Winery Wednesday - Benziger

Every so often during the winters here in Virginia, we get these ridiculously warm spring-like days. Today, as I write this post, is one of those days. It’s going to be 74 degrees and sunny. I do my best to soak up every single bit of these days when we get them.

They also make me a bit anxious for spring to actually get here and make me reminisce about those warm days I’ve spent visiting wineries. For this Winery Wednesday feature, I’m remembering our trip to Napa a few years back and one of my favorite places we visited there – Benziger Winery.

When we planned our trip out to California wine country, we knew we wanted to spend some time in Sonoma County. It tends to be a bit more low-key and causal than Napa Valley which really is more our scene. My husband is a chemist so, when we saw that Benziger was a Biodynamic farming winery, we had to visit. The science gets him every time.

Beyond the Biodynamics, Benizger is beautiful. Though, I guess you really can’t go to any wineries in California that don’t provide amazing views. They have a bunch of different options when you get there from a tasting in the main room to a full tour of their facility or a private lunch with the head winemaker. We did a wine tasting and then we wandered through their gardens and grounds on our own. It gave you a great feel for their Biodynamic processes and provided some great scenery to enjoy.

Their wines were great too. We brought home a bottle of their Merlot with us since it was our favorite. Their Cabernet Sauvignon was really delicious too. Since we had 4 days of wineries, we had to cut down on how many we got from each winery at the time. As luck would have it though, we recently found a bottle of their Cab at a local store!

As you can see from the photo, the Merlot is still in our collection and has a few years of age on it now. We have this really bad habit of saving our good wines for some special occasion. We really need to just drink them! Now that I know I can find it around here though, maybe we will bite the bullet and pop this bottle open.

If you get the chance to go out to Sonoma, definitely put this place on your list. If not – keep your eyes open at your local shops and you might just score big with some of their delicious wine!