The nation’s best?Taste Thomas Keller’s salmon tartare-filled cone, and you decide. All fruit is picked, sorted, and packed by hand. Ex-hippies Jennifer Lynn Bice and her late husband, Steven Schack, studied cheese-making all over France before inventing their mold-ripened Camembert-style Camellia. GAIGE HOUSE INN 13540 Arnold Dr. Helena pale ale. The shop, whose deeply laid-back café serves a $1. Roughly chopped, they are aged in oak barrels whose wood coaxes out the peppers’ residual sweetness. “We wanted to make a nuanced, sweet hot-pepper sauce, rather than one of those numbingly aggressive hot-hot sauces,” says its creator, Forrest Tancer. Nineteen rooms amid the redwoods. For her own undertaking, McEvoy enlisted the dashingly mustachioed Maurizio Castelli, a former consultant at Coltibuono. REDWOOD HILL FARM 5480 Thomas Rd. the all-american roadside picnic Redwood cheeses are the stuff of great picnics, as are the trendy Oakville Grocery’s focaccia sandwiches, pistachio biscotti, and Mount St. Alas, the only chance to taste the results is at Oliveto, or by ordering a bottle via the Web site of Healdsburg flower farm Chalk Hill Clematis (www. MEADOWOOD 900 Meadowood Lane, St. An allée of palm and olive trees leads to a cluster of redwood barns and 20 acres of gardens and orchards. The sign, honest beds, phenomenal food, is no lie.” a cheese course Redwood Hill Farm’s view of Mount St.
The Napatization of Sonoma is well under way.” Hotels SONOMA MISSION INN & SPA 18300 Sonoma Hwy. In Healdsburg, where the Grocery has a branch, you can also pick up a chewy sourdough baguette at the Downtown Bakery & Creamery—a reminder of the days before the town succumbed to Victorian cutesiness. ASTM Copper-Nickel Factory hot sauce: the last word When Wall Street securities analysts talk about reinventing themselves as West Coast winegrowers, Iron Horse is the sort of place they fantasize about. After nine months the fermented mixture is processed to a jammy purée with a fresh pepper taste and a seductive floral perfume. The restaurant at this redwood landmark remains honorable even when it overreaches. The property is an enchanting patchwork of barns, gardens, arbors, greenhouses, and orchards. Apple balsamic vinegar didn’t fare well in a tasting—too crude and cloying.
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