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In the spirit of eating local, this month's Wine Blog Wednesday's theme is to pick a vineyard or winery closest to you and to try their wine. Here in Sacramento, we are blessed to be close to a fabulous wine growing region in the Sierra Foothills and around the Sacramento River Delta. Bogle Vineyards is probably the best nationally known of the local wineries, though most people don't know it is located in the Sacramento Delta region. Bogle is one of my favorite wineries - terrific quality at a reasonable price. They have a wonderful estate port that you can only buy directly from the winery that I highly recommend.

From where we live in Carmichael, it really is six of one, half dozen of the other in terms of which is the closest winery. (Well maybe Bogle is a little closer as the bird flies, but we wanted to try something a less known.) So, we headed up to Placerville to taste the wines at Lava Cap winery. We love their Barbera, which is spicey and has a lot of character, and definitely holds its own with our Italian sausage spaghetti. At the winery we sampled some Lava Cap wines with which we were unfamiliar and in particular liked their Sangiovese and Zinfandel. In fact, I who announced, "I've never met a Zin I liked," had to drink my words. The Lava Cap Zinfandel is mild and most agreeable - a perfect light lunch wine.

By the way, the Barbera 2001 Reserve is what we are now enjoying, but my wine expert brother Ed tells me that every Barbera he's ever had from Lava Cap is good.

Here's the view from the deck at the tasting room. At 11:30 am it was already 95°F and rising. Perhaps this is one reason the most popular time of year to go wine tasting is in the fall?

Karen was our helpful server who shared with us the most intriguing raspberry freezer jam recipe. Must try soon....

Note:
If you are trying to view the Lava Cap website in a Mac Safari browser, you probably won't see anything on the page. I don't know enough to know why that is the case; Safari can be a bit funky. However, the site shows up perfectly well using the FireFox browser for the Mac.