The Best Wine Tasting Lunch Is at the Vineyard

When enjoying a long day of Dionysian quaffing, one’s mind inevitably turns in the urgent direction of lunch. In Northern California, fine-dining lunches have long accompanied the winery tasting experience. That’s true in France, Italy, and the south of England, too, where restaurants like the one at the winery Tillingham sport Michelin honors. The local tradition is still growing, but there are plenty of reservation-only long lunches to get excited about.

The hottest ticket is surely Antica Terra, whose chef, Timothy Wastell, won a James Beard Award this year. Inside the winery’s barrel house, which glows womb-like, Wastell and his team cover tables with microseasonal plates to the hum of jazz vinyl, then proceed through considered courses. Uni atop a buckwheat waffle and local goat charcuterie were just a couple of my recent dining highlights, to which the wine—the winery’s own and a battalion of world-beating fine wines poured alongside them—offered a melodic counterpunch.

Half an hour away at Soter Vineyards, chef Clayton Allen (formerly of Clyde Common) serves a menu of about seven courses based around livestock and vegetables farmed on-site. My last visit included creamy sunchokes with brown butter and rosemary, riotously bright and tangy chicories tossed with citrus and almonds, and a duck from their farm (he may as well have arrived quacking). In the glass, Soter’s exquisitely traditional bubbles and pinots arc gracefully across the lunch.

Winery meals are inherently intimate, though few compare to lunch at Rodeo Hills, where winemaker Jared Etzel joins his guests for each meal, sharing splashes of his finely tuned pinot noir and chardonnay alongside stories of his personal Oregon wine history. Etzel’s father, Michael, cofounded the enormously influential Beaux Frères winery with the wine critic Robert Parker in the late 1980s. Decades later, Jared Etzel has forged an identity wholly his own at Rodeo Hills, a separate property strictly producing estate-grown wines (subject of great expectations in the industry). The meal is a charmingly homey contrast to the rather grand wines. Recently, it centered a roast chicken with tarragon jus, and Netarts oysters with lemon made the perfect foil to Etzel’s Chablisian chardonnay. A winery lunch is always special, but with the winemaker at your table? C’mon!