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I try a few varietals at Cakebread Cellars and Frog’s Leap because they’re a couple of my personal favorites, but mostly, I’m trying to get a sense of how they run their tastings.
I’ve done my research over the years at wineries in every town I’ve visited, but I’m a little behind on my knowledge of Napa because it’s so spread out.
Standing behind a group of women, I take mental notes. They look to be about my age—mid-twenties—and they’re on their way to being drunk before noon. They squeal louder than they probably realize as one of them drops a glass onto the stone floor.
“Don’t worry.” A tasting room assistant in a brown t-shirt dress almost the same color as her hair puts on gloves and whips a broom out from behind the bar to scoop the broken glass. I make a mental note about safety, speed, and thoroughness.
The women, who all wear matching pale pink shirts emblazoned with “I Do crew” on the front, don’t miss a beat, getting the dropsy sister a new glass and toasting with full glasses of chardonnay. The brunette in the middle of the throng wears a telltale bridal veil and a shirt that says, “I was told there would be strippers.”
Par for the course at wineries, where not everyone is looking for top notes and wood barrel aging. I file that observation away as well. The better I can show Dashiell Corbett that I’m prepared for whatever their guests throw my way, the better my chances of landing the job.
A couple hours later, I stop at the Napa General Store for a sandwich and ask if there’s any prayer of finding a clothing store in the area with something more appropriate to wear for an interview.
“Duck Feather. They have an absurdly fabulous gift shop,” the cashier advises, her sleek lavender ponytail brushing shoulders bared by a pale pink halter dress that looks like exactly the thing I ought to be wearing to a job interview.
“Any chance you bought that there?” I ask, peeking over the counter to see more of the dress.
She looks down. “Ha. Not there, but I’ll bet they have something like this. Best gift shop in the area.”
I thank her for the tip and take my sandwich to go. It’s just shy of three, and my ambitious plans to cover more of the wine route are foiled by the heat of the day. The thermostat in my car reads ninety-one degrees, and I know it won’t cool down much before evening.
Turning down the long drive of tiny Duck Feather Vineyard feels promising. It’s always fun to find these hidden gems among the more well-known growers. Sometimes, they only produce a few dozen cases of wine per year, but some are so good they have waiting lists to buy what they produce.
Maybe I’ll get lucky at Duck Feather, a winery I’ve never heard of with a sign so rustic that it looks like someone painted it by hand.
The yellow clapboard house that serves as a tasting room and gift shop is small and charming, a fraction of the size of Buttercup’s farmhouse. Inside the tasting room is a four-foot burnished wood countertop with two barstools made of metal and cowhide. I bypass the wine and browse in the adjacent shop.
Every shelf is adorned with Duck Feather merch, from baseball caps and tee-shirts to wine bottle stoppers, coasters, and tea towels. There’s more here than I’ve ever seen at the most well-known wineries. I guess Duck Feather is trying to put itself on the map this way.
A whole other section is devoted to clothing that could hold its own at a beach resort or restaurant lunch. It’s a smart business move for a small wine producer because, no doubt, people come to Napa and realize they aren’t dressed for some of the finer restaurants they may want to visit.
After buying a pale blue maxi dress, I slide onto one of the barstools to sample Duck Feather’s wine.
“You like the sauv blanc?” The man working the tasting counter wears a white button-up shirt, open at the collar, and a pair of khaki pants. His smile is kind, if bored. He’s probably already asked this question several dozen times today, and probably everyone has a version of the same answer. “Yes.” “It’s good.” Most people don’t come right out and say they hate a wine unless it’s not what they’re expecting—overly sweet when they want something dry or heavy when they want something light.
“It’s nice. Light.” It tastes faintly of grapefruit, and it’s mild enough that it goes down easily. On a hot day like today, I could drink a lot of it without realizing it until it’s too late.
I keep notes on every wine I’ve tasted in an app on my phone designed to let me mark and find wines by winery and vintage, write down details about the various awards and scores they’ve received, and jot down the way the wines are made.
My own set of notes goes into a different file—details about who I was with when I tried the wine, whether I tasted it or drank an entire glass, whether my friends liked it. Then I go farther down the rabbit hole and write down obscure facts that only wine nerds care about—the top notes, underlying flavors like cherry or chocolate, details about the kind of wood used in the storage casks, fermentation times, soil conditions—any details I can scrounge up that fall outside the normal information a person could look up online.
That’s the gold. That’s where I separate myself from other would-be sommeliers who have different palates and might choose different wines to go with certain foods. I’m banking on my taste setting me apart. Someday.
I take a second sip of the pale white wine and swish it in my mouth. Normally, I’d make use of the spittoon bucket, but I swallow the whole mouthful.
“Refreshing, right?” he says, leaning over the counter and putting his elbows down close to my glass.
I take another sip and nod. “Goes down easy. Probably too easy, right? You get a lot of people here who just want to get drunk and don’t really care about wine?”
He rolls his eyes. Probably seen his fair share. “Most people.”
That’s what I was afraid of when I answered the ad for the job at Buttercup. I don’t want to be a glorified bartender like Jackson said. “But some are here because they care about wine, right? That makes it all worthwhile.”
He shrugs. “I guess. I mean, we get a lot of blowhards, too, people who think they know. ‘Oh, I’m tasting cinnamon and old vines.’ Not sure you can taste the age of a vine.”
“Maybe some people can.” I don’t want to sound like a blowhard, but I think he’s wrong.
“Yeah. Not me.”
