Sonoma County Retaurants: Chloe’s

So, a new place for lunch in Santa Rosa.  Right now this is not a place for people who don’t live or work in the Santa Rosa area unless you are traveling in Wine Country during the week, but we can only hope that it will grow out of its limited time slots and move to a bigger place because the food is really very good.

The name is Chloe’s French Café and it is not easy to find because it is in an office building.  In fact, if a friend of mine hadn’t heard through the grapevine and a little press that this was a small restaurant quite a bit above average, the only people who would have ever heard of it would have been the people who work in the building.  I have to give some directions because almost all of us had a hard time finding the place, but even with my directions, you have to know how to navigate your way around Santa Rosa.  You can take the Mendocino exit off 101 (either S or N) to Hopper.  If you’re coming north, that means you have to cross over the freeway and head north toward Kohl’s.  If you’re coming south, that means you turn right when you get off the freeway.  Then you turn RIGHT on Airway, which is the first stop light (just like you would be going to Kohl’s) and keep going behind Kohl’s to the Landmark Office Building.  This is all on the west side of 101.  Entrance to Chloe’s is off the main entrance of the office building (you need to go inside the main lobby to find it).

This is a US version of a small French café and one of the owners is actually French.  There is wine available for lunch (by the bottle and by the glass) which automatically puts it a cut above the usual business office greasy spoon.  Then the lunch offerings are nicely varied.  They include a variety of salads, including one with homemade Duck Confit, to cold sandwiches with a French touch to grilled sandwiches like Saucisson (French sausage, ham and melted cheese), Croque Madame (grilled ham and cheese with an egg on top) and Croque Monsieur (grilled ham and cheese without the egg).  They also have daily entrée specials.  On the day we visited, there were serving a very lightly breaded sliced pork with couscous and carmelized carrots.  Yum! 

It is a shame that this is only a lunch place and only open Monday through Friday.  It has a very, very tiny space inside for tables and a much larger space outdoors (tables with umbrellas for the sun), which works fine for the day, but would not serve for dinner except in summer.  My hope is that the owners refine their work here and then find another venue to expand into a bigger restaurant that includes dinner since what we have tasted so far is really excellent.

Northern California Wineries: Kunde Estate Winery

Kunde Winery is in the Valley of the Moon in Kenwood in Sonoma County.  This is an estate winery, which means that all of the wine they produce comes from their own vineyards.  There are almost 2000 acres in grapes.  You can see some of the vineyards right on the valley floor as you drive along Highway 12, but the vineyards go up into the mountains to the east of the Valley as well.  Several times a year, a vineyard tour is offered which takes about 4 hours, includes a lunch, and covers the parts of the vineyards from the valley floor up the mountainside.  There is also a small hill behind the main parking area where Kunde has built wine caves for aging wines.  These caves are open for wine tours more often, but not all of the time.

This is one of the old California wineries with an interesting history.  The first vineyard, Wildwood, was originally planted with cuttings from famed French wineries by its first owner, John Drummond.  That vineyard was acquired in 1904 by Louis Kunde, who emigrated to the California from Germany.  The winery and vineyards survived Prohibition and has been substantially expanded by acquisition, especially in the last 30 years.  The Kunde family still owns and operates the current winery and is particularly dedicated to sustainable wine growing.   They are green!

The tasting room, built in the 1990s, is in a replica of the old Kinneybrook cattle barn situated right in the middle of the Kinneybrook vineyard and has huge floor to ceiling windows.  It has an inviting picnic area next to a small pond right outside the winery building.  There are two parts to the tasting room.  When you walk in, there is the standard tasting bar in front of you with tastings available for $10, pretty much the same as other wineries.  To your right, there is a separate section of tables called the Kinneybrook Room where a special tasting of Kunde’s reserve wines is offered, along with a tasting of cheese and crackers to accompany the wines.  The cost for this tasting is $20.

We decided to try the Kinneybrook tasting since we felt that this should be an example of the best wines Kunde has to offer.  The reserve chardonnay was excellent and fairly reasonable in price (in the $30 range).  However, we both prefer red wines and these did not hold up as well.  The Zin needed more character and the Cabernets needed more depth.  The cheese, however, was most excellent.

