“We want you to enjoy this with lamb and chutney,” Graff had said moments earlier. “And we want you to drink the whole bottle. It’s 15 percent alcohol but if you know that, I’ve not done my job right. If I could get that up to 16 percent and you couldn’t tell, I’d be okay with it.”

Later he drove us up Winston Hill, where we looked out over the valley and sampled the Winston Hill Red Wine, the Frank Family Vineyards' version of a meritage without jumping through the hoops to call it a meritage. (Frank Family also makes some very big and luscious cabernets.) There are a lot of great settings in the world to drink wine, because wine grapes grow in many beautiful places, but the Frank Family Vineyards spot on Winston Hill, with its quaint picnic tables and umbrellas, with Mount Saint Helena off in the hazy distance to the right and the valley floor laid out directly in front of the hill, has got to be one of the finest.

We had dinner that night with Graff, and downed more of his wines at chef Michael Chiarello’s Bottega restaurant in Yountville. The food was deliciously rich, which is fine by me. But if you are looking for light California fare, this ain’t it. I found myself wishing halfway through dinner that I would be able to order delivery service from Bottega all the way to Chicago this coming February. Damn, it was good—every bite, from the beets and blue cheese, to the ricotta gnocchi, to the braised rabbit, to the wood-grilled grass-fed porterhouse with truffle-Parmiagiano fries. And I left out four other dishes. The restaurant is part of a whole Chiarello complex in downtown Yountville, complete with an eclectic store full of cookbooks, sauces and house wares.

And let me tell you, Graff is not afraid to stick around after dinner and drink a little wine. The man is dedicated, and sharp as a fondue skewer, start to finish. We called it a night after Bottega, but the servers and the locals who had not been drinking wine since the middle of the afternoon like we had, headed to Pancha's, as they do most nights, for pool and tequila in a charmingly shabby roadhouse setting. Pancha's is the place you go to drink like a local in Yountville. To eat like a local in Rutherford, as we did the next morning, snag a few tacos from La Luna Market. There’s a spicy pork and a less spicy beef, both pleasantly charred, and a stewed chicken, which admittedly sounds bland. But it was the best of the three. In St. Helena, for an old-fashioned California drive-in hamburger experience, indulge at Taylor’s Refresher (since 1949) and then stroll the main drag window-shopping and getting ready for another day of tasting. My, that sounded very guidebook-ish. Apologies.

The next morning we stopped by one of the vineyards that supplies Bennett Lane Winery. There, again with the late summer sun burning hot on us, we received a soil lecture from winemaker Rob Hunter. I’m not much of a soil guy but the lecture was interesting and I probably picked up a few bits of knowledge about dirt as it applies to winemaking. I try to reserve as little space as possible in my brain for soil. But here’s a summary from Hunter: there are a million factors, of course, but the ideal soil for all wines grapes, he said, would be “mostly silt, a little sand and a tiny bit of clay, with organic matter, which makes it black.” So, there you go, aspiring farmers of the vitus vinifera persuasion.

Here’s how Hunter summed up the flavors of the legendary growing regions of Napa:
Calistoga: “bright cherry berry.”
St. Helena: “Jammy berry.”
Rutherford: “Dustiness.”
Oakville: “Blackboard eraser chalk.”
Yountville: “Cedary tobacco spice along with jammy fruit.”

And if you want intense fruit flavor and low tannins, as Hunter wants in the wines he makes for Bennett Lane, go for wines made from fruit grown on the valley floor, as Bennett Lane does. Hillside vines equal tannin. “Randy’s mantra is ‘Let it hang,’” Hunter said, referring to winery owner Randy Lynch (who also owns a Nascar team).

“Don’t worry about the storms,” Lynch said. “Let it hang. It hasn’t bit us yet.” The more hang, the more fruit, the more sugar. Everyone knows that one, right? But not everyone does it.

Bennett Lane holds the distinction of having the most-northerly tasting room in Napa Valley. There you can learn how to distinguish one bunch of grapes from another, and one leaf shape from another, at the winery’s “Petting Vineyard.” You can also blend your own red wine in the “Put a Cork in it” program. Using Bennett Lane's cabernet, merlot and syrah wines, it's hard to mess up your blend. The winery calls its blend of those three varietals "Maximus," but you can call it whatever you like, and you can take your bottle home with you.

“There’s so much out here geared toward the oenophile and not much for the beginner,” said Stefanie Longton, who runs Bennett Lane's wine club. “This is good for wine experts who can just geek out and then it’s good for beginners, too, who can get into it and appreciate the process. They usually end up having more fun than the experts.”

I enjoyed the blending but I enjoyed corking my bottle the most. I'm a sucker for powerful machines and large levers that you can't get hurt using no matter how buzzed you are. I wouldn't want to cork bottles all day but I could have easily banged out a couple dozen if they would have let me.

The drive over the mountain to Sonoma from Calistoga is an interesting one. The terrain goes from orderly and manicured to wild and overgrown very aburptly. And the roads wind and lift and drop. I would hate to have to make the drive at night, as there is not an electronic device in sight. Even the light from the stars would probably be blocked by the ubiquitous flora. Come to think of it, that’s going to be the name of my first solo album—“Ubiquitous Flora.”

