I'll tell you, I finished the day Saturday just the way I like to finish days in this wine country north of San Francisco Bay ... sitting outside in the later afternoon sun, having some wine with a bunch of friends who go way back, heading off to a casual dinner later on with no change of clothes required and then spending the rest of the evening simply hanging out, talking.

Nice idea of a vacation if you can get it. It's also, according to just about every travel study I've read lately, the way more and more of us are spending vacations ... some place easy to get to, easy to get around in, amenable to large groups of families and friends. We're increasingly taking them in bites, more like extended weekends, spending more as long as "together" is part of the equation.

The bunch of us polished off the last couple houses on the kitchen and garden tour (which, let me tell you, included a lot of living rooms and bedrooms and bathrooms ... sort of like open houses) in quick fashion in the afternoon. I wish I had photographs to include here ... but no photos were allowed, anywhere.

If they had been, I'd have loaded this post with pics of a home right out of somebody's post-modern design book for homes that, well, I don't know ... you just might not want to come home to. For me, there was too much glass, too much metal, too muck stark and a living room ceiling in its great room that would rival any office building foyer I could think of. And, man, way, way, way up there!

There's a rose maze out back at this place, a huge, interior wall of glass that looks out onto a (yes, again) lap pool and a two-acre pond. There are two tennis courts here, and a bocci ball court. But what got me were what looked like acres of gravel and stone surrounding the house. No lawn, no decorative grasses, nothing really indigenous, nothing, but acres of stone. With tree after tree, each planted in its own tiny circle of a break from that stone, in perfect rows ... everywhere.

Everything was perfect.

Except, in the pond, where there were swimming two of the biggest swans I'd ever seen. I stood outside for a while, watching them. Then they began swimming my way. They got bigger. And bigger.

I don't do monstrous birds. We left.

The home is in Napa, off the road so you can't see it. If I find a link to anything about it, I'll post it. It's on Vichy Avenue. Perhaps that accounts for its structural accountability.

Our break came at the Trefethen Family Vineyards in Napa. The present winery dates from 1973, the original property as winery from 1886 and called, then, Eshcol.

The winery says "Trefethen has never purchased a single outside grape." In other words, what you drink, comes from what you see.

Shannon Walli, a self-described Southern California girl, poured for us in the reserve room (a beautiful space to sit, let me tell you).

She poured some Pinot: "We make the very best Pino."
You do? What about Oregon?
"That's very good Pinot."
Better?
"We pour the best Pinot in California."
Ah. She passed the test, according to me. Give credit where credit is due. And we hadn't even told her we were visitors from the north.
And - she even gave me a hug in the parking lot.
That's good service.

Dinner was at The Boon Fly Café, in Napa, in the Carneros area and part of a big complex called The Carneros Inn. Nice, small, very casual place, worth a visit. At the very least to fight over the beer battered sweet onion rings. I think we had three orders. Maybe it was four.

Regardless, those and a nicely done apple crumble tart finished off the day.

I like this.