Wine Tasting at Sherman Cellars

It's our one-month anniversary as husband and wife! As a mini celebration on Sunday, Tung and I went for a wine tasting and chocolate pairing at Sherman Cellars, right in Downtown San Jose on Post Street. This is the official tasting room of Creekview Vineyards. I wouldn't have thought there's a tasting room in the heart of Silicon Valley, without acres of grapevines growing nearby!

Creekview Vineyard is a micro-winery; they farm their grapes in San Martin and sell most of it to other wineries, managing to produce a meager amount of cases each year to sell at their own tasting room. The crops and the amount of which they are able to produce are further threatened by grape predators such as birds and wild boars, but some of their Zinfandel vines are aged at approximately 150 years old. The chocolate that we tasted is manufactured by Brix, headquartered in Napa. Their dark chocolates taste surprisingly sweet and pair delectably with our selected wines for the day.

  Buying a Brix chocolate means you literally get an 8-ounce BRICK of chocolate, to be hand-chipped into bite-sized chunks with a sharp knife before you can eat it.

Sherman Cellars sports the usual wine paraphernalia decor, as well as some historical decor.

 On the wall is a digital photo frame whose hardware is no longer in production, but which sold for thousands of dollars when it still was. The pictures alternate from the winery grapes to interesting historical tidbits of Downtown San Jose, such as a few of a horse and a cow in a pasture that used to be just down Post Street back when the Silicon Valley was the agricultural giant known as The Valley of Heart's Delight. These two are both rescues and became fast friends, the cow having an endearing craving for apples and demanding that any visitors feed her an apple when they come near the pasture fence. She has sadly passed away from eye cancer.

We ran into some interesting and friendly people during our wine tasting: a couple from Santa Rosa with a 12-week-old baby named Olivia (supposedly, she is their designated driver after they've completed their wine tasting). There were also two older ladies stopping by the cellar right before they caught a play in Downtown San Jose, and a family that seemed to know the sommelier, Tim. The wife has a rescue dog that is "running for mayor" for KOFY TV 20's couch spot, and the husband took this picture of us to commemorate our anniversary. Out of context, these tidbits on information and conversations may make it seem like we're more high than drunk, but it's all in good fun, shared by a friendly batch of strangers brought together in a quaint little tasting room on a lovely, pre-Autumn Sunday afternoon.