech and non-interventionist believing the vineyard determines the wine for each year. “Manipulating the wine too much tends to actually decrease the uniqueness” Chris maintains. Most of his wines are not fined or filtered. Loxton crafts a variety of single vineyard syrahs from local growers and his own estate, many of the wines are produced in the 100-300 case range—an artisan producer. In the truest sense.

Loxton specializes in limited production of ultra-premium Syrah wines. In Australia the dominant red wine grape is Syrah (or Shiraz as Australians would say) so Loxton Vineyard is narrowly focused on this varietal. Locating in Sonoma’s Valley of the Moon, Chris also decided to produce limited quantities of California’s “native” grape, Zinfandel . You’ll find Chris tremendously affable, willing to share his wines and knowledge, and a great all around guy. Ask him about the science of wine or the vineyard and you’ll get an earful, he’s also doctored in Physics!

From Loxton we soujourn on to the cellars of Dave Cohen and his stellar “MoonDance Cellars” winery. Sullivan Birney Winery,

Tour of downtown Sonoma Square and shopping opportunity.

Gundlach Bundschu winery

Dinner at the Girl and the Fig restaurant