Travel
One of the best reasons to take a trip is to see how people in other cultures eat and drink — and to join in the fun. Our travel section includes trip reports from all over the world, with deep dives into the vineyards, breweries, distilleries, and bars you’ll find there.
Top Travel Posts:
A Visit to the Don Julio Tequila Distillery
Where to Drink in Asheville, North Carolina
A Visit to Suntory’s Yamazaki Distillery
Harvest in Chile’s Casablanca Valley – A Dusty Paradise
Revisiting the Kentucky Bourbon Trail, 2018
A Visit to Jack Daniel’s Distillery
Exploring Port Wine: Touring Porto and the Douro Valley
Drinking the Costa del Sol – A Trip from Barcelona, Spain to Lisbon, Portugal
Recently we were invited to sit down with Arnaud Hereu, winemaker for the Chilean label Odfjell Vineyards, and taste some of their new releases over dinner. What a delight it was! Arnaud is as vivacious as his winemaking style. He’s traveled the wine world to get a hands-on oenology education, starting with his home turf…
Joel Peterson of Ravenswood is legendary in the Bay Area wine scene. We were recently invited to tour the winery and certain vineyards close the Ravenswood team’s heart. We also dined on the vast patio space that they just opened up near the barrel room and tasting room. We drank Zinfandel while eating BBQ, listening…
Master distillers get all the press, but their work is basically done before a whisky ever goes into the barrel. When it comes to putting out a finished product, the master blender rolls up his sleeves. In the case of Japan’s Suntory whisky operation, which spans three distilleries in the country, that task falls to…
It’s the stuff of a Hollywood movie, or a novel about rags to riches. Except it’s all true. In 1940 in the town of Atotonilco El Alto in Jalisco, Mexico, 15-year-old Julio Gonzalez-Frausto Estrada lost his father. Julio became head of the family, and worked as a farmhand for nine pesos a week to help…
The eclectic, mountaintop city of Asheville, North Carolina has long been a mecca for craft beer in the southern United States. Craft brewing behemoths like Sierra Nevada and New Belgium have even set up East Coast operations there, alongside more than 40 other, smaller breweries. But there’s more to Beer City USA than beer, as…
Did you know you can take the BART train (with a short car service ride from Pleasanton) from the Bay Area to go wine tasting in Livermore Valley? Well, you can! It’s a very price-friendly option with no drinking and driving to worry about. It’s pretty out there, too. Wente has 2000 acres of…
Paso Robles, in the northern part of San Luis Obispo County, has a storied past: a history of habitation by the Salinan Indians that we can trace back thousands of years, a change of hands to Mexican ownership (before and after the Mexican-American War ,when the U.S. annexed California) and an eventual purchase from a…
Should a whisky fan make the lengthy trek across the Pacific in search of the secrets of Japanese distilling, one would be wise to start at the source. That’s what I did anyway, on a recent pilgrimage to Yamazaki, the first whisky distillery in Japan, which was built in 1923 and is still going strong…
Going to the Russian River Valley? Want to find a place to visit several family-owned wineries, be surrounded by lush vineyards, and not have to drive or walk too far to get to each? I offer my day on Olivet Road as a template, a lovely stretch of “Wine Heaven” road between Windsor and Santa Rosa,…
Mauritson Family Winery is easily accessible on Dry Creek Road, the main corridor of Sonoma’s Dry Creek Valley. The Mauritson family arrived here in 1868 and planted its first vines in 1884. Today, the company farms 230 acres in Dry Creek and Alexander Valley, and produces wine under a handful of different labels, all of…