We’ll stop by again and try the tasting at the regular bar.  We’d also go back for the cave tour.

Wine Country Restaurants: Rosso Pizzeria and Wine Bar

Nineteen new restaurants were added to the San Francisco Chronicle’s list of the Top 100 restaurants in the Bay Area.  One of the new restaurants is Rosso Pizzeria and Wine Bar in Santa Rosa.  That puts this restaurant in the Creekside strip mall in the company of such fine North Bay restaurants as Cyrus in Healdsburg,  Farmhouse Inn in Forestville,  Nick’s Cove in Marshall , Café La Haye in Sonoma and five restaurants in the Napa Valley.  

Like most pizzerias, you can have a sit down meal in a very nice, calm setting or you can get takeout.  However, this pizzeria has much more than just good pizza so you may want to have a sit down meal, though sometimes it’s quite a long wait for a table since they only take reservations for larger parties. 

This is a foodie’s restaurant.  John Franchetti, who worked at Tra Vigne in the Napa Valley before starting this restaurant, is the chef and part owner.  The philosophy of the owners of Rosso is clearly influenced by the Slow Food Movement.  The pizzas are thin crust Neapolitan style with tasty but restrained toppings – none of those thick crust, big, goppy pizzas here.  Most of the pizzas have either a red base (homemade tomato sauce and garlic) or a white base (garlic and oregano) with toppings that include foods such as Point Reyes blue cheese, spaghetti and homemade meatballs, prosciutto, artichokes, shiitake mushrooms and other kinds of cheeses.  It’s mouthwatering just reading the menu and the taste is just scrumptious.

Rosso makes their own burrata, a cheese made from mozzarella and cream.  They make their own cured meats (salumni), like prosciutto, which change daily  and can be ordered as a separate dish.  The menu includes several antipasti, several inventive salads and piadine, which is sort of a pizza salad – a flat bread with salad toppings.

By the way, the Rosso web site indicates that they are going to have a wine club that has wine tastings both at Rosso and at local wineries.

A Zinfandel Wine Trail – Dry Creek

Unlike Cabernet Sauvignon, Pinot Noir and Merlot grapes, Zinfandel is a grape that did not come from France and so there is no wine made in France that is really a cousin to a California Zinfandel.  There are a lot of questions about how the Zinfandel grape made it from Europe to California – some say it came from Croatia, some say from Italy – and no one seems able to say when it got here.  However, its origin is really not important.  The Zinfandel grape is one of the most widely grown grapes in California and it grows in a variety of places where you might not expect good wine grapes to grow.  The Zinfandel grape also makes a very good wine.

One of the major appellations for Zinfandel is Dry Creek Valley in Sonoma County just south of Lake Sonoma.  Travel along Dry Creek Road, West Dry Creek Road, Dutcher Creek Road, and several other small rural roads and you will find winery after winery, many of them small family wineries, where red Zinfandel wines are the major winery products.  This is a great wine trail to follow.  There are, however, about 50 wineries so you need to do a bit of research before you go to determine which are the best wineries to visit for Zins.  I’ll just note a few whose wines I know fairly well.

I mentioned Quivira Winery before in my blog about Wine Maker Dinners.  Quivira in on West Dry Creek Road and specializes in Zinfandel.  This wine goes particularly well with oysters.  We visited Quivira one time for a weekend special wine tasting where they served their Zins with Hog Island oysters and the combination was “to die for”.  Quivira is also a “green” winery which is dedicated to sustainable agriculture.

Ridge Vineyards makes Zinfandels a number of places in California (Santa Cruz Mountains, Paso Robles) and one of them is on Lytton Springs Road in the Dry Creek area.  Ridge has been making Zins for a number of years, but some of the best come from the Dry Creek vineyards.  On top of that, the wine tasting building at Lytton Springs is totally green – made from straw bales, earthen plaster and recycled lumber – and covered in solar panels.

Lambert Bridge is also on West Dry Creek Road and makes wine from a number of different varietals.  Of course, Zinfandel is one of their varietals.  They have four different 2005 and 2006 Zinfandels – all from different Dry Creek vineyards – in their current releases.

