One night in the Russian River Valley

Here is the story of how we ended up spending an unforgettable night in the Russian River Valley. We drove north from the San Francisco Bay area with the intent to stay at Bothe-Napa Valley State Park. This park is located in the heart of Napa Valley wine country, and only a few minutes from the tasting room of a wine we first tasted (and really, really like) when we went out to dinner with some friends for Christmas, Belle Glos Pinot Noir. Sadly, nothing about our stay in Napa seemed to be working out the way we planned. Our RV did not fit into the campsite, which claimed to be for RVs up to 31 feet (ours is only 25 feet). And Belle Glos was closed on the day we were there, and all other wineries we looked up required reservations to do a tasting. So, with no place to go and no wine to taste we were left scrambling at the end of the day to find someplace to at least park for the night. To make matters worse, internet and cell service were spotty at best so looking up places to go was a bit more of a challenge than we wanted at the end of the day.

Finally, I was able to look up some nearby locations on Harvest Host and called Russell Vineyards. Bruce Russell, the owner, answered right away and told me that he had the night marked as a night off and wasn’t planning to have anyone stay there. He must have heard something in my voice or he is just the nicest guy out there, probably the latter, because he said if we could drive over right then he would meet us and let us stay. He told us that he does have a two bottle minimum and it is $20/tasting. This all sounded reasonable to us (it actually cost more to do many of the wine tastings in Napa or Paso Robles) so we got back on the road and drove about an hour over to Healdsburg in the Russian River Valley.

Let me just say, what started out as a rather disappointing point in our trip ended up being one of the highlights, thanks to Bruce. We started out by getting our RV set up just inside the gate to Bruce’s property. It is a large, fairly level site that could actually fit at least a couple of large RVs.

Once we were situated Bruce drove us up to his vineyard in his truck. I’ll admit, there was a moment when we were headed deeper into his property that we thought he might be some ax murderer. Joel even made a joke, “Three go out and only one comes back.” It turns out, the two-acre vineyard sits on a hilltop in the middle of over 200 acres with steep hills. We learned that the ranch has been in his family for over fifty years. It has a creek that flows through the property during the winter and Bruce lets his neighbor graze dairy cows in the open grass-covered slopes.

Once we reached the vineyard we sat down at a picnic table under a big shade tree while Bruce opened a bottle of his Syrah wine.

The wine turned out to be delicious! We sipped at it while Bruce explained the history of the vineyard, how the wine was grown and harvested, and his plans for future wines. Part of what made the experience so great was that we had one-on-one time with him, and he was patient, answering all of our questions as we sipped his wine and walked around his vineyard.

It turns out there were some goats and miniature horses on the property. Bruce introduced us to his very friendly billy goats. By the way, I looked it up – “All Billy goats are goats but not all goats are Billy goats. A Billy goat is a male goat otherwise categorized as a “Ram” goat, as opposed to a “Doe or Ewe” which is a female goat.” – findanyanswer.com

Bruce even put his two billy goats on the label for his wine. He calls them his “kids”. (we see what you did there Bruce) Here is some more goat-wisdom I picked up from the internet: “While we often think of the word kid to mean young human, in old Scandinavian, Norse, German, and Swedish the words to describe a young goat are kizzi, kitze, and kidd. Kid has been used to refer to a young goat in English since around the 1200s.” – study.com

Nearby our parking spot for the night is a small gate and sign. We learned from Bruce that this is the entrance to Gina’s Orchard, a space preserved in memory of the granddaughter of nearby property owners.

As I said, this turned out to be one of our more memorable nights so far.