Napa!

Today we went up to Napa to be classy and taste wine at a bunch of vineyards. See, look how classy Ben is tasting his first glass of the day:

This is in a "wine library." Also it was like 10 am.

We got to see wine before it is wine:

Vines!

Grapes!

And while it is in the process of becoming wine:

Each barrel holds ~300 bottles of wine.

Some really huge (~1400 gallon) barrels.

We learned that the oak barrels are crazy expensive (upwards of $1,000 each, and that's just for the regular sized ones), but can only be used three times before they no longer have enough "oakiness" left to impart to the wine. Hence, we saw a lot of old barrels being repurposed around the various wineries:

Barrel trash can in the foreground.

Barrels being used as tables.

At one of the wineries we were even able to taste wine straight from the barrel, before it had fully finished maturing. I expected the fact that it was unripened would make it taste kind of funky, but I thought it tasted just like regular wine. I guess I have a very unsophisticated palate.

The sommelier using a "wine thief" to serve wine from a barrel.

Most of the wineries had really beautiful gardens in addition to their vineyards. I guess if the conditions are right for grapes, they are also right for lots of flowers.

Pink flower!

Little purple flowers!

Also, I knew Napa Valley was, by name, a valley, but I didn't put together that meant all the vineyards were at the base of mountains.

Vines in the front, mountains in the back.

Lots more drinking delicious wine in picturesque locations...

In a barrel room!

By a fountain!

One of the wineries had a raffle for a free bottle of wine, and I won! The last time I won a raffle was in 2007, when I won a Roomba at one of Ben's robot competitions. We hadn't planned on actually buying any wine since it's all pretty expensive, so we were pleased to end up bringing home a nice bottle anyway.

I won! I won!

Once we were all happy and full of wine, we took a ferry back across the Bay to San Francisco. The spray generated by the ferry resulted in a rainbow following us home, which was a perfect end to a perfect day.

It looked more impressive in person than it does in this picture.