Andrea and Richard

Guerneville

We decided to head to Sonoma for the day and ended up going to Korbel Winery to do some wine tasting and also maybe a winery tour of Korbel. Traffic was not bad until we got to Park Presidio Blvd. in San Francisco. It took us forever to finally get on the Golden Gate Bridge to Sonoma.

When we arrived to Korbel, we decided to do some wine tasting first. The tasting room is nice and spacious where you can purchase bottle(s) of their champagne and wines. What’s also nice, not sure if it was a special or not, but they let you have four complimentary tastings of their select bottles. Andrea and I chose (in order): Natural, Brut, Rose, and Sec. Andrea’s favorite is the Korbel Natural. I personally am not a fan of Korbel and instead prefer either Schramsberg (Blanc de Noir) or Roederer Estate champagnes.

Unfortunately we missed the last Garden tour of the day (3:00 PM being the last. They only have four Garden tours on the weekends) and instead caught the lats winery tour at 4:45 PM (they run multiple winery tours on Saturday and Sunday). Don, who also was our hostess for the wine tasting, led the winery tour. We got to see a lot of Korbel history, along with a video detailing the founding to present day Korbel from how Korbel started making cigar boxes to printing newspapers to distilling brandy and then finally making and bottling champagne. The total tour took about 45 minutes or so and we also got the opportunity to see the official Champagne of the Millennium (Korbel was selected as the champagne of the Millennium) bottle that is huge!

Sonoma Coast State Beach: Goat Rock

Before we started dating, Andrea had taken me Goat Rock, one of her favorite places. It was the same day that I had my first taste of champagne (at Korbel). It’s a very nice beach, but quite windy when we were there. There is no swimming allowed because of the dangerous currents.

When the winds aren’t so bad, it’s a nice beach to have a picnic at, not too crowed with a lot of room and decent parking.

Negri’s Original Occidental Family Style Italian Dinners

Negri’s is a very famous Italian Diner out in Occidental. It’s a family owned establishment that has been operating for 4 generations. The amount of food you get is a lot! It’s basically a seven course meal.

Andrea and I ordered the Anitra Arrostro (my favorite here) which is a half duck slow roasted with onions, carrots, garlic and rosemary seasoning with mushroom gravy. What comes with that meal is: bread and butter, minestrone soup, mixed green salad, antipasta, ravioli, zucchini pancake, and salami. As far as we can tell, everything is made fresh here. They have a variety of dishes if duck isn’t your thing. They have chicken marcela, pizza, spaghetti, among many other Italian dishes.The prices are all very reasonable. Our complete meal, for the both of us, cost almost $50 and we were stuffed with food left over. Come hungry.