Winter Wineland January 18-19 in Sonoma Counrty

There aren't a lot of wine country events during the sleepy winter months. Winter Wineland is the biggie for Sonoma County.  The event is sponsored by a northern Sonoma winery association, the Wine Road. This covers essentially the Russian River, Dry Creek, and Alexander Valleys.

Winter Wineland is a ticketed event that gets you into about 130 wineries. Okay, you probably can't get to all of them in two days so you may have to be selective. Everyone participating will be running some sort of wine sale. Some will have the winemakers available to talk with, some will have food, music, theme parties, cellar tours, etc.

The Saturday and Sunday of the event is during the Martin Luther King holiday weekend.

Get your tickets at the Wine Road website.

Some suggestions:

• Get tickets, hotel reservations, and dinner reservations in advance. Tickets may sell out, hotels may fill up, you may wind up having dinner at In-N-Out!
• Get lodging in Santa Rosa, Windsor, or Healdsburg to be centrally located.
• Plan each day to cover one area, such as Saturday in the Russian River Valley and Sunday in Dry Creek.
• This is a great chance to look for wineries that aren't normally open to the public, but are for this event.
• Bring a lunch or plan a restaurant stop during the day! Seems simple, but a lot of people forget about eating until about 2 pm when they are way up in Dry Creek Valley somewhere.
• This affair runs from 11am to 4pm each day at participating wineries. Some of these wineries will be open before or after these hours for regular tasting.

Hope to see you then!

January in the Russian River Valley