 

Northern California Wineries: Sunce Winery

This is another winery located on Olivet Road in west Santa Rosa in Sonoma County.  Maybe it was just the day we were there, but I would categorize this winery as a “party” winery.  This winery bottles so many different varietals and the wine is poured so liberally by the tasting team that, if you don’t pace yourself, you can drink too much.  Also, if you taste all of the different wines that they offer to you, you will lose your palate and now wine will stand out.

There was a party going on the day of our most recent visit to celebrate the bottling of a new release.  I know we tasted the new release, but it did not stand out for me so I can’t remember which varietal it was.  I think it was one of their Italian varietals.  There were a lot of people tasting and a lot of people having picnics and drinking wine. 

Almost all of the wines they make are from single vineyards.  The vineyards that they source their wine from are all over Sonoma County.  For this reason and because they bottle a number of varietals, they also make only a small number of barrels from each vineyard.  They also produce an estate Pinot Noir.  The winemaker immigrated to the US from Croatia where his family had been winemakers.

This is a winery I’d like to go back to on a week day when there wasn’t a big crowd and there would be a better opportunity to taste individual wines in a more relaxed atmosphere.  But, hey, if you like to party, try this winery on barrel tasting weekend.  I bet it will be one big party!

Sonoma County Wineries: DeLoach Vineyards

There are a bunch of small wineries along Olivet Road just west of Santa Rosa which runs between Guerneville Road and River Road (easiest to take the River Road exit off US 101 and turn left on Olivet Road).  Sometime over the next week or so, I’ll cover all of the wineries on this road, but I’ll start from the other end with Deloach Vineyards – http://www.deloachvineyards.com/deloach/index.jsp.

Once upon a time, Deloach Vineyards was owned by Cecil Deloach, who had once been a fireman in San Francisco before he moved into the business of making wine.  There were financial problems, a bankruptcy, and the Deloach Vineyards were taken over by the French burgundy house, Boisset, who bought the name as well as the winery.  It’s not clear if Cecil Deloach has any ownership at all any more in the winery under his name.  When we get to Hook and Ladder Winery in a couple of days, we’ll talk about where Cecil Deloach and his family have gone.  However, this is about the current Deloach Vineyards.

There have been changes.  The wine tasting room has been totally redone.  There is a lovely courtyard for picnics and picnic space out front as well.  Boisset has made changes to the vineyards, as well, moving toward sustainable approaches to vineyard management starting with 22 acres turned over to what they call biodynamic management.  That is a good thing in these days of global warming.  So the real question is about the wines.

First, this winery charges for wine tasting unless you buy a bottle of their wine, which is pretty standard.  Not too excited about the zinfandels, but any zinfandel has to be a great zin in order to get me excited.  The pinot noirs are interesting.  I probably like the Green Valley Pinot the best out of the ones available for tasting.  Not overly impressed with the OFS (Our Finest Selection) Reserve wines except for the Chardonnay.  Surprisingly enough, the lower end Chardonnay – the Russian River Chardonnay – was one of our favorites.  They also have a very good Merlot.

Wine tasting staff is knowledgeable and helpful.  A pleasant place to visit, good wines, but nothing really outstanding.  Sort of – if you’re in the neighborhood, stop by, but don’t go out of you way.

Wine Country Restaurants: Cyrus and Market

The best restaurant, and also the most expensive, restaurant in Sonoma County has to be Cyrus in Healdsburg (easily $300+ for a couple for dinner).  And I will admit that I think it’s worth every penny.  BUT, you can get the same attention to detail and excellent food, if a little different in style, for much, much less at Market in St. Helena.  The only reason I bring up Cyrus and Market together is because Douglas Keane, the chef at Cyrus, and Nick Peyton, his partner in Cyrus, are the ones who started and still own and manage Market.   

Now Market is definitely not Cyrus.  Cyrus is a top-end, elegant restaurant with two Michelin stars and is second only to the French Laundry in wine country restaurant destinations.  Cyrus is a special occasion restaurant – a restaurant you visit for a birthday or anniversary or to impress your Valentine big time.  Unless, of course, you happen to be a multi-millionaire, in which case you might eat dinner at Cyrus any time.  Even then, too much of such high-quality food may be overdoing it more than once a month.

