Visit and tour of Woodbridge Winery

Driving up through the San Joaquin Valley was interesting and boring. Mile after mile of Almond Orchards (had no clue there were so many!), grape vines (I expected this), bee hives at the ends of the rows (should have expected this, but didn't) and the unexpected smell...manure. Suddenly we came upon several miles of feed lots of cattle. I'd bet there were up to a million cattle kept in fenced areas to eat, eat, eat, definitely not free range. Bet that's where they're fed all the hormones we hear about. I was so busy looking, I forgot to take a picture. Just as well.

Because of all our car problems and delays, we decided we had to go straight through California...LA to Oregon.

In reading the brochures we picked up, Rick discovered that the Robert Mondavi Woodbridge Winery was in Modesto. That's one of our favorite everyday wines. Since we missed going up the Pacific Coast Highway, we decided to take at least a short side tour.



Let's take this Airstream to the Winery.


Let's visit.


Early spring for the vines.


These are special vines. Only Zinfandel grows on vines which aren't on wires. Some of these plants are quite old we learned on the tour.


This is a HUGE operation. Each of these vats hold about 216,800 gallons. There were dozens of them.


These vats are at least twice the size of the last picture. Only a small portion of them are in the picture. Look at the cars compared to the vats. The employees rode around the facility on bicycles it's so large.


This is the bottling and corking machine. It bottles 400/minute. That makes 50,000 cases per day. That's a LOT of wine...start drinking!!!



These storage vats are made of Redwood. Also old. The guide said that they do not flavor the wine at all. But that they are good for the wine because they breathe.



These are the Oak casks to produce the oak flavor. Only a small portion of them are pictured. The winery has so much space in this cooler, they rent space to other wineries to place their casks here to age.


It was an interesting visit and tour. Well worth the time.

Now on to the Redding Elks Club where we enjoyed visiting with the members.