Our second day in Calistoga we visited several wineries.  The tasting fee ranged from $10 to $20 per person or you could share a tasting.  Some places offered as many as 6 wines for tasting.  Since Steve likes red and I like white, sharing was a good option for us.

The nicest distillery that we visited was the Montelena Chateau.  It was a real castle with ivy clinging to her walls and a moat and pagoda outside.  This particular winery is famous for putting Napa Valley in the world's winery establishment.  In 1976, they entered a white wine, a chardonnay, in the world competion in France.  It won first place and the French immediately demanded a second judgment.  It won again and a third time.  I tasted the wine that won the award.  I throught it tasted a little grassy, but then my taste is more toward the sweeter wines.  I ended up buying a very sweet dessert wine at Montelena.  We also enjoyed the grounds with the ponds and flowers.  Ducks and swans floated around.  What a relaxing bucolic setting.

We visited several other wineries and ended the day with dinner at a local restaurant, the Flat Iron.  Steve got bbq ribs and I had fish and chips.  We just had water with dinner because we had several bottles of wine back at the hotel waiting for us.  The pool and hot tub felt especially nice after hiking around those wineries and the hard tasting choices we had all day.  Talk about stopping to smell the roses!  We really enjoyed ourselves, tasting wine, in addition to smelling roses!

The next day we packed up and headed north to Klamath Falls, Oregon.  More on that later.