Market is an everyday restaurant.  You could easily have lunch there every day, stop in for a drink after work if you live or work in St. Helena or are just passing through, or have dinner there whenever you decide to pass on cooking at home.  It’s a sort of friendly neighborhood restaurant.  It’s long and narrow with a pretty narrow frontprint on the main drag in St.  Helena.  It has a beautiful bar that goes half way down the room on the left side.

Market is down home American food.  You have not had macaroni and cheese ‘til you’ve had Market’s mac and cheese (they call it adult macaroni and cheese ); there is absolutely no better mac and cheese anywhere. But they have many other great dishes at reasonable prices.  The menu changes often, but they always have a raw bar for those of us who love oysters.  For lunch, there is a great BBQ Pork-Pulled Sandwich that is scrumptious and that tends to stay on the menu, as do the fish and chips and buttermilk fried chicken, both of which are on both the lunch and dinner menus.  The wine list is not huge, but the selection is nice and they pride themselves on not pricing any wine more than $14 over retail, which is definitely not a large markup in the restaurant business.  This doesn’t mean that you can’t find an expensive wine, the price range is quite varied, but it also means that there are wines in the $25-$30 range as well as more expensive wines.  As is to be expected, the wines are mostly from Napa and Sonoma with a few other California wines thrown in and a few wines, particularly white wines, from other parts of the world.

So go to Cyrus if want to show off your foodie credentials BUT ONLY if you’re also ready to taste extraordinary food.  They don’t give two Michelin stars for hamburger, even good hamburger.  Start off with the champagne and caviar and then take your time and your palate through a three, four or five course dinner.  It will be a dinner to remember.  By the way, there is a less expensive, less elegant bar menu with some of the same dishes.  Food is just as extraordinary, but you can buy a la carte and spend a bit less money on dinner.  If you’re just hungry for some good, down home cookin’, head for Market.

Northern California Wineries: Frank Family Vineyards

There’s an old winery building in the upper Napa Valley just south of Calistoga on Larkmead Lane, one of the small roads that cuts between Highway 29, which runs up the west side of the Valley, and the Silverado Trail, which runs up the east side of the Valley.  The building is on the National Register of Historical Places.  It is still called the Larkmead Winery.  It’s a fascinating piece of history. 

A winery housed in a wooden building was originally established on the site in the late 1800s by Lillian Hitchcock Coit, the grande dame of old San Francisco who was also responsible for Coit Tower, the well-known landmark on Telegraph Hill.  The winery was sold to Felix Salmina, a Swiss immigrant who had settled in Napa in the mid 1800s, not long before the turn of the century, and it is he who is responsible for building the stone building that is now on the National Register.  The Salmina family sold the winery after Prohibition.  At some point, the vineyards themselves and the winery building appear to have parted ownership.  As far as I can determine, the Solari family, owners of Larkmead Winery, own the vineyards on the Valley floor. However, the winery building became a part of the Hans Kornell Champagne Cellars.  That was a great winery to visit in the 70s and 80s when old Mr. Kornell, was still alive.  He was a very formal person but took the time to carefully explain how champagne was made.  This was when the bottles were still riddled by hand!  He made the driest champagne I have ever tasted, Sehr Trocken (which I also think was his best), from Reisling grapes – highly unusual.  Eventually, Mr. Kornell died; there were financial problems with the winery (bankruptcy); and it was acquired by Rich Frank and Koerner Rombauer (Rombauer Vineyards) and, eventually, renamed the Frank Family Vineyards.  I believe that the Frank Family is now the sole owner. http://www.frankfamilyvineyards.com/index.jsp

The tasting room is not in the old stone winery building as it was in the days of Mr. Kornell. I believe that the stone building is being restored.  The tasting rooms, actually there are two, are in a farmhouse adjacent to it.  Since Rich Frank is an ex-Disney executive who is still involved in the industry, there is a lot of movie memorabilia on display in the tasting rooms. 

