Our first winery stop was Van Der Hayden, recommended by our hostess as a quaint family run operation that had a unique product: a late season cabernet. The vineyards driving up to the tasting room were lovely, but the tasting room was rather squallid. The wine might have been great, but we didn’t want to pay $10 to sample wine in what felt like the equivalent of a rundown trailer park.
We saw a beautiful ivy covered building surrounded by vineyards and decided that would be a great alternative to Van Der Hayden. All of the photos in this post are from that winery, Clos Du Val, which is located in the Stag's Leap District of the Napa Valley.
The older man behind the bar at Clos Du Val Winery smiled as we enterred, and the tasting room’s interior was up to the challenge of its inviting exterior.
We split a $10 tasting, something we like to do for three reasons. 
First, I primarily like red wine and Julie white. Second, the less we drink at each winery, the more wineries we can safely visit. Third, we’re frugal.
Our knowledgeable host took us through a series of tastings, including a Sauvignon Blanc produced for cartoonist Ronald Searle which sported a fanciful label of a woman humorously uncorking a bottle. Since the tasting fee applied toward any purchase and this wine cost $18, the net cost for the wine was only $8. I particularly liked their Merlot, and I commented that I thought it was definitely the best. “It’s a shame,” our host replied. “Ever since that movie ‘Sideways,’ Merlot has had a bad reputation, and we cut back production by 40% this year.” I have to admit that I had never bought Pinot Noir before seeing that movie, and most wine I had bought since had been Pinot Noir. After our Napa trip, I bought a half dozen bottles of Merlot by vintners such as Meridian, where the Pinot Noir price was considerably higher than the sale price of their Merlot. 
A funny side note is that when I was looking at Jay's photo from his backpacking trip in Europe, I noticed the same brown label with swirls as Clos Du Val in one of his photos taken in the French Alps. He said it was the cheapest wine they could find there, and it only cost about three Euros. I'm not sure it was the same, but I think it was.
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