Mark Twain was right

One of the quotations that I often seem to hear about the San Francisco Bay Area is also a pretty familiar one to the rest of us who live here, and it comes, rightfully, from Mark Twain:

The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.

Twain also said:

It is better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than to open it and remove all doubt.

Well, I can’t keep my mouth shut if I’m stupidly pouring wine into it, so I let my keyboard do the talking and thusly I write this blog.

At any rate, I just read something interesting in the Weather section of today’s Mercury News about – quite naturally – the weather here. Despite the fact that I’ve lived in these parts most of my life, I’m intrigued by the irony that contrasts two towns which are less than 50 miles from each other.

On average, over the years, the hottest day of the year in San Jose is July 5th. In San Francisco, however, that day is September 28th.

And that’s what allows the concept of winehiking here in the Greater San Francisco Bay Area to be so downright interesting, not to mention just plain fun. Every day, and in every season, there’s more to this part of the wine country than merely where you can best grow or source your Rhone, Bordeaux, and Burgundy varietals. Drive less than an hour in any direction from San Francisco, and you’ve got incredible choices of hiking trails – as well as tasting rooms – to discover and explore, in so many varied microclimates.

Twain probably would have been hard-pressed to find irony with that sentiment. Ever so humbly, I simply hope to remove all doubt.

~winehiker

Related posts:

• Planning a California wine vacation? Read these five tips first.
• Top Ten California Wines of 2006
• Visiting A Winery – 5 Ways to Avoid Learning Anything

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 10th, 2007 at 4:45 pm and is filed under grape squeezins. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.