Lodi with the Ladies

Yesterday we made a trip to Lodi, one of our favorite wine-tasting regions, to help Marcy and Kathy do some research about which wine to serve at their upcoming wedding in June 2011. Liz and I started going to Lodi a few years ago when we began our wine-tasting habit... er, hobby... and kept finding out that many of the Zins we liked were made with grapes from Lodi. It turns out that Lodi produces a majority of the wine grapes grown in California, and has for over a century, but kind of flew under the tourism radar as they sold most of their product to winemakers in other regions, and didn't do a whole lot of the tasting room thing in Lodi proper.

Anyway, we immediately liked tasting in Lodi. In contrast to better-known regions, we found the Lodi tasting rooms to be super laid back, often with the winemaker present to chat about their wine, and the wines to be reasonable and delicious (many, many old vine Zins with tons of farmy character). One of the highlights of our first trip to Lodi was Borra Vineyards where we were charmed by their wacky pourer, Barb, who showed us pictures of her cat on her phone and treated us like old friends. Borra makes an amazing Barbera, awesome Syrah and Rosé, and one of my probably top 3 wines, a Field Blend. We joined the club.

Another Lodi fave is Heritage Oak. They had just opened their tasting room the first time we visited, and we were impressed by their variety of Zins from different parts of the vineyard. Their tasting room is homey, and Tom the winemaker, is friendly and full of great information.

So, we hit these two yesterday along with St. Amant, one of our friend Tracy's favorites. (We like their Tempranillo and Rosé, but their tasting room is a warehouse, so not our favorite stop.) Marcy and Kathy found a couple wines at Borra, and a couple at Heritage Oak that are good possibilities for the wedding. It was great to spend the day on a little road trip with the girls and, of course, Odetta. We had a great picnic courtesy of Marcy at Borra with a bottle of their new Chardonnay, which is surprisingly (I am loathe to say this about a Chardonnay) delicious.

Possibly the best part of the trip was our stroll along the trail at Heritage Oak at the end of the day. They hand you a map in the tasting room and send you off to explore the vineyards and the Mokelumne River that runs through the grapes. They also loaned us their chocolate Lab, Hershey, to show us the way and keep Odetta company. We ended up at this totally idyllic beach (which was actually mostly underwater since the river was high) watching the dogs swim and planning our next trip to come picnic and watch Marcy swim. Two other folks showed up with 2 more Labs, and it turned into this hilarious, chaotic, splashy doggie paradise. We strolled back to the tasting room just in time to catch a great Lodi big-sky sunset before our drive home.