This is a follow up from the “Forest Grove” blog on SakeOne (Momokawa) 
I bought the “on sale” cooking sake “Murai Family Tokubetsu Honjozo” for $3 (720ml) and recently while cooking I tried it out. Just pour in 2 small cap and wow, it’s really nice and bring up the flavour even better.
It also helps to thicken the “soup”. Yummy yummy.
This weekend we went for a winery trip 
My previuos trip is to Napa Valley’s (CA) wineries. I would say, it’s really different from wineries here. Their wineries are in larger scales and got a lot of tourist during weekends.
First stop is the Montinore Vineyard. This has a nice patio outside overlooking the vineyard while enjoying the wines. We did just a brief stop and for a few photo snapshots. Wines there are not very expensive.
www.montinore.com
Second stop is SakeOne or Momokawa. This one is an interesting and special one, because it’s Sake! There’s no wineries at it’s compound, just needed rice I choosen this one as it offer FREE tour around the “factory”. Sometimes I feel it’s quite interesting to understand and learn the process and enjoy better the wine/sake. The tour is at 1pm, 2pm and 3pm. While waiting for the tour at 2pm, we signed up for the Sake testing for $3/person for 4 sakes tasting. We tried the “g-joy”, Momokawa’s Ruby Junmai Ginjo, plum sake and coconut sake. Hmm, all turned out nice except the coconut 
which is too overpowering and we don’t quite like it. At last we ended up bought $10 small g-joy(375ml), $11 (750ml) Ruby, $6 plum sake(375ml) and $3 Murai Family cooking sake (750ml). The people there are really friendly. Since there’s no one signed up for the tour except us, we get a “private and personal” tour. It was an interesting tour. We saw the brown rice before polishing and after 40% polishing, really white and fine. She also actaully open up the cover and let us see how “bubble-ly” the fermentation went (we saw 2 tanks: early stage and later stage) and also let us climb up the staircase to look into one of the tank and smell the yeast. We also get to visit the cedar-lined koji room and taste the rice up until here If you happened to drop by, must try the sake testing and FREE tour.
www.sakeone.com
3rd winery is the Popular David Hill winery and vineyard. It’s a bit weird, as the road to the winery is unpaved for ~0.3miles 
Hmmm… but this also means more likely to find ‘real and hidden’ winery There’s roadsign along the road until the gate. The shop/house doesn’t have a “label or title” to it. But there’s a big vineyard there and they’re set up to have garden wedding, NICE We went for their wine tasting, it’s FREE with some are $1/tasting. We ended up buying their prize winning Merlot $30.
www.davidhillwinery.com
montinore vineyard
Momokawa Sakeone
Sakeone poster
David Hill
David Hill: Garden Wedding
David Hill vineyard
Momokawa's Sake
David Hill's Merlot + Momokawa's Sake
Comments