wine country afternoon

There are a few wineries we've been to plenty of times and don't necessarily need to do a tasting every time we are there. We just want to go there to enjoy the ambiance, purchase a bottle and camp out on their patio for the entire afternoon (I'm sure the winery head honchos would love to hear that we like to "camp out" but when you buy a bottle, I don't feel bad just chilling on their grounds.  

In Napa, we like to go to Beringer and buy a bottle of their Cab Franc (probably one of our most favorite bottles of all time) and hang out on the porch just off the reserve room.  There is something unbelievably relaxing about spending a day not running from one winery to the next but just enjoying the area.

In Sonoma, we like to go to St. Francis, we found a quiet table on the patio, complete with shade and unobstructed view of the vineyard - can't beat that!

This particular day, we needed to eat our picnic lunch right around the time that we were driving past St. Francis.  The beauty of the place is that you can eat your own food on their grounds.  Purchasing a bottle of wine to go with your picnic, if not blatantly stated on the picnic tables is usually assumed, for this particular day we enjoyed the 2008 cab.  You might remember we dig the  07 St. Francis cab so much that we bought the entire stock from the liquor store one day
at the beginning of the year. 

Entire stock = 2 cases...we weren't the only people to know this is a excellent bottle at a steal of a price.  This is also the sole reason why I don't blog about new wines anymore, we just drink this one, sadly for us but lucky for you, we are nearing in on the end of our stash and soon enough will need to branch out and purchase some new wines to try.  

Barkley was totally digging it...you might sense a theme here. Our dog is just about as much of a fan of weekends in wine country as Mike and I are. Lucky little dog.