Lilly and I made our yearly August prilgrimage to Napa.

    Most of the photos we took were once again at David Arthur's place on top of Pritchard Hill in Napa. As we mentioned in the March trip, David's place is always a riot. This time, there was a huge crowd which made barrel tasting problematic. David will probably be holding barrel tastings in his new "bat cave" sometime soon. Julie, Lil and I were joined by Lil's parents, Jose and Erika, and her brother Pablo. Jose has quite a nice collection of his own and is particularly found of Burgundies (although a recent tasting of a '89 Pichon Baron might have made him switch to Bordeaux). Pablo has been on David's mailer for a while and in fact bought one of the '99 magnums. As always, David's wine maker Bob Egelhoff was there to explain the wine, the vines and enjoy in the fun. We started off by barrel tasting the '00 Elevation and '00 Cab (which were to be bottled within days of our visit). Lucky for us, we also got to taste through the '01 Elevation and its components. Wow! The buzz is that '01 will be a great year for Napa/Sonoma wines, and the '01 Elevation looks like a clone of the '97 (we were lucky to taste the '97 Elevation at a pre-auction tasting at Acker Merrall in 1999). Pictured below is Bob, then Lil's parents, Jose and Erika, then Julie's back (sorry Julie) and yours truly talking to David, and finally Bob talking to some people.

After the barrel tasting, we all drove down to once again see the caves and enjoy the beautiful August day. As you can see from the photos, plenty of wine and sunshine were on hand.

Finally a few days later, we finished our trip of Cali wine country at Joseph Swan. The wine maker, Rod Berglund, was pouring a number of different pinots. Unlike many Russian River pinots that are highly extracted, Swan pinots seem to be more Burgundian in nature. We finish the photo shoot (appropriately enough) with a couple of photos of pinot growing in the Swan vineyard.