Touring the wine caves of Napa Valley

Find a wine club that offers cave tours

If you’re thinking of joining a wine club, pick one that offers cave tours. Caves are great places to store and age barrels of wine. They maintain an even temperature all year, low but not freezing. They’re also humid, which reduces the loss of wine by evaporation that you’d normally get when storing a non-airtight barrel for years. The humidity of a wine cave should be at least 75 percent. And wine caves are often carved, decorated and lit to suit their owners’ imaginations and sometimes have their own water features that draw from underground rivers. They can even be good places to have dinner. With dinner, you can taste the latest wines and the library wines from previous years stored in the cave.

Cave tours near St. Helena

Anderson’s Conn Valley Vineyards, near St. Helena, holds tastings in its barrel caves, where current releases and library wines may be sampled and visitors can learn how they make and store the wine. One of the wines in its library is the ruby red 2009 Éloge. A fine blend from an excellent growing year, the ’09 Éloge has an aroma with a core of concentrated dark fruits, with crème de cassis, cigar box, spice and streaks of red currants. Its flavor is similar — deep and full-bodied with concentrated dark fruits, spice and mocha.

Cave tastings are $65, but one tasting fee can be waived by joining their wine club or making a $100 purchase. Join today.