San Diego Part 2

Aside from eating (a lot), being tourists, and hiking around San Diego we also visited a brewery and a couple of wineries.  After our hike at Mission Trails Regional Park we went to Stone Brewing Company's World Bistro and Gardens for lunch.  Little did we know how epic this place would be.

Stone Brewing Co.'s World Bistro and Gardens location near Point Loma is the biggest beer garden I've been to hands down.  The restaurant and gardens encompass 23,500 square feet of real estate and incorporate an "industrial meets organic" feel by featuring metal, concrete, wood, water features, and plant life.  This particular location is where Stone Brewing experiments with new brews.  As a result this beer garden offers some exclusive brews that aren't offered at any of their other breweries.  I was very impressed by their variety of beers.

Oddly enough I really liked their Baird/Ishii/Stone Japanese Green Tea IPA (10.1% ABV) despite disliking (and thus avoiding) IPAs in general.  The green tea taste was artfully incorporated into this moderately hoppy IPA.  My favorite out of our flights was the  Stone "The Tiger Cub" Saison aged in White Wine Barrels (8.2% ABV).  It was the best of both the wine and beer worlds for me.  I highly recommend taking some time to visit Stone Brewing Co.'s World Bistro and Gardens should you decide to explore San Diego.

We also stopped at Bernardo and Orfila wineries for our wine education segment of our SoCal getaway.  Bernardo Winery (left and middle photos) is 125 years old and has been family-owned for three generations.  Their facility reminded me of a wine amusement park in that it was set up like a little village of shops.  They had glass blowers on site, a chocolate shop, a coffee shop, not to mention the tasting room itself.  We quickly discovered that the wine tasting experience is quite different than one in Virginia.

For those who don't know, a wine tasting in Virginia is usually conducted from a set list (though a winery may have more wines than you'll get to taste) and you stay at the tasting bar while the Tasting Room Associate conducts your tasting.  In California, or at least where we visited, the winery presents you with a list of all of the wines they have available along with a punch card with the number of tastings allowed.  You then pick which wines you'd like to taste.  There are pros and cons to both ways of conducting a tasting, of course, though I did still have a mini wine tasting culture shock there for a hot second.

The wines at Bernardo Winery were good overall (I especially liked their Champagne) and they poured generously for tastings, but I found the wines at Orfila to be more interesting.

Orfila Winery, open since 1994, is nestled in the San Pasqual Valley and overlooks a 70-acre estate.  Their wine list was extensive (I wish I could have tried them all!) and I found their Tasting Room Associates to be very personable and knowledgeable.  I enjoyed tasting and comparing several of their Syrahs as well as trying their Sangiovese, a varietal which I'd never had prior to this trip.  They still didn't make me a fan of ports (I'm still trying to find one I like), but we had a great time classin' it up.  Hopefully there will be more winery experiences in California in my future.  Next stop, Napa Valley?!