• Our recent post providing an overview our Napa trip earlier this month can be read by clicking here. We wouldn’t want anyone to miss anything and it will explain the title of this post since it is the last line of that post.

We promised to give you, from our most recent personal experiences, what we rated as the good, the great, and the mistakes from our trip. We review the restaurants and lodging experiences on Yelp so you can check out our thoughts on our food/hotel experiences there. This is for the wineries we visited this trip.

For starters, I will say the good were plentiful, the great were wonderful, and the mistakes a combination of mine, others, and were few.

We visited 15 wineries and had dinners 3 more vintner teams.  This made for a fun-filled 5 day trip up and down Napa Valley!

The Good: We ranked 4 of our 15 visits as good! By good we mean solid, enjoyable, and worth a repeat visit in the future! We loved their wines, staff, location, and wouldn’t hesitate for a moment to recommend them to friends and family. Each of these offered unique experiences, treated us warmly, and often, even though we had not met before, welcomed us as friends. Nothing at all wrong with these visits, it was just that we felt while very, very good, they just didn’t quite make the last step up to greatness.

The Great: We ranked eight (6 plus 2) of our visits as great! That’s over 50% and that thrilled us! I believe if a winery made the grade to great we should begin by recognizing them.

Alphabetically, our first 6 greats are Alejandro Bulgheroni, Blackbird, CONSTANT Diamond Mountain, Melka Estates, Raymond Vineyards, and Vineyard 29. Each of these locations, facilities, wines, staffs, and experiences was distinctly different, and they each made the grade to our great category. These great wineries varied from relatively new and smaller to established, larger, and elegant! I’ll list what made each great in their own right when I publish their individual reviews soon.  That said I did understand some special aspects which helped make them great.

So here are the commonalities, which for us, made our great visits standout:

• We were welcomed in a distinctly friendly manner.
• In each case we were told our visit was appreciated and important.
• The staff at each had done some level of homework about us so our experience was that much more focused and meaningful.
• We were never rushed.  I understand this was off-season and while some spots were busy, we were always well attended.
• In these visits, the staff members were knowledgeable enough about their wines and felt empowered to make one or more changes ‘on the fly’, which they deemed important to improve what already was a solid visit.
• While there was always a sales/club membership pitch, it was appropriate to our interests and not heavy handed.
• Each wine for tasting was poured in its own, clean glass so we didn’t get any hint of mixing from the earlier pour.
• We were invited to return at the end of each of these visits.

Our 2 additional greats I classify separately as they were amazing meal/wine experiences and they were world-class! One was the Delicacies by Del Dotto at Del Dotto’s Piazza location and the second was the Sequoia Grove Terroir Tasting at Sequoia Grove. The foods prepared by their in-house chefs were delicious, gorgeously plated, and perfectly complimented each wine. Plus each was served in a most beautiful location on their property!

We also put all three of our dinners with vintners as solidly great! While we were already fans of their wines Grable Vineyards, Sill Family Vineyards, and Grounded Wine Company, we now know so much more about the people behind them.  We came away from dinner as better informed advocates and, best yet, friends! So I guess, all in all, we had 11 great visits!

The Mistakes: On balance we spotted only 4 mistakes. The biggest was my own! It came from me not planning accurately when I put together our initial itinerary. I tried to jam in one too many visits each day so we ended up cancelling one a day. Luckily, one was able to reschedule. In the future I will keep our itinerary to no more than four winery visits a day, unless we add a walk-in to a evening, open late, tasting room on the way to dinner, while shopping, etc. Of the other three mistakes only one was really bad.  One of the wineries we were confirmed to visit closed early, didn’t tell us, and left us literally out in the rain. The other two were probably based on a difference of opinion as to what makes a good or great winery experience. In these two cases we left with the feeling we were just part of a rote presentation, missed any real enthusiasm, and came away with the feeling we had mostly been a box to check off on their ‘To Do’ list.

All in all a wonderfully successful trip and one more reason everyone should Visit Napa Valley!

Watch for our soon to come individual reviews of our great visits!

Cheers!