Good thing Don was driving: Perhaps it was a little too much wine the night before, or maybe it was the fact that by 8AM I had ingested ZERO caffeine units; at any rate I was thick-headed as we drove up to Abel's Acres Apple Farm. I stumbled in the door looking for coffee; a few minutes and dollars later we stumbled out the back door onto a sunlit patio, overlooking a beautiful little valley surrounded by cedar topped mountains. We grabbed a table in the sun, and I slugged down two quick cups of coffee before stopping to relax and enjoy steaming hot apple crisp right out of the oven.
Wow!
It was just the right amount of syrup and cinnamon, not too sweet, nice crispy topping. Suddenly I felt (mostly) human again and was enjoying the day.
Apple Hill is not a hill, it is an area up in the pine and cedar forest just above Placerville where there are apple farms. It is sort of the Disneyland of apple farms, including the crowds, the parking way out (we were parked in the middle of an apple orchard, but we saw others hauled in via tractor), traffic jams, and all the kid attractions, junk food and craft booths you could want. All at one farm. Which is one farm out of perhaps fifty such farms. It is really rural in a people-watching-at-the-mall kind of way.
The stores are sort of like apple warehouses, selling about twenty varieties of apples and every apple related food item and knick-knack you could imagine. Apple BBQ sauce? Check. Apple wines? Check. Apple Christmas stuff? Check check check check.
Not only that, the farms are a virtual cornucopia of holiday delights: pumpkin patches, corn mazes, Christmas tree lots, berry picking, petting zoos and U-Pick vegetables.
At BoaVista I found my favorites: Winesap apples. Crisp, tart, firm... just right. We admired the beautiful looking, but not so good tasting dark dark Red Romes, the Black Arkansas and Johnagolds. But Don and I mostly had fun wandering over to the edge of the crowds and admiring the views across the tree-layered valleys, or staring off past the cars into the deep cedar groves.
When we had our share of apples and people, we headed a little North to the Wofford Vineyards. They had a nice outdoor grassy area in which to sit and enjoy tasting the whites, then we headed in to sample the reds. Don paid the tasting fee for us all, which included a quick tour and barrel tasting of the 2011 and 2012 cabernets. The crush was on, so the place was just permeated with that good smell, and the wines themselves were good, but pretty expensive at $50 a bottle.
Back into the car to end the day in the Shenadoah Valley, outside of Plymouth where we found the BellaGrace Winery tucked up a road right behind Renwood. We tasted outside, right in front of their cave, enjoying a wonderful view over the fall, color tinged grape vines. The 2010 Old Vine Zin was the best, and the price was good, so we each picked up a couple bottles and headed back into Sacramento.