Day Four: Montana de Oro Beach Walk and Paso Robles Wine Country
We wanted to see the big slide at the south end of Big Sur, so we drove up. It really is a spectacular site: a new peninsula out into the ocean. We could only get within a few hundred yards, but well worth the drive.
Then we hightailed it south along the coast to meet our good friends Cindy and Gary H. at Montana de Oro State Park for a lovely beach walk. They’ve now lived in California long enough to count as natives! Just like old times, catching up and taking in some nature.
We would have walked forever, but we had a reservation at Linné Casado Winery. We found a deli in Morro Bay and had a good sandwich before heading down the road to the winery. It was a pretty glitzy but beautiful operation. The young woman who did the tasting was a trained oenologist, and very informative. The wines, though, were a massive disappointment: old style Cali, with huge fruit and alcohol. We bought some wine, mostly a white, which didn’t taste as good in NJ, and one bottle of high-octane red.
The next winery was owned by the cousin of a friend of Gary’s. John and his wife couldn’t have been more welcoming. John spent a full two hours with us, showing us the vineyards and his growing techniques, then the cellar, where he had us do some comparative sampling: the same wine picked two weeks apart and then aged in similar barrels, and the same wine picked the same day but aged in different barrels. Very informative! And the wines were much better than the famous joint up the road: more restrained and nuanced.
Lesson learned: I had gone for the highly recommended place over good sense, and hadn’t checked out the reviewer for Vinous!
Dinner that night at a restaurant recommended by Jamie Rankin was also very good: Artisan had some good wine by the carafe, and we had a very nice Tablas Creek Châteauneuf look alike along with some new California grub.
