Monochrome Gate Bridge

This is the leaving of San Francisco, after a slightly surreal morning at the Yerba Bueno (sp?) park, where we shared the experience with people in various stages of getting high or coming down (with associated voiding of various forms) until we discovered the lovely kids play area and carousel. We headed up to wine country today: always interesting to see the differences between the old and new world ways of making wine. We managed to squeeze in a nice long tutored tasting, where (since they weren't too busy) the kids got an empty adjacent tasting room all to themselves to play in. (Well after that kind of 5* treatment we obviously felt obliged to buy some...)

Very beautiful country out in the Sonoma valley, but it's just odd to see how brown/yellow everything is apart from the vines. The winery we visited (Berzinger) is biodynamic, so they think they make the best wines by working with the environment (though I'm not sure whether they go so far as some French vinyards do and plant in accordance with the lunar cycle). They did have a very pretty bug farm - lots of flowering plants to encourage the kind of insects they need to polinate the grapes and keep the pests down.

And the wine tasted pretty fine too, though nothing's going to make me a fan of pinot noir.