I wasn't thinking of doing a PET, and was too busy drinking to take a lot of pictures, but here are a few.
Paso Robles has a nice river walk along the Salinas River. It was about two minutes from our hotel so we took a 3 mile walk to get started on Monday and Tuesday mornings.
A lot of these black oaks around the area.
I think we visited seven wineries between Sunday afternoon and Tuesday afternoon (we left first thing Wednesday morning). One nice thing about the Paso Robles area is that there are a lot of really scenic roads that you have to take to visit most of the wineries scattered in the hills. This is a picture from the crest of Highway 46, between Paso Robles and Cambria, looking across the drought ravaged landscape down to Morro Rock.
I reserved a place on a guided tour of a winery called Tablas Creek. They make a big point of being totally dry farmed and organic, so I wanted to see their operation. We also had a reserve tasting that included some of their "library" wines. The tour was pretty interesting. We got to see the vines up close and how they graft the varietal cuttings onto the rootstock. Also, the mobile bottling operation was there at the time, so we got to see how that's done. Most of the wineries in the Paso area are too small to do their own bottling, so these guys have a bottling plant that's totally mobile inside a trailer. I thought they'd want us to stay out of the way, but they actually invited us to come up and step inside to see the bottling line. It's all pretty automated but they have to keep things finely tuned all the time.
Many of the wineries in the Paso area specialize in Zinfandel (a heritage grape in California) and Cabernet Sauvignon (a Bordeaux grape) but Tablas Creek specializes in Rhone varietals and Rhone style blends - Grenache, Syrah, Mourvedre, Carnoise, Cinsault, Petit Sirah. Their reds are consistently rated 92 to 96 point by "experts." All I know is that they're pretty good. We ended up joining the wine club.
Some more pics from the tour:
Small barrels:
Large barrels:
Really large barrels:
Vina Robles is a winery on the main drag (Hwy 46) on the east side of Hwy 101. They built a 3000 seat amphitheater a few years and have been having concert series every spring/summer. I decided that the Steely Dan show was a good chance to check it out because the tickets were about 1/3 the price of what they're getting this year at Humphrey's in San Diego. This turns out to be about the nicest outdoor venue I've seen. Since I joined the wine club there I get pre-sale on all of the shows, plus a members only happy hour on a patio for a couple of hours before the show starts. It's nice to relax, eat some tri-tip and drink a couple of bottles of wine before the music starts.
You can't see the band to well in this picture, but the seats were excellent. There's actually a comfortable amount of leg room and butt room as well. The only drawback is that it got pretty fucking cold when the sun went down. 80 degrees in the afternoon, down to about 45 in the early morning.
