Just Back: Dry Creek Valley

It makes no sense: a dry creek is just a furrow, a trench, or a rut. Whatever. Although it doesn’t have the high profile of neighbouring Napa valley, Dry Creek Valley is home to some pretty good wineries. We drove in from the coast, and settled in the town of Healdsburg.

On the first day, we took a guided bike tour to 3 wineries, covering about 14 miles around the valley.

The next day we had scheduled a couple of tastings at wineries that we know from their wine “clubs” (i.e. you subscribe to receive a periodic wine shipments from them). One is a few miles outside Healdsburg and lies in the Alexander Valley, which means that it would require a bit of biking effort to cross over from Dry Creek Valley. Then we had a genius idea: e-bikes! Getting there with pedal assist was no trouble at all, and kind of felt like cheating (but in a good way). It took Heidi all of 3 minutes on the bike to declare that she was absolutely, definitely going to buy one of these.

One of these wineries had screwed up an order I placed last year. I ordered 6 bottles of their, relatively hard to get, rosé for about $20 per bottle, but they shipped me 6 bottles of their showcase Monte Bello wine, which goes for about $350 per bottle. When I called to report the mistake, they couldn’t believe it: both that they had made such a huge mistake, and that I had reported it. When we left the winery, our tasting host was still telling the other staff about the mix-up.

Next day we headed back to San Francisco, for a quick visit before returning to NJ.