wine time!

Blurry picture = on our way out the door and bringing this bottle with us to a friend's house and I realized we hadn't given it its own photo shoot yet (mistake #1)

I haven't blogged about wine in such a long time that I figured it's time to get the pictures off the camera and talk about them.  You know what happens when you leave pictures on your camera and you don't take notes on the wine?  You forget the specifics (mistake#2). DOH! Well, shoot, taking wine notes was supposed to be my 2012 resolution.

So here's the low down on this bottle of wine:  Castello only sells wine at its winery or through its website.  You can't buy this bottle anymore. We liked it.  We are sad we didn't buy more of the 07 Castello Cab.  Lesson learned - next time we are at Castello di Amorosa, we'll have 2 of everything, and we'll take tasting notes immediately!

Let me break this down to you in math terms:

   blurry picture

+ no wine notes

= good wine, fun times, no mistakes

The good news is that we've found that you really can't go wrong with any Castello bottle, which - if you are following my math - clears away all your previous mistakes.  Yippee!

wine: Castello's Barbera

Sometimes, I'm a sucker. 

A sucker for a good story, a Hallmark commercial, or a good deal.  On one day recently, I was a sucker for a bottle of wine that they are no longer going to be making after this year.  (On a side note: Our wine guys said that Castello di Amorosa is going to start making a Zinfandel - yahoo!)

As it turns out, being a sucker sometimes leads you to buy a bottle of wine that you are not so much in love with the taste, but that extinct like a stegosaurus. 

This wine earns 2.34 stars in my book.  One star goes to its extinction, while the other 1.31 stars are earned because they keep sheep, chicken and a peacock at the winery.  If you are doing the math, that leaves 0.2 stars for the wine.  So long stegosaurus wine.  Hello future Castello Zinfandel, I cannot wait to try you out.

unicorns, not included

To me, every castle needs a unicorn.  This one however does not. This castle has chickens, sheep and wine.  OK, maybe I have just reformed my idea of what needs to be included in a castle.  I think the latter ingredients are much better.

Castello di Amorosa is located in Calistoga on St. Helena highway. It is a huge castle with sweeping views of Napa Valley.  Castello is owned by Mr. Sattui.  Which if you drove the entire St. Helena highway from the south to the north to the castle, you would have passed V. Sattui, another delightful and energetic winery. But that winery is for another day. We're talking castles today.

The Italian influence on the Californian grown grapes makes a very interesting and delicious blend for the wines. Send all of these bottles to my cellar, please!

Shoot... I don't have a cellar and our bottle wine frig is maxed out at the moment.

We've never had a complaint about any of the people that we've had that have been pouring the wines for us.  They are all so friendly and knowledgeable and they pose the wines for perfect photos.

Gifts galore surround the tasting room.  It's a very interesting medley of things found while you are wine tasting.  You may also befriend a dog, and if we were present, you could befriend our dog as this winery is dog friendly and Bark Bark LOVES it! She will lick the cobblestone floor 'til the cows come home.  This winery also has a wine dog named Lupo.  Lupo is a German Shepherd and his name is Italian for wolf. So clever.  Sadly, we've never met Lupo on any of our visits yet.  It might just become my mission however as Barkley has a fondness towards the Shepherd.  You see, I learned this from their website, which you should check out too.  It's full of lots of fun facts and BEAUTIFUL pictures.  I also learned about their sustainable farming techniques.  Barkley may have a fondness towards big dogs; my fondness goes straight to the sustainable agriculture techniques.  God bless a good natural predator or cover crops. 

 Even creepy legless monks can be yours. Just kidding, you don't want the monk... check out that crown!

Fancy wine stoppers.  It's hard to pass up a good wine stopper.

For more information, check out their website here.

wines from my favorite castle

If you were a fan of The Bachelor - Jake's season - you may remember the trip that Gia, Jake and Vienna took to the castle in Napa.  That castle, complete with sheep, chickens, goats, a drawbridge and a lot of wine is the Castello di Amorosa winery.  You may know that Mike and I are big fans of the Bachelor, the Bachelorette, and the Bachelor pad, and now our favorite wine to drink while watching scandalous reality television is the Castello di Amorosa. The picture above is their Cabernet.  This one is more of a special occasion wine (save this one for The Bachelor finale) as the price tag on this wine is $75, but boy oh boy, is it tasty!

You won't find Castello di Amorosa wines at your local liquor store, they don't sell them anywhere but at the winery.  We did have some wines shipped to Wisconsin for Mike's parents (which we enjoyed last week at Thanksgiving!) but they will ship wines so that you can enjoy them at home.  (Provided you don't live in one of those states that you can't ship wine.)

Fantasia was Mike's dad's favorite wine. (Proof is in the pudding with those pictures I showed you on Tuesday.)  This is a great wine for someone that doesn't like wine.  It's very sweet (think cherry 7up with a splash of wine) and because of that, I'll save my pennies and wait until I can enjoy the $75 cab.  This wine demonstrates the phrase "to each their own" really works for wine.  Whatever you fancy, you can find in a wine at Castello di Amorosa.

Castello's Sangiovese is the wine that Mike and I could drink every time we sit down to watch the weekly Bachelor episode. It is quite possibly the most fantastic weekday wine we've found in some time.  It's more pricey than our typical $10 or under bottle of wine, but it's really good.  If memory serves me correctly it's in the $25 - $35 range.  It's just such a smooth and wonderful wine.

And because we are on the topic of the Bachelor.  The next season returns in January with a repeat bachelor, Brad Womack. I'm not too sure about that. I might need more Sangiovese to get me excited about Brad.