Pilgrimage to Napa Valley

I'm currently visiting my dad in Sacramento, California for a couple weeks and yesterday I made a pilgrimage to the wine capital of the United States, Napa Valley. To get in the mood I started the day with a visit to the Mondavi Institute for Food and Wine Science at the University of California Davis. Robert Mondavi was largely responsible for dissemination of Napa Valley wines around the world and passed away two years ago. On the inside, the Mondavi Institute looks like any other laboratory building for biology or chemistry, with labs full of scientists in white coats holding pipettes at long benches covered by reagent bottles and fancy equipment. The labs are connected by boring white hallways lined with scientific posters. The only way you would know it's a Food and Wine Institute is by reading the names of the labs (might say "Sierra Nevada Brewing Laboratory"), by finding the usual waiting room news mags replaced by Wine Spectator and The California Dairy Dispatch, or by noticing the abnormally large number of offices with signs saying "Closed from 12 to 1 for lunch." On the ground floor there was a wine marketing conference going on. As I walked by I heard the presenter insist that you might really like your dog, but it doesn't belong on your wine label.

From Davis it was about an hour drive to Napa; the town didn't look too exciting so I headed up the Silverado Trail through the heart of the valley. Just about every acre of land was covered in grapes. Napa Valley is a good place to grow wine grapes due to its unique geography and climate. In some spots the soil contains volcanic lava, and in others it contains maritime sediments from when the San Pablo Bay reached into the valley. Thin and rocky soils cover the hillsides, which decrease overall yield but lead to grapes with concentrated flavors and sugars. Napa Valley's climate isn't too cold or hot, and it has a long growing season with warm sunny days and cool nights, allowing the grapes to ripen slowly over time.

I stopped at the Honig Winery in the Rutherford American Viticultural Area. I had read that Rutherford soil is a unique combination of gravel, sand, loam, and volcanic deposits that provides especially good conditions for Cabernet Sauvignon. I tasted four wines--first a Sauvignon Blanc in which some of the grapes had been left in contact with the skins for a few hours before pressing, presumably enhancing a grapefruit flavor. The second was a 2006 Cabernet Sauvignon with grapes from the Honig vineyard that had been aged in American oak for 18 months. Third was a 2006 Cabernet Sauvignon with grapes from a nearby vineyard that was aged in French oak. Last was a late harvest dessert wine made from Sauvignon Blanc grapes that were infected with Botrytis fungus, which dehydrated the grapes and concentrated the sugars. All the wines were good but at $40 to $75 per bottle they were outside my budget.

I finished off the day with a very hot but enjoyable walk on a trail up Cold Canyon near Lake Berryessa.

Today Alex and I went sailing on Lake Natoma near Sacramento, reviving an old hobby of mine. As I was reviewing sailing terms and techniques, I was reminded of the various points of sail, the possible orientations of a sailboat relative to the wind direction. Sailboats can't sail directly into the wind, but they can sail about 35 degrees to either side, called "close hauled." If the wind direction is perpendicular to the sailboat, that's called a "reach," and if the wind is coming from behind the boat, that's a "run." What is the fastest point of sail? At first it seems obvious that a run would be fastest--that's when the wind is squarely hitting your sails from behind. But the fastest you can go on a run is the speed of the wind. In fact, the fastest point of sail is usually a broad reach. This can be explained by considering two points. First, for all points of sail except a run, forward movement is caused by sails acting as airfoils, like airplane wings generating forward lift. Second, the wind direction experienced aboard a moving sailboat, the apparent wind, is different than the wind experience by a stationary object, the true wind.

Let's say you're on a broad reach, with the wind coming over the corner of the stern at a 135 degree angle to the direction the boat is pointed. The wind will flow over the sails and accelerate the boat forward. As the boat accelerates, the apparent wind direction shifts forward. It's the same thing that happens when you're driving in a car on a rainy day and the rain is pelting your windshield from ahead. When you get out of the car though, the rain is falling vertically.

When the boat has accelerated to the point at which the apparent wind is 45 degrees off the direction of travel, a comfortable close haul for most boats, the boat is going 1.41 times the speed of the true wind. Racing boats that can sail closer to the wind than 45 degrees can travel significantly faster--at 29 degrees off the apparent wind, the boat is going twice as fast as the true wind.

I found this wikipedia page helpful for visualizing with vector diagrams.

According to Wikipedia, "in 2009 the world land speed record for a wind powered vehicle was set by a sand yacht sailing at about 3 times the speed of the wind."