Beer with subtitles

A rare treat for a visitor to northern California: an opportunity to gatecrash a well-planned trip up to wine country, taking in some pretty fancy and hard-to-get-into wineries and finally live out all my “Sideways” fantasies for real (well, the wine tasting bits anyway).

So, we started at some ungodly never-before-heard-of hour on a Saturday morning in order to arrive in downtown San Francisco where a limo would pick us up and bring us to Napa. No designated driver for us!

It was a glorious morning and after some introductions – there were eight of us travelling and there were six Indian names to somehow memorise, so it took a while – we headed off, traversing the Golden Gate before passing through Sausalito and onwards up to Napa. I felt a bit guilty about crashing in on the trip but nobody seemed to mind, especially when it was revealed I was Irish. As an aside, sometimes it feels like a license to do as you like over here – jaywalk, crash parties, you name it!

Anyway, for future reference, here’s where we stopped:

• We stopped first in V. Sattui and this was, to my mind, perhaps the most enjoyable stop: $10 yielded eight tastings from their menu, none of which – interestingly – are available outside of the winery. I loved their off-dry Johannisberg riesling, did not love their Rosato and very much enjoyed their Zinfandel. Having something of a sweet tooth, I liked their Madeira enough to buy an entire bottle and create yet another massive packing problem for myself.
  
• Cakebread Cellars was undoubtedly the highlight of the tour. Cakebread are a small volume winery (100,000 cases per year) with such reknown that tastings are strictly by appointment only and whose appointments are not subject to adustment. I’m enternally grateful for the locals who stood aside to let me take their place. I won’t forget it: their Chardonnay was amazing, their Merlot nothing like a Merlot (richer, somehow than their Cabernet) and their Cabernet just stunning. I felt compelled to purchase a Cabernet for a Bordeaux-loving friend back home and a Pinot for a special occasion.
  
• Our last stop, Mumm Napa, allowed us sample something new: sparkling Pinot. These were a bit mixed than previous wineries but at least one worked very very well.

All in all, a wonderful day. It’s fascinating to see how every winery is setup for visiting, with some (like Sattui) even limiting their sales to just their winery. It seems to be a pretty common weekend activity over here and one that’s slowly being adopted in Europe where, for one example, I’ve heard of Bordeaux tours. However, I guess it’s not as established a pastime back home. California may be a young wine-producing region but they’re producing some amazing wines and, in this climate and with this scenery I simply can’t think of a better way to spend your Saturday.

As an “international”, transport will be interesting: Sattui offered a cardboard and polystyrene wine-carrying contraption that’s guaranteed against breakages of the precious contents within. We’ll see in a week’s time if British Airways allow me check in two big pieces of luggage and, if so, if it survove Heathrow.

There’s an old philosophical thought experiment concerning the multiplication of bacteria. It goes something like this:

A cell can divide itself in two, producing a new cell, every five minutes. In effect, the number of cells doubles every five minutes: two, four, eight, sixteen, etc. After one day at this rate of growth you already have 2^288 bacteria (lots) and, in fact, it’s easy to calculate that pretty soon the entire universe is full. Or maybe it already is. So, why isn’t the universe full of bacteria?

Well, it just doesn’t happen in practise. Or so they thought: there is one actual recorded case, from international globalised economics, of such sustained exponential growth: the Starbucks coffee chain, whose branches filled the entire known universe in late 2003 (although they still only have two outlets in Dublin).

Seattle is where it all began, way back when in 1971, in a little outlet – just like a hundred others – on the edge of Pike Market. Overlooking the Pacific Ocean, this particular branch eschews the normal green sans-serif livery in favour of what are presumably the branch’s original colours and slogans. It’s a tourist attraction of sorts, a landmark store whose queue is far too long to contemplate joining.

I’m glad the queue was too long: it gave me an excuse to wait for better, genuine coffee later in the day. In fact, I have great coffee karma in Seattle. Here are my finds for the two days, listed in the order in which I stumbled across them:

• Seattle Coffee Works
  Situated between the market and the Seattle Art Museum, this coffee house boasts a veritable cornucopia of local roasts. Did I know there’s over 80 independent coffee roasters in Seattle? No, I did not! The friendly barista asks me a rare question: what sort of coffee do I want? I say espresso but that’s not what she means; do I like it light, dark, spicy? She quickly assembles a special concoction of her very own to my exact specification (“eh, dark – but light!”) and whose merits I’m instructed to report back. Best of all, if I’m not happy then she’ll “keep doing it until I like it”. What an offer!
  
• Zeitgeist
  The Smashing Pumpkins play across the road for this fine cup of coffee in the historic Pioneer Square district. In another city this would be something to write home about.
• Vivace (off Broadway)
  There’s a long queue and it takes a long time to prepare but it’s the most amazing cup of coffee in the entire history of the world, ever. It’s deeply dark and unleashes upon the tongue that rarest of things, what I call the “coffee fruit hit”. This is my own term for a coffee taste that is so fresh and rich it goes far beyond bitter and almost into sweetness, as if someone had genetically engineered a coffee-flavoured banana and somehow mashed it into coffee-banana juice…no, paste.

