Customer Reviews

Frommer's Portable California Wine Country

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

There's a lot of detail packed into this small guide. I liked the winery reviews because they outline what kind of experience each winery offers along with the basics about their history and wines. And restaurant reviews were frank and on the money.

I used this book to plan a short weekend trip to Napa Valley from Los Angeles. This book packed with all sorts of great information for each different wine country city (napa, yountville, etc) from best types of hotels for every budget, nearby attractions, spas, picnic spots, restaurants, etc. And of course a concise review and rating of the wineries in each city.

I found myself taking the bag out of my bag during the trip to read up on different wineries and attractions I wanted to visit.

It is very small and compact so it's easy to take with you too.

This small book (only 172 pages) is perfect for planning your next Sonoma/Napa visit. In fact, although I have been many times to Napa, I wanted a new place to stay with a fireplace and jacuzzi bath and privacy. I found a great place in the book called Cottage Grove Inn - with 2 Frommers stars.

Because it is so portable, not all the wineries are listed, so if what you need is a listing of all wineries this may not be your book. However, if you need to find the best in hotels and dining experiences as well as some of the best wineries to discover for yourself, then this little jewel is perfect.

This book is a great size, and offers a well rounded summary of what Napa and Sonoma have to offer visitors. However, when it comes to winery and restaurant recommendations, this books only suggests a few (2-6) from each area of the valleys, and of those, only a handful have received Frommer's ratings. There's so many more vineyards and restaurants in these regions, so more "recommended" locations would have been helpful. Still, considering its travel-friendly size, this is a nice book to have on hand when planning a trip to this part of the country.

I bought 2 guidebooks for CA wine country. This one was great for most everything, but the other was more encompassing with regards to winery/vineyard recommendations. This was best for background information, transportation, activities, places to stay and eat, etc. Nice maps of Napa and Sonoma, as well as driving areas between popular regions. Overall very good, and you could easily get around only using this book.

I'm planning a trip to wine country and needed some information, not an encyclopedia's worth. This was concise and will be handy to take with me. It is laid out geographically which will make it that much easier to see the wineries that I want to see.

We're not what you'd consider wine snobs and bought this book for the good excuse of checking out wine country which is just a short drive away. It's nice they included restaurants. After all the tasting stops it made our outing complete and we drove home totally content as well as sober.

This, like the other Frommer's Guides I have seen, seems to be timid, generic and void of fun, gritty, insider information. It gave some useful information to read on the plane about various wineries, but I left it in my hotel the days I headed out to Sonoma, and this I did on purpose. Do your research and buy a better guide.

Just because a travel guide rips into the Mondavi winery as being too touristy does not mean it has any special insights on how to see parts of Napa that are off the beaten path. Mondavi is an easy target. Nevertheless, this guide does have some good info about where to go to get some free drink--and do not worry about wine-drinking protocol. Because if you like it, that's all the counts. The best vintage I ever had was still the '53 Chateau Mouton Rothschild my uncle gave me as a present for getting my doctorate in material science, and I slurped down that bottle while eating a corndog.