Nice example of CA Wine Country home
jakkom
6 years ago
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patty_cakes42
6 years ago
ingrid_vc so. CA zone 9
6 years agoRelated Discussions
San Francisco / Wine Country Trip
Comments (9)I live in the SF bay area. The Napa Valley wine train is fun for lunch or dinner. If you want to spend a fortune for dinner, but have the meal of a lifetime, I would look into The French Laundry. Book early. V. Sattui is one of the top wineries in Napa and the castle there is a must see. Nice place for a picnic too. Opus One is also nice, but hard to get tours of. SF has wonderful walking tours that range from a couple of hours to all day. You get to tour and go behind the scenes of various restaurants, bakeries, wine bars, etc... I did an Italian food tour that was amazing. We went to 5 different restaurants for different courses and ended up at a bakery for fresh out of the oven biscotti. The Culinary Institute in SF is fantastic. The students put on quite a lunch. They often have theme days. I agree with Beach Blanket Babylon. Seating is tight as the club is not that big....See MoreCalabasas, CA -- Affordable Housing?
Comments (30)Probably too late to ring in here, but we just moved from Corona, California and that was a great area with VERY good schools. Crime is low, the area is growing and beautiful and it's just about 40 miles north of Temecula on interstate 5, so Corona is not quite as far to Calabasas. You could get a beautiful 3,000 sq. ft. home in Corona for about $600K. Maybe a little less since the market is slow right now. As for the two-hour estimate on Mapquest, throw that away. NOTHING in the L.A. area takes the amount of time that Mapquest estimates. Mapquest doesn't account for the crazy traffic. You're probably looking at 3-4 hours, on average, to get from Temecula to Calabasas during the oh-so-busy 7 a.m.-10 a.m. window or the 2:30 p.m. - 7 p.m. window. (those are rush hours in the L.A. area.) If you left smack in the middle of the day, between 10:30 a.m. and 1 p.m., you could probably make it in 2-1/2 hours if there were no accidents on the freeways. Another area I wanted to suggest, in addition to Corona, is Pasadena and the surrounding cities. I also lived in Covina, which is about 20 miles east of Pasadena, and I always adored Pasadena. A slighly less expensive city would be Monrovia, which has beautiful Craftsman style homes and sits at the base of the mountains so it's just gorgeous. Schools in Monrovia are excellent and you can find great schools in Pasadena, too. One more option, if you want to go a little east, is Glendora. Another beautiful community at the base of the same mountain range, just about 20 miles east of Pasadena. Alta Loma is the next city over and they have fabulous schools there as well. I'd say that, in traffic, Pasadena is about 90 minutes from Calabasas and Monrovia, which is just a few miles to the east of Pasadena, is about the same. Glendora would be about 45 minutes further, in traffic. (and it's always good to assess distance in traffic times because that's when you're going to find yourself doing the bulk of your driving. I've gotten out of the airport at LAX at 11 p.m. on a Sunday night before and found myself stuck in traffic in a taxi on the 405 freeway.) Good luck on your move!!!...See MoreCheap wine, or wine snobs (long)
Comments (7)Allison - wine mentor? What a cool job that would be. I don't know. I've been drinking wine for years and ask questions all the time. Now that I'm selling it I end up answering a few questions too, but my suggestion is to read and taste. And if you ever get out to NYC, call me. That's serious incidentally. Anyway, I can offer a few suggestions for people. First, don't overlook Beaujolais. It's been producing wine for centuries, mostly for cafes around Lyon, where there were a number of silk merchants. They make a young wine for drinking within a few months and back in the 80s a couple British guys were drinking and made a bet with each other about which one could get the wine to London fastest. That set off a trend for about 10 - 20 years and increased sales of that young Beaujolais. Production shot up and a lot of second rate wine was made to cash in. Then the fad faded, the market crashed, and the area is suffering today. BUT - in the hills around Beaujolais they also have what are called "cru" sites and those are very much worth investigating. For education, bypass the young stuff and look for the crus - they will have a name like Fleurie, Julianas, Morgon, Moulon au Vent, Regnie, or something like that. This area is just south of Burgundy, and some of the winemakers