The “coffee fruit hit” I first experienced with a clown-sized double espresso from Peaches in Dublin – never since, incidentally – and, in my innocence, momentarily mistook my angel espresso for a fruit drink and/or portal into another dimension. A very strange and rare delight indeed.

Not bad for one weekend.

Seattle’s premier museum – SAM – is located in the heart of downtown, just minutes walk from Pike Market. It houses (mostly) modern art from all round the world with particularly good exhibits from Native American, African Aboriginal artists.

So we get all the usual modern art weirdness, plus a few of those 19th century idealised western landscapes (I guess this is the north-west, which they supposedly depicted) and giant totem poles.

Every single guidebook and website said I had to at least pass through Seattle’s Pike Market.

Well, I like easy itineraries and the market was just 15 minutes walk from the hotel so I started off here bright and early Saturday morning: just when it should be at its most interesting (or busiest). It runs seven days a week and seems to have evolved from an old farmers or fish market situated near the waterfront.

Today, although fish and fresh vegetables are still present, it’s dominated by local arts and crafts. These are similar in many ways to what I saw in Mountain View’s Food and Wine festival but the great thing about hosting local artists is that it’s different everywhere you go. I don’t buy much apart from a t-shirt or two but I always enjoy walking around these sort of displays.

Apart from the sights we have a number of buskers performing outside the (somewhat notable) Starbucks and charming albeit foggy views of the ocean.

A gratuitous panorama of the Golden Gate, courtesy of the wonderful Autostitch.

I really like the Golden Gate.

Vertigo is on TV.

It couldn’t be better timing: after three weekends in San Francisco, I can recognise or can roughly place most of the locations…and there’s so many San Franciscan locations in Vertigo: Fort Point, the Presidio, Coit Tower and the Palace of the Legion of Honour all get a mention. In fact, the locations are as much an “extra character” as the famous music.

There’s something special about travelling to a place that’s featured in a favourite movie – and so many great movies (or at least movies that have stood the test of time) are set prominently in a great city: Manhattan, Vertigo, The Commitments, Lost in Translation, etc.

What’s the correlation?

Well, I dunno but, watching this, I’m painfully aware that I’m actually not in San Francisco…I’m in Mountain View. And nobody ever made a film – good, bad or indifferent – about Mountain View.

…missing your last train home.

And to cap it all off, a $100 taxi ride later, I end up back in Mountain View.

A one hour cruise with the Red and White Fleet around San Francisco Bay seemed like a jolly splendid way to while away another afternoon in San Francisco.

At the very least, it made for a nice change from hiking up and down those damn hills.

Pier 39 – and the attached Ferry Building – is just a few minutes walk from my hotel. I took a leisurely stroll over only to discover that my cruise leaves from Pier 43-and-a-half. Oops. A frantic and harrowing taxi journey usually saves the day, of course, and so it was this afternoon.

This particular cruise – one of many run by the company – leaves from pier 43, runs west just out past the Golden Gate Bridge then returns east via the Oakland side of Alcatraz before returning to the pier. It takes an hour and is really a nice way to spend that hour.

Nice article about New York’s A train; at 31 miles it’s the longest subway line in the world (and has the best soundtrack).

Still working my way through San Francisco with the help of Frommer’s. I’ve got most of the standard tourist stuff out of my system and now I’d like to simply explore the neighbourhoods.

Over lunch in the Ferry Building, the man sitting next to me strikes up conversation; also here on business, his work involves something called “blue ocean thinking” – which sounds intriguing – and it turns out we both studied computers at college and are both ex-IBMers. Like me, he’s arrived in San Francisco a couple of days early to soak up some the city’s atmosphere. With this common aim in mind, we agree to take the cable car up Pacific Heights and then explore the streets for a few hours.

The California cable car (unusally quiet today) whisks us up California past Union Square and Nob Hill and up through to Van Ness and Washington, on the outskirts of Pacific Heights.

Out here, the streets are so photogenic – houses are eclectic, colourful and quintessentially San Franciscan with their Victorian fronts and flights of stairs leading up to the entrances. The highlight of this area proves to be Fillmore Street, with several excellent coffee shops such as “The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf”. We sit down here with the locals who are here enjoying a lazy coffee afternoon, in a way that’s increasingly – and with great difficulty, thanks to our weather – becoming popular back in Dublin.

A couple of parks punctuate the streets along the way and afford some nice views of the city, as well as one very intriguing cat out taking her owner for a walk..

Now, we head down through a neighbourhood called Cow Hollow toward Union Street (not to be confused with Union Square), another little haven of one-off shops, coffee houses and restaurants. Thus ends a tour of another little corner of San Francisco…you just can’t go wrong in this city.