As the recipient of many well-intentioned but unused wine gifts, I feel compelled to speak up on behalf of all wine drinkers.

The short answer is “not necessarily.” But it’s a logical question, and the more time you spend browsing the shelves at your local wine shop, the more likely you are to ponder the thought.

There are only 11 wineries on Diamond Mountain, many of them with hard-to-find wines with “cult” status.

The following is a list (by region) of some of our favorite wineries, restaurants, shops, and activities up in Wine Country. This not an exhaustive list (by any stretch of the imagination), but simply some places we have discovered and enjoyed during our travels around Napa Valley. At the bottom is a list of places we would recommend avoiding - not because they are terrible, per se, but just because you can probably do better with your time/money.

There is nothing more frustrating than going to a decently nice restaurant, perusing the wine list for the perfect wine to go with dinner, only to have the waiter bring out a small, thick-rimmed glass for my wine. Ugh. Restaurants do this because **newsflash** glasses break. However, you deserve better!

If you’re like me (and I’ll assume your reading a wine blog because we have AT LEAST that in common) then you might find yourself on the couch on a Friday or Saturday night flipping through the Netflix or Amazon files looking for a nice way to mindlessly work your way through that nice bottle of wine you’ve rewarded yourself with.

Why not (maybe) learn something about wine in the process…or at least be entertained?

Over the last few years, I think I’ve seen twenty or more documentaries or wine-related movies. Some were good and some I didn’t last five minutes with. So let me guide your weekend movie search.

In no particular order, the Top Five Wine-Related Movies/Documentaries (Drumroll…….)

You may think of Sonoma County as Napa’s lesser-known but very well-reputed “little brother.”

Here are a couple of secrets about us:

We like to eat pizza.

We're sort of lazy cooks.

Claudine Wines are something you will be proud to open for your wine friends and something you can still afford to open for yourself…on a Tuesday…with leftovers…

Claudine Wines is the culmination of our collective experiences, trial and error, and desire to be a part of the world that still seems surreal almost a decade later.