My father and I started a new annual tradition in 2005, the year that I started at
Genentech. While not an obsessive like myself,
Pops is a wine-guy (kind of hard not to be while living in
Napa). We decided back in '05 that we should start taking a wine-tasting trip every year that I get the week off between Christmas and New Years. The first year we stayed in Glen Ellen and hit much of the Southern region of
Sonoma Valley. Last year we stayed in
Healdsburg and took care of the Northern regions.
This year we decided to make it a little cheaper and just stay at the house and go to the many places in the
Napa Valley that we hadn't hit yet. Indeed, we stayed very low-profile on Thursday, just taking a taxi downtown and hitting some of the many tasting rooms that have or are about to open up in the city of Napa. The Napa downtown has (finally) come into its own again over the last 3-4 years, somewhat coinciding with the completion of the
Napa Valley Opera House restoration. There are almost no empty storefronts any longer and there is actually some building going on and further restoration work happening in various places. The other part of the resurgence has been the proliferation of tasting rooms. The
Napa Valley Register published a list of 17 tasting rooms downtown (15 are currently open already) earlier this year in August (thanks Na!) and we used that list to plan out our day. We heard later that there are supposed to be up to 10 additional tasting rooms that are to open downtown in 2008!
Another family-owned winery has been bought out by a mega-conglomerate wine company. Following in the footsteps of other such pioneering family wineries like Mondavi and Stag's Leap Wine Cellars, Rosenblum Cellars of Alameda has been sold to Diageo for US $105 million. Kent & Kathy Rosenblum founded their winery 30 years ago and then made the move to their current home in Alameda in 1987. The deal was announced 01/25/08. 
On Saturday 01/19/08, I had the outstanding opportunity to attend the latest 
