Day 8 - Wine, wine and more wine!

Early morning start with breakfast at Mr. Sawyer's home with the Sawyer's Wine club members. We had pastries and juice and then headed out to the deck to feed bread to the fish in the Sawyer pond. After socializing and seeing Susan, for the first time since arriving in Napa, we were giving knives, gloves and buckets and told to go pick some Cabernet Sauvignon. Each year Sawyer Cellars has their wine club members pick, sort, crush, Cabernet Sauvignon that they ferment separately and each year you get to sample and purchase the wine made the previous year. So we all headed out for a rousing, dirty, and hilarious couple of hours of picking 1 ton of Cabernet grapes. It took the group longer to pick 1 ton than it did for the (skilled) crew to pick the entire 6 tons of Merlot, earlier in the week. As the grapes headed up to the winery to be sorted and crushed we had to leave and head to our appointment at Monticello Vineyards with Stephen Corley.

Stephen headed us out to the vineyard for a brief tour and then into Monticello. If you have not visited Corley you should, it is a beautiful property and their Monticello is a smaller replica of Jefferson's Monticello. After taking the tour Stephen took us downstairs into the wine cellar. Wow! The Corley family has done a wonderful job setting up a beautiful and relaxing environment for those lucky enough to get an invitation. And we all felt very lucky and privileged for the opportunity - and thoroughly enjoyed every moment of it. Stephen was extremely gracious and opened many bottles of wine for us to drink, I mean sample including their Reserve Cabernet. After a couple of hours we headed back up and out to the fermentation tanks and vats to nose around and then into the barrel room where Stephen pulled barrel samples for us. Reluctantly, we made our purchases and headed for some food.

After a quick stop at Oakville Grocery, again, we headed back to Sawyer.

We arrived at Sawyer just as the Harvest festival was wrapping up and were regaled with stories of all the fun events we missed, so what was left to do but sample some of Sawyer wines. We were given the opportunity to sample their Petite Verdot, which is fantastic. Shortly after our arrival Mr. Sawyer arrived with a 1991 Sawyer Cabernet which he opened and graciously shared with us. It was a spectacular wine and still had a lot of life and flavor left in it. Mr Sawyer and the entire team at Sawyer Cellar's were very gracious inviting us in and sharing this fun event with all of us and we very much enjoyed every minute of it.

We made our purchases and then headed back to the hotels to get cleaned up for our dinner at Greystone.