Wine and Spirits Travel

It’s hard to complain when everything has been going so well with my travels, but I was very disappointed to get the phone call that Up & Away had cancelled our Hot Air Balloon ride.  I had really been looking forward to it. Safety comes first, though, and the wind was not cooperating. No balloon ride meant that we had a bit of extra time in our apartment at Camellia Inn in Healdsburg. I had remembered a great coffee shop down the block and we enjoyed some lattes and pastries from Flying Goat Coffee before the driver picked us up for our final Sonoma wine stop. D’Argenzio Fine Wines was nothing like I expected and nothing like I had seen before. At first I thought we were just going to a boutique winery, but I soon learned that the D’Argenzio family had much bigger plans for this facility, which also has a tasting room in Burbank.  The place looks like it belongs in an Italian village and that’s just what they are helping build around them – in the middle of Santa Rosa ,

The Celebrity Millennium Wine Cruise left plenty of time to explore California Wine Country while the ship remained docked in San Francisco. Since I had been to Napa recently , I chose to do one stop there and then spend most of the time in Sonoma . Wine Road Northern Sonoma County   arranged for our transportation from the ship and we headed to Napa Valley for our appointment at Mumm , a premiere maker of sparkling wines. The weather was warm and sunny and the views of the vineyard were just beautiful.  Winemaker Ludovic Dervin took us around the property and through the self-guided tour of the winery, which was built in 1987. The tour is as entertaining as it is informative (I loved “Bob,” the robot who safely puts the bottles in the boxes).  In addition, Mumm maintains photo and art galleries and I was excited to see some incredible work by famed photographer Ansel Adams , as well as a preview of a brand new exhibition by Robert Buelteman . Dervin, who has been with Mumm since