Sonoma County & Vineyard Walks

Have you been to Napa Valley? Beautiful scenery, fantastic food and lodging, and outstanding wines. The area makes for a great vacation.

At the same time, I see Napa as kind of the epitome of the type of touring that we at Zephyr Adventures don't do. Most people who visit Napa drive from winery to winery, never seeing much more than the front of a tasting bar or the occasional cave cellar tour.

Right next door, Sonoma County still offers that sense of adventure we are looking for, which is why my colleague Reno and I visited Sonoma County last week to revamp our existing California tour.

While famous, Sonoma County still is an enigma to many people. Some simply associate it with Napa while others think of it mostly as the City of Sonoma. It is much more than either Napa's neighbor or one city. Sonoma County is diverse, with sophisticated small cities and towns, twelve different wine growing regions, and scenery ranging from the Pacific Ocean to inland mountains to towering redwoods. It's a great place for an adventure wine tour.

It is also still not so famous that the people have lost their friendly attitude. At least most of the people. As we roamed around the county setting up our new tour, we did come across a few wineries where "gatekeepers" at the tasting rooms did their best to keep us away from the real decision makers. At one, the marketing manager sat on the other side of the wall as she said "tell them I work best by phone". We wanted to pull out our cell phones right there and call her from the other side of the partition!

We were much more successful when we came in contact with the "old guard", growers and vintners who have been in Sonoma County for years and know most of the other key wine players. And thanks to Larry LeVine of the Sonoma County Winegrape Commission, we had access to a number of these people.

Larry is a unique guy. He works for a county commission but thinks like a small business person. He was enthusiastic about his ideas and just as enthusiastic about ours. He loves wine, likes to walk through the vineyards, and is passionate about Sonoma County. Needless to say we got along great. Larry was a big help in setting up our new Sonoma Vineyard Walking Adventure.

In the past, we have run bike tours in Napa and Sonoma. However, we decided these just weren't special enough, nor did they give us the inside access we want on our Wine Adventures. So, we switched entirely to Sonoma and from biking to walking.

Vineyard Walks, which make up the bulk of our new tour, are pretty special. The walks not only afford us but require us to have intimate contact with the local wine industry, since vintners don't want us tromping through their fields without an escort. That worked out great since some of Sonoma's major players were excited to hear we would be bringing people into Sonoma County's vineyards and not just into the tasting rooms.

There is a difference. If you visit 10 tasting rooms on a two-day spree, you might remember which wines you like - if you keep good notes. However, you'll know little about the wineries and nothing about their grape growing techniques. Yet wine making is a 12-month job (it seems like a 14-month job as I listen to the workers) and drinking the wine is only the final step. On a Vineyard Walk, we learn about the workers, the seasons, the land, the wine making, and the grapes themselves.

For me personally, I don't have a memory for whether the 2003 Cabernet is better than the 2001 or whether X winery had a 90-point Zinfandel or an 87-point Shiraz. What I remember is the cool ridge trail we took with Don the winemaker, the eagle I saw circling above the fields, and the incredible sunset over the yellow-colored leaves that capped a gorgeous fall day. And it is those memories that make my Sonoma wines all the more delicious.

Note: Credit for the first photo goes to Sonoma County Tourism Board, www.sonomacountry.com.

Press Trip in Oregon's Wine Country

I returned only a few days ago from Oregon's wine country where we completed our first-ever Wine Adventure. Zephyr's active wine tours will not run until 2008 but we decided to kick off the concept by inviting eight journalists to experience our Wine Adventure in Oregon.

Getting journalists to join in on our tours has been a primary goal of Zephyr Adventures for a decade and we have been very successful with this over the years. However, it is not an easy task. The reality is journalists and editors receive WAY too many emails, are faced with many potential story ideas, are burdened with busy schedules, and are sometimes prohibited from taking free tours.

Therefore, we were extremely pleased with the results of our six-week effort to contact the travel and wine media. We ended up with eight excellent journalists (I'll leave them unnamed since they might want to remain anonymous until their story comes out) and, just as importantly, are in contact with dozens more who liked the Wine Adventures idea but couldn't join us in Oregon.

From my experience, I think journalists face press trips with some trepidation. Often press trips are crammed to over-capacity with visits to museums, chambers of commerce, and other places that just aren't that fun. We decided to do things differently and gave these eight writers the real Wine Adventure experience - five days filled with tasting, meeting local vintners, and doing fun activities such as hiking, canoeing, biking, and horseback riding on and near the vineyards.

And the result was awesome. All ten of us (including my co-guide Reno and me) had a great time. I expect to see some great writeups of the tour in the near future but will foreshadow these by noting a few key points about this Oregon trip:

• Oregon's wine country is unique for its cooperation rather than competition. This impressed all of us. We rarely (in fact only once) heard a winemaker say something negative about another winery and often heard stories of cooperation and sharing as Oregon bucked the tide to become a reputable wine area.
• The inside access we had was impressive. We almost always met with the owner or winemaker at each vineyard and had plenty of time to ask inside questions. Although we were there during harvest and crush and each winery wanted to show off their operations, we tried to have each highlight something unique: barrel tasting, a vineyard walk, a unique grape varietal, etc.
• No one else is doing activities like we do. We set up a Vineyard Walk in the Eola Hills area of Oregon, walking through five separate landowner's holdings and tasting at three wineries. We canoed on the Willamette and stopped at a winery for lunch. We rode horses in and among the vineyards in the Dundee Hills area.

Working with journalists is always a risk; one never knows what will result. However, after five days of fun our relationship with these eight definitely turned from "press trip" to "group of friends". That gives me confidence we'll get some excellent exposure from this trip but also makes what we do worthwhile.