Naked Wines in Sonoma

Sonoma is a quaint little town, mainly comprising a square which includes cafes and wine tasting stores. It is also the far northern end of the chain of mission bells that run from deep in South America, and I guess it should also be the end of the related Camino Real.

We'd attempted to snap mission bells from the car on a previous journey as we travelled north along Camino Real, but the camera at the time had very sluggish response and we kept missing them. This time I took no chances.

As we were deep in Sonoma Valley, naturally we had to spend a little time at a vineyard. There are signs everywhere and a huge number to choose from. We decided to be purposeful and had noticed, on the way into Sonoma, the logo for Naked Wines, which is a collective to create wines via sometimes up-front funding to vineyards and mainly marketing into the U.K.

Because I'm a member (a so called Angel), and have pretty much bought wine from them for the last couple of years, we thought it would be fun to drop around to their tasting rooms in Kenwood. They don't have anything similar in the U.K. and we thought it would be a quick way to get an overview of wines in production.

We were helpfully shown a selection with overlap between their UK market and the US one. Although they carry global wines, we asked for it to be limited to Californian. Not surprisingly the Americans keep quite a few of their wines for local consumption.

My plan had been to order a few from their system but have them shipped from the U.K. Unfortunately, they are not able to do this. I wasn't sure if it was because the US wing had only been set up for a short time, or whether it was some kind of trade restriction.

Anyway, we sat in the sunshine. I watched wine being tasted (I was the designated driver) and then we made a list of a few to order when we are back in Blighty. Oh, and we bought some "for the trip".