Hearst Castle & Paso Robles Wine Country - 3.10

First thing in the morning we made our way towards Hearst Castle up on the hill by San Simeon. It was designed by architect Julia Morgan for newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst from 1919 until 1947. Julia Morgan worked on it for almost 30 years - helping Mr.Hearst realize his dream. Currently it is a National Historic Landmark, was donated to the state of California and is open to the public. There are various tours you can take up there, each one taking you through different areas of the enormous main building and other buildings in the complex.

Mr.Hearst's parents had brought the land times ago and once the parents died, William was over 50, he started to build a permanent home there. Castle is situated basically in the middle of nowhere, but he loved the area as this is where they went camping with his parents when he was little. Whole estate is about 1000 square km :) Now the castle is amazing, it is huge and it is luxurious. He incorporated different historic architectural styles, there was a private cinema, tennis courts, indoor and outdoor swimming pools, huge library and enormous kitchen with refrigerators (at that time this was luxury), 56 bedrooms (wherever there was a bed there was also a bathroom right next to it - so if there were 2 beds in a room then there were 2 bathrooms as well), an airfield and the world's largest private zoo with many exotic animals.

Castle has an impressive amount of art in it, starting from books and ending with antique ceilings, covering whole lot of paintings, furniture, carpets, sculptures and so on.

In the afternoon our wine tasting tour started. We managed to visit 7 wineries :) Here they are:

Turley Wine Cellars - specialized for Zinfandel's. Jenny likes zin's so we got to taste lots of those :)

Peachy Canyon Winery - specializing in sustainably-farmed Zinfandel, Cabernet and Rhone varietals. It was located in the beautiful Templeton gap west of Paso Robles in the Old Bethel School House dating back to 1886.

AJB Vineyards - a smaller winery, here all the wines are estate grown and produced: Viognier, Nebbiolo, Sangiovese, Zinfandel and Syrah. Estate is family owned and operated.

Donatoni Winery - another smaller winery, as they say: great trips begin with Donatoni wine :) They use grapes from the Paso Robles appellation for their wine.

Eberle Winery - they celebrate their 30 years of wine making, booklet informs me that this is one of the top 10 most award-winning wineries in USA. Here we got to go on a cave tour as well and learn a bit more about harvesting and making wine. This one was quite established and seemed to be enormous. Our wine pourer told us that there was one Estonian girl working in their winery last year :)

Tobin James Cellars - Kristy is a member of this winery so we got to do the tasting for free and got an extra list of wines to taste as a complementary. We must have done 10+ wines there :) They craft fruit intense wines: Zinfandels, Cabernet Sauvignons, Syrahs, Chardonnays, Merlots, velvety "Liquid Love" Dessert Zinfandel and many others. They had quite a wide selection of different ones.

EOS Estates Winery - very much an established one with quite a bit of beautiful gardening and a special parking lot for Porches :) They were proud to announce that their whole estate and production runs on solar power. Had some nice wines too and whole lot of merchandise.

At each wine testing there is a list of wines that are available for tasting, sometimes it is a fixed list and sometimes there is a list of options from where you can make your own selection. Usually it was anywhere between 5-7 wines, mostly red, at the end some port or dessert wine, few had also white wine available for tasting. Some wineries charged for tasting the others did not. In total there are more than 100 wineries in this wine country :) As I mentioned earlier the key is to eat crackers and drink plenty of water. Usually there were crackers on the counter so you could munch on those as well :)