2nd of May: Napa Valley

In the morning Kathleen Davis, of the Great-Dane Kennel Davishire, picked us up at Paul’s and Grady’s home. The journey went to the Californian Napa Valley where we met Allison (breeder of fawn Danes) and Lucrecia (brindle breeder). In the whole valley a lot of Vinerys (vineyards) one after the other, vineyards with many kilometres of length. The single Vinerys offer club memberships. As a club member you can bring guests and take part in a wine tasting. As the local friendsgroup where members of these wineclubs we could do so, but not till we had something to eat we enjoyed a fabulous picnic outside one of the vinyards.

Allison and Lucrecia explained the reason, why colossal ventilating fans are standing on the wine fields. This are so-called „Defenders “. In the valley it becomes very hot during the day, at night there can be frost even in May. So that the shoots wont be damaged, at night the Defenders move the air above the wine fields, so that the frost cannot settle on the vines. In our visit in the Napa Valley it was a bit cloudy luckily –, otherwise, we would have had to count on temperatures about 30° C. I already mentioned that in America everything is a little bigger – so also the vineyards. We visited one after a journey with a chair lift. It lies on one of the hills, to his feet endles fast wine fields. We saw halls with gigantic steel tanks in which the grape juice was fermenting, and afterwards the colossal halls in which hundreds of oak barrels (five stacked above one another) camped down in long rows. Here the Californian wine gets his maturity and its final taste mark.