We've had several members of our wine team visiting California and Washington over the past month. Guest blogger Stephen Simms is the wine consulant at our east Naples (E. Tamiami Trail) store.

The day after arriving in Napa Valley, our first stop in the morning was the prestigious Far Niente
Winery. We were graciously greeted by by Ms. Peggy Alamano, who is the Trade Specialist, with a glass of Far Niente’s latest release of Chardonnay at the Sullenger House, a restored, 1884 Queen Anne-style home on the official list of the nation's historic places worthy of preservation.

On our tour we learned the history of the world-class Far Niente wines and the precious fruit used to make them that started with John Benson’s search for precious metal – specifically gold. Benson, a forty-niner of the California gold rush, founded Far Niente in 1885, and hired Hamden McIntyre,
creator of the former Christian Brothers winery – now the Culinary Institute of America at Greystone – to design the building.

Peggy also informed us that Far Niente was a gravity flow winery, which gently moves the grapes through each stage of production, and that Far Niente prospered until Prohibition in 1919, when it was abandoned and left to fall into disrepair. Sixty years later, in  1979, Gil Nickel purchased the winery and adjacent vineyard and began a three-year restoration of the property. During restoration, the original name, Far Niente, from an Italian phrase that can be interpreted as "without a care," was found carved in stone on the front of the building, where it remains to this day.

Gil Nickel had a 60-foot wine cave dug into the hill behind the winery in 1980, the first to be constructed in North America since the turn of the century, spawning a new wine-country industry.

Tomorrow: the wines and more