Santa Rosa Park

We just could not leave this area until we tasted the wine products of this area. The movie Sideways has some scenes located on the Santa Rosa road so that was the road we took. We passed by the ostrich farm mentioned in the movie. By the way, there are also llama, alpaca, and miniature pony farms in this valley of the Santa Ynez mountains. The Santa Rosa road has been described in some travel brochures as "bucolic". Below is a common scene on this road. That is cattle on the hillside.

 We did our wine tasting at the Alma Rosa winery, one of the oldest wineries in the area.

No, this is not a joke. Remember I said "one of the oldest"?  The building is certainly not like the wine tasting rooms we saw Sunday- those are more modern and classier. However, we did taste some fine wine at the Alma Rosa. And without the crowds, the staff was able to give us the needed time to understand their different wines. In the movie Miles shows some wine snobbery by describing a wine as having "citrus,strawberry, the faintest soupcon of asparagus and just a flutter of a nutty edam cheese" We can do him one better; we tasted a wine yesterday which the winery describes the essence as being one of "beet roots meets cola".  John and I have a long way to go in learning the science of wine tasting! We did see the movie Sideways again last evening and it is not one we would encourage you to go out and rent. It is typical Hollywood fare, but does have great scenes of the countryside and  good discussions on wine tasting. We ended our afternoon at the Nojoqui Falls County Park. Usually the falls have little to no water flowing over the gorge, but it has rained recently and consequently the falls were awesome to view.