J Vineyards & Winery in Healdsburg is a stylish oasis, friends. Judy Jordan runs this place (she grew up in the legendary Jordan Winery in Sonoma's Alexander Valley and set out on her own in 1986), and George Bursick makes the wines, including some stellar pinot noirs. His assistant, the delightful and delightfully laid back Hollis Price, handles the sparkling. She says “right on” and “no worries” a lot, and she appears to mean it. Price makes very nice sparking wines in the methode champenoise. If you’re into the bubbles, a visit to J Winery should be on your Sonoma itinerary (my second solo album, “Sonoma Itinerary.”)

The J Bubble Room is a bright and spacious area connected to the lobby. It is adorned in soft neutral tones, with enormous windows that offer views of lush greenery. It's peaceful. You can eat there too, and you should. In the Bubble Room the talented winery chef Mark E. Caldwell will pair food courses with J wines. The wine or the food would be enough to justify a visit here. As a bonus, you get to sample them together. Plan a lunch there one day, as the J Bubble Room is open 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. For $60 you get six tastes of food and six tastes of carefully paired wine. It’s worth every nickel.

Another surprisingly good place to eat in Healdsburg is the legendary Madrona Manor. I mean, it’s a hotel. And it’s a hotel that looks and feels like a massive Bed & Breakfast. And I can’t remember the last time I had a good meal at a Bed & Breakfast. But let’s just say you don’t stay at Madrona Manor. It's a very pretty place, but maybe you’re not into antiques and lace. Or maybe you can’t afford it (the cheap rooms were $220 in September of 2009 and the swankiest suites topped out at $625). Whether you sleep there or not, you should go there for dinner.

Chef Jesse Mallgren is doing some sort of mild molecular gastronomy there that is not fussy or crazy or eye-rolling but just plain nice to eat. A petite portion of onion veloute with banyuls vinegar, a 63 degree Celsius egg (don't roll your eyes -- I don't care what temperature it was, it was perfect), and Parmiagiano-Reggiano left me wanting a quart of it, or at least a full bowl. And there was a duck dish later that I loved almost as much as the creamy onion soup. What made dinner even better was that the food was paired with the first ever wines from Pfendler Vineyards. Owner Kimberly Pfendler founded the winery in 2007 and now grows grapes on her property in the Petaluma Gap.

Pfendler hired Greg Bjornstad to make the wines, and the young man from Wisconsin is doing a fine job. Of course after he left Wisconsin he studied agronomy at Colorado State University, and then viticulture at UC-Davis (like so many winemakers in Napa and Sonoma, and other wine regions around the world), and then earned a Wine Spectator scholarship to work at Newton Vineyards in St. Helena, and then was selected for the rare opportunity of interning at Chateau Lafite Rothschild in Bordeaux, and then came back to California to work at Joseph Phelps Winery as their viticulturist, and then returned to Newton to manage their vineyards, and then joined the start-up Flowers Vineyard and Winery as vineyard manager and assistant winemaker, helping Flowers capture Wine & Spirits magazine’s “Artisan Winery of the Year” award twice in a row, and then served as a consultant for almost a decade to wineries in California, Australia, South Africa and Russia—but it’s good to see someone from Wisconsin doing so well in such a non-Wisconsin business. Maybe growing up with all of that cheese helped.

I was so tired and brain dead at dinner in Madrona Manor I could barely muster anything more than “Mmmm”—not to the affable winemaker or the elegant winery owner, who was seated next to me. But I can tell you now that I would go back to dinner at Madrona Manor on an hour's notice, and I will be on the lookout for, and no doubt become a devotee of, Pfendler wines—both the deliciously ripe and lingering pinot noir and the tremendously balanced chardonnay. It isn’t all oak and it isn’t all austere Burgundy; it’s somewhere in between and it is worthy of all the praise is it poised to receive. Both wines would be considered good for a fifth vintage in a good growing year, let alone for the very first wines the winery has ever produced.

I made one mistake at Madrona Manor--really the only mistake I made on the entire trip. I ordered a chocolate soufflé for dessert instead of the hyped ice cream sundae. They call it "Cart a Glace," and they make it tableside--the ice cream itself, not just the sundae--using liquid nitrogen. After the fog clears, you're left with a pretty terrific bowl of ice cream with all of the classic toppings (I stole a bite from a neighboring diner). Okay, I made many more mistakes than that. Given another chance I would have made time for a mud massage and a hot spring soaking in Calistoga, I would have downed two double-espressos to wake myself up enough to carry on a decent conversation with Kimberly Pfendler instead of just silently dreaming about the onion veloute and her wines as the night wore on, and I would have bought more Squirrel Nut Zippers and Chocolate Ice Cubes at the old fashioned candy store Powell's Sweet Shoppe on the Healdsburg town square. The key to visiting any wine country is to leave yourself incentive to return. I'll do better next time.