in Burgundy work in both places and you can learn a lot and have fun. Find a producer, say Chermette, or Brun, for example, and sample the wine of the same producer from Fleurie, Morgon and Julianas. Even buy George Dubeouf wines from those places - they are great values and will show you the differences in the soils and environment and microclimates, which the French call "terroir". Because it is the same winemaking, you take that variable out of the equation and presumably taste only the differences that result from the terroir. It's a good lesson and the wine is wonderful, inexpensive, and not high in alcohol. And even try the young Beaujolais just to compare. As a rule it will be simpler, but quite nice. If you can start to understand those, you start to understand what people get excited about when they talk of Burgundy or Piedmont. You can do it with riesling too - they pretty much never use oak barrels in Germany for the rieslings, so you only taste the winemaker and the vineyard. For example, find some Prum - J.J. Prum, S.A. Prum, Weins Prum. They are related family and they make wine from the same vineyard. You can learn about the differences in winemaking. Or or St Urbans Hof and Zillikin who both use the Ockfener Bockstein vineyard and who are probably cheaper than the Prums. Or find a producer who uses multiple vineyards, like St Urbans Hof again, and try their Ockfener Bockstein vs their wine from Piesporter Goldtropfchen, looking at the same winemaker but different vineyards. Try to find Kabinett wines and don't mix Kabinett and Spatlese, etc., for this study, because the sugar will through you off. Write down the differences between the wines that you observe. You can do it in CA too - Andy Beckstoffer owns vineyards that produce really great wines, but those are going to be much more costly than those rieslings are. Schrader for example, is one of many people making wine from the Tokalon property, but you're talking $100 a bottle. The Prums have had their vineyards for years, maybe centuries. Beckstoffer moved to CA from Virginia, bought property, and sells his grapes at a price based on what the winery is going to charge for the wine! So those CA wineries, being pretty new and only recently opened by guys who became millionaires somewhere else and who paid $200,000 and acre, or else whatever Beckstoffer wants per ton, charge a lot of money for their wines, whereas Prum can sell a wine for $26 or less. I love the idea of Two Buck Chuck, but the wine isn't so great IMO. I'd rather pay another dollar and get a better wine and I think they could do it. What you won't have however, is the distinction you get from the other wines I suggested. That's because it is designed specifically NOT to have it. The idea is to create consistency, not personality. Again, no problem here and more power to him, but for me it would be boring to drink the same thing all the time, and I collect wine specifically to have variety. In 2005, the cabernet sauvignon harvest in Napa was pretty big and pretty good. People thinned the crop several times in some vineyards but the grape clusters were large so they still got more tonnage per acre than they normally do, although the wines are top notch anyhow. Prices? Not going anywhere good as far as I can see. As long as wines are selling for $100 and up, the prices aren't coming down. And about that thinning - in France and other regions, there are often regulations regarding yield per acre. They think that if you cut some young grape bunches off, called "green harvesting", the remaining ones will be more concentrated. That's becoming a basic tenet of winemaking. But there is some evidence and some opinion that this is BS. The concept was developed before there were adequate ways to measure. So a long time ago in France they thought they could improve quality by limiting yield. But maybe that's artificial, as illustrated by the 2005 vintage in CA. In a nice warm year, with adequate rain and no heat and healthy vines, the plants just might want to produce a little more with no drop in quality. In 1997 and 2005, that happened in Napa. If one were only to go by yield, we would have less wine but in fact, there was no reason to reduce production since the quality is fine. But as long as people are willing to pay, others will produce wine at $100 and up. In much of France today, they are trying to reduce production to keep prices high. You can figure out the economics of that, but IMO the idea is flawed because the competition is not simply air, it is wine from elsewhere. So if I can't buy or afford French wine, I'll buy Australian wine or Spanish or