The park was pretty nice. Our site was just wide enough to pull out our slides, but we were happy that it was concrete and the roads all paved. It's located next door to EOS winery, with a pathway through their vineyard allowing RV visitors to walk to their tasting room from the park.
As an added bonus, the RV park hosts wine tastings on site periodically. The afternoon that we pulled in, the park was hosting one such event with 10 local wineries. It included appetizers and entertainment by a local band. We came here for the wines so no time like the present to get started-- and no driving involved.
There are so many wineries in the area, we had a hard time narrowing down which ones we would visit. There are two that were definitely on the list--Adelaida Cellars and Tobin James. We visited them ten years ago, and joined their wine shipment clubs. Since then, we've enjoyed their wines every spring and fall. When we had our house, we stored the shipments in our wine cellar, pulling out bottles on special occasions or when wanting to share with friends and family. We decided that we would have to temporarily cancel our club memberships while we're traveling, assuming that coordinating receipt with a constantly changing address wouldn't work--this in spite of the many offers we had from friends and family to use their addresses for shipments, and promises that they would take good care of the wine for us. It isn't that we didn't trust them......no, actually, it was that we didn't trust them. :) So when we visited Adelaida and Tobin James, we lamented to them our disappointment of not getting to enjoy their wine until we settle into a house again sometime in the future. They both told us that they will be more than happy to work with us on getting shipments to us as we're traveling, so we're back in the clubs! And as they had just shipped out their spring selections and had a few left, we could take this spring's wine with us. Of course, not having a wine cellar onboard the RV, we'll have to drink it all in short fashion. You can imagine how unhappy that makes us.
In total, we visited 7 different wineries (SheM is a lightweight, so no more than 2 wineries per day). Other than Adelaida and Tobin James, we agreed that we would buy no more than 2 bottles of wine at each winery. Bottom line is that when we left Paso Robles, we had about 20 bottles of wine stashed in as many places as we could find to put them. The number is dwindling.
On a completely different line of attractions, we drove to the Sequoia National Park. It was a rather long drive from Paso, but since we were at the closest point that we'll be as we travel through California, we went. We didn't have time to drive the entire park, so opted to take Generals Highway as far as the tree named General Sherman, the world's largest living tree measured in volume of total wood. En route to General Sherman, the scenery is, as you would expect, gorgeous.
Regarding the title of this post, Mike Grgich is arguably the person responsible for the California wine industry's success. His 1973 Chardonnay bested several French wines, being named best white wine at the Paris Tasting of 1976. This gave California credibility for wine making, and the rest is history.
Next is Vacaville (pronounced like vacuum).
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