Bella Circus

We spent Saturday at Bella Winery & Caves for their event, Bella Circus.  It was part of the Passport weekend, and Bella has made it a point to go all out with their events.  While we're fans of Bella, what brought us to the event was to see a family friend perform in the circus - a random coincidence. 

We arrived at Bella around 1:30 to an incredible crowd of people.  Bella was using an open area both down below and to the side of its property to park cars, my guess is there was room for close to 100 vehicles and we arrived it was full.  But since it was passport weekend, there was a steady flow of people, so it wouldn't surprise me if Bella had more than a thousand visitors yesterday. 

Each visitor was greeted with a Rose, then a walk around the property and into the caves brought each person to the various wine stations. 

We tasted the following:

• 2007 Dry Rose - very light and nice.  My mother in law bought two bottles she liked it so much.  You can't go wrong with this wine, particularly with summer around the corner.
• 2006 Dry Creek Zinfandel - 100% zin, I didn't really notice anything in particular with this other than the big fruit.
• 2006 Belle Canyon Zinfandel - this was delicious and I'm not a huge fan of Zins.
• 2006 Sonoma County Syrah - Maybe my taste buds were off but I didn't like this Syrah.  It had a earthy spice but lacked much depth.
• 2007 Late Harvest Zinfandel - this is easily my favorite Belle production.  This year's is wonderful, sweet but not too strong.