Chilean. It's a huge generalization and not 100% true, but you might say that in Napa the high prices are the result of extraordinary entry costs while in Bordeaux or Burgundy or Champagne, they are the result of production decisions designed to keep prices high. Again, that's not entirely true but its a shorthand explanation. So you look for areas like Beaujolais, Cotes du Ventoux, Cotes du Rhone, Languedoc in France, or the Rhine in Germany, or Umbira and Puglia in Italy, or Paso Robles or Mendocino in CA, or Walla Walla or Columbia Valley in WA and you can find much better deals. Or look at Argentina - some nice stuff coming out of there. And in the Texas Hill Country, they're working and in Arizona and in other states as well. Some people disparage those wines, but the people have to start somewhere. I used to disparage the wines from Michigan. Then I tried some. Taught me a lesson. I only knew the cheap sugary stuff but there are now some serious producers making good whites on the west of the state. Also in Ohio there are one or two - Kincaid makes really nice cabs down near Kentucky. I would never have believed it if I hadn't tried them. And in fact, they were in some pretty stiff competition - I had them at a dinner with people who brought some serious wine to the table and brought these just to educate us. So if someone is open minded, there is no reason to listen to wine snobs and you can find some great values out there, that are interesting, complex, and even educational if you care to go that way. Cheers all....See MoreShow 3 kitchen examples of 1mil homes in your area
Comments (82)Allison, I was responding to the posts that were saying something about finally a picture of a kitchen worth $1M. At that point you really do have to differentiate between good neighborhood urban or lakefront horse property and new suburb new construction no location value. The what do you get for the price is an interesting question across the board, but the "million dollar worthy kitchen" needs context. I suppose it's different here than in other places. The properties have a lot valuation/structure valuation, so it's normal for us to think that way. The structure value isn't cost of build or insurance or anything, just the difference between what the lot would assess for if it were cleared and what someone would pay for the place as is. You can even do that in Igloo's case. Every house has features and detractions, all of which are subjective, but a value can be put on it because someone did buy it. Where there aren't good comps it's harder to value the lot, but because most features of the lot are intrinsic (though things like views and services do change) the lot prices are calculable to a good enough extent. For our purposes, just "lakefront, view, 2 acres, CT" or "new suburb, quarter acre, flat, IN" or "city, near transport and universities, lot under 10K s.f., Boston" is enough, with the frontage, to give context whether you're looking at a vacation/retirement house, a big new family home, or a town home....See MoreFun2BHere
6 years ago
PROAnglophilia
6 years ago
cawaps
6 years agojakkom
6 years ago
MtnRdRedux
6 years ago
Bunny
6 years agoFun2BHere
6 years ago
texanjana
6 years ago
rubyclaire
6 years agoBunny
6 years ago
gsciencechick
6 years agolascatx
6 years agolast modified: 6 years agoFun2BHere
6 years agoBunny
6 years agolast modified: 6 years ago
Gooster
6 years agoingrid_vc so. CA zone 9
6 years agoPartial view of vineyard across the street from our home. With the drought and grapes needing less water than avocados or oranges, more and more of these are springing up in the hills around here in southern California. Having been to the Sonoma region, I would have to say that, for me, the landscape is more dramatic here.
jakkom, you make a very good point, but you can see that this picture was taken on an overcast day, and I don't feel that the colorful roses etc. look garish. Color can have different intensities, and I always choose those in the medium range, which I think gives the best of both worlds, not too bright but yet not mind-numbingly monotone. It is a matter of taste, though, since I've noted that many members here prefer a more serene palette than I do, indoors or out. The only thing that matters at all is personal preference.
lascatx
6 years agohamamelis
6 years agolast modified: 6 years agoBunny
6 years agowritersblock (9b/10a)
6 years agoFun2BHere
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sprtphntc7a
6 years agoBunny
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IdaClaire
6 years agowritersblock (9b/10a)
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