Livermore Wine

Napa and Sonoma are the most famous wine growing regions of California, but there are quality wines being produced everywhere in this state. You can get wines nearly everywhere from Santa Barbara all the way up to Eureka and several places in the central valley as well. On Saturday I went wine tasting with a couple friends over in Livermore. It's a little ways East of Oakland in Contra Costa county. The wineries of Livermore were very pretty, tucked between golden hills and lush green golf courses. One of the wineries we tasted at loooked like a European villa sitting atop an Italian hillside. And on our approach to one of the other wineries, we were driving towards the ever spinnng electricty generating windmills of the Altamont pass. It's a very scenic area.

Our third stop at a winery was at a very small winery call the El Sol. We had a little trouble finding it, because it was essentially done out of someone's back yard. We approached a ranch house and there were a couple barrels visible and sign a little larger than a postcard that said there was a tasting room out back. Out back the tasting area was also the barrel room. We sat among the barrels and the fruitflies. Instead of the large mechanical storage systems, he had plastic bins which he plunged by hand twice a day.

Out back, we met Hal Liske, a former Hayward firefighter who is now 65 and retired. In addition to fighting fires he once raised bees for honey and to treat people with MS with venom therapy. However, he found driving bees around at night and lifting heavy jugs of honey too much work and decided to invest in his passion for wine instead.

Hal spent over an hour and a half with five of us, explaining the ins and outs of a small winery. He crushes nearly 82 tons of grapes a year with the help of just a couple guys. He has only bottled two wines for sale so far, but that made our tasting more of a treat. In addition to trying his zinfandel, we tried several barrel tastings. He gave us a chardonay that was still unfiltered. He gave us an ice wine (frozen grapes with a high sugar content) and many other things. He explained his philosophy on wine make in great detail. He's a believer that wine should be paired with food and he's interested in making good food wines.

In fact, my friend and I went in on splitting a case on a future wine. The wine is still in the barrel, but we'll have an excuse to go see this guy again and pick up our wine when its ready.

It's hard not to get a little infected, when you see someone doing something with such passion. If you don't have a passion, try and fine one. I recomend trying to stop out there sometime if you're ever in Livermore.