Champagne is still made at the winery under the Frank Family label.  Most of the champagnes are quite dry.  I don’t know if that is in keeping with the Hans Kornell tradition, but they are very drinkable.  However, I’m not fond of rouge champagnes and I don’t make an exception for the Frank Family’s.  The winery also makes cabernets, chardonnays, zins and pinot noirs.  I think my favorites, outside of the champagnes, are the cabernets.

This is a great place to visit just because of all of the history.  However, it can be a very noisy tasting room environment.

Sonoma County Restaurants: Underwood Bistro

There was an article in the San Francisco Chronicle last week about the Underwood Bar and Bistro in Graton.  The article was all about what a great place it is for dinner and for late night munchies and particularly mentioned the great cocktails and wines.

I agree that the Underwood Café is a great place to go, but I would add that it is just as good, if not better, to go there for lunch.  It’s especially good if you’ve been in West County wine tasting (West County is the part of Sonoma County that is west of US 101).  The lunch tapas menu is great!  I’m particularly in love with the tuna tartare.  It is a truly delicious dish and is also available on the dinner tapas menu, but it is such a great dish to have with a glass of champagne, viognier or chardonnay at lunch time on the back patio.  Oh, and you can also get it to take out if you want to have it at home.

However, tuna tartare is not the only yummy thing on the menu.  Both the regular lunch menu and the dinner menu have oysters on the half shell though not all are local.  There are oysters available from Drakes Bay, Point Reyes and Hog Island but there are also oysters from Washington and Canada, which may not suit locavores.  The Moroccan lamb sandwich on the lunch menu is excellent as are the grilled mushrooms with polenta if you want to go vegan.  There’s also quite a selection of cheeses on both lunch and dinner menus.  For dinner, in addition to several meat and poultry dishes, there is an excellent Catalan fish stew and very tasty ravioli.

The wine list is heavily loaded with wines from Sonoma vineyards and Sonoma County sparkling wines are well-represented, particularly Iron Horse, which is just up the road from Graton.  There are some good Napa wines and a few European wines as well, especially European bubblies.

Anyway, a great place to eat and don’t forget to go for lunch, especially on a warm, sunny day.

Northern California Wineries: Rosso and Bianco

This is Francis Ford Coppola’s latest wine venture. 

I suppose if you really want to have a winery with all kinds of movie props and paraphernalia as an integral part of your winery, including the old Tucker made for the film of the same name, it would be much better to provide that kind of wine-tasting experience in a building just off a four lane highway (101) where there is not another winery immediately adjacent rather than along small two-lane Highway 29 through the Napa Valley.  I’ve been to the Rubicon Estate Winery in the Napa Valley (originally known as Niebaum-Coppola), where all of this paraphernalia is now displayed, on a weekend (my mistake) and the buses and crowds are way too much.  I’m sure it puts a lot of strain on other wineries in the area since wineries are cheek to jowl in Napa.   So it is probably a good thing that Coppola is going to move all of that to Rosso and Bianco (the old Chateau Souverain plant in Geyserville that he took over last year).  And, it’s somewhat fitting, since right across the valley is River Rock Casino, which is trying to expand into a destination casino.  The parents can leave the kids at the winery while they play the slots at River Rock.

Another  good thing about Rosso and Bianco is the As Yet Unnamed Café, especially if you like artisan pizza.  The cafe has a wonderful view east over the vineyards; the food is reasonable and quite good, including the desserts.  However, we visited during the week in winter and ti was quite comfortable and we could take our time.  I would expect that it will become a zoo in the summer.

Many of the wines at Rubicon are estate-bottled.  The wines at Rosso and Bianco are supposed to be based on Sonoma grapes.  Tasting is free for the low-end rosso and bianco wines (relatively generic reds and whites).  There is a tasting fee for the other wines – $10 for Diamond and Sofia wines and $15 for Signature, Director’s Cut and FC Reserve wines.  Even the higher-end wines, however, are priced very well.  We had a bottle of the FC Reserve Pinot Noir with our lunch and it was priced around $30.  It was a relatively light pinot noir, but was very smooth.  In keeping with my interest in champagnes, we tried the Sofia Blanc de Blancs, but I would not recommend it.  It was dry, but had very little character.