Wine Tasting in Saratoga, CA
Wine tasting in downtown Saratoga, CA is a great way to get a taste for the region without having to make a trek into the mountains. When I was out in San Jose last month to visit friends, we were looking for  winery options that were open on a Friday and wouldn’t take more than a few hours.
That’s when we discovered Saratoga. A small town which has a main street with good restaurants, shops, and 3 tasting rooms. Parking in the free public lot at the eastern end of Big Basin Way, we strolled down to the far end to start our tasting adventure at Cinnabar Winery.
Cinnabar offers a pleasant outdoor porch, but we decided to do our tasting in the cozy, and slightly warmer tasting room.
Tastings are $1o per person for 4 wines, and they’re happy to revisit any that you’re considering purchasing. The wines were decent — we tasted the Incantation Blanc, Mourvedre, Dry Creek Zinfandel and Malbec. I quite liked the Malbec, though it was way overpriced (in my opinion) at $65 a bottle. If you’re local, a wine club membership might make sense as a social investment as they’re open in the evenings and often feature live music and food on the patio. 🙂
From there we ambled immediately next door to the Big Basin Vineyards tasting room, whose wines come from the Santa Cruz mountains.
We opted for an outdoor tasting on the patio this time and had our wines poured by someone who had spent the early morning hours harvesting in the vineyard before coming in to the tasting room. 🙂 The tasting here was also $10, but with 5 wines on the menu — a Reisling, Pinot Noir, Syrah, and two delicious Bordeaux style blends.
These wines weren’t cheap either, but I liked them quite a bit more, the Paderewski GSM and Odeon blends in particular. Unfortunately all the photos I took of the pleasant outdoor patio included my friends who did not wish to appear on the blog, so you’re stuck with a close up of me.
The third winery on the street, Michael Martella and Michaud Vineyards, in the same building as Big Basin Vineyards, wasn’t open that Friday afternoon so we headed for a late lunch, choosing Bai Tong, a surprisingly good Thai restaurant with lunch specials.
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