Picchetti

Seven years ago when we lived in Sunnyvale, we used to take the short drive up into the Santa Cruz Mountains to visit Picchetti Winery. It was a great place for picnics and next to a park where one could go hiking through the century old vineyards first planted by the Picchetti family back in the 19th century. For a number of years after we'd left California we continued to get wine from Picchetti, but that relationship didn't survive our most recent move to Tennessee. So it's been a few years since we've had any Picchetti wine. Today we drove down to South Lake Tahoe, just across the California border, to hit up Picchetti's secondary tasting room. Surprisingly, no other California wineries have followed suit. While there are no peacocks here like there are outside their Cupertino facility, there was plenty of good wine to taste. And they were happy to still treat us like wine club members, with gratis tastings and opening up a bottle from their library. Sadly they had no port, but everything else we tasted brought back memories. I've left pieces of myself all over this country in the many places we've spent time and revisiting them I usually find that we've both changed. Still, I feel like each is a repeating refrain in the symphony of my life. I visited Lake Tahoe as child before Aunt Dell and her family lived here, but often with them since they lived not far from us in California. Visiting Dell et al. after they moved up here as a teenager from the east I was allowed the special privledge of a long distance phonecall back to my girlfriend, to whom I will be married 16 years tomorrow. I came back for the last time with my parents when the twins were young. The next time we visited there were four kids and I was headed out to spend a year working at Stanford. That year we saw a great deal of Dell and Bob, but their daughters were already grown and gone. When we left California to return east of the Mississippi Picchetti expanded to Tahoe. We came back to Tahoe in 2009 and then again this week, probably making it the longest refrain. I haven't been back to Bel Air, MD in decades and I haven't been to Severna Park, MD since Nana died. And without ties to family or friends in those places I don't know that I ever will again. So over the coming months as I drink the Picchetti wines we purchased today it will now incorporate a bit of the Tahoe connection in addition to California.