Twelve years ago my parents and I stumbled upon Prager after a tour of a larger winery. We’d walked up a pretty little shaded path, through a storage room filed with casks, and then into a little room where a white-bearded fellow who looked like Ernest Hemingway seemed to be entertaining a group of friends holding wine glasses. When we asked about the tour, he said, “The tour? Here’s the tour!” He walked to the doorway and pointed to the casks. “That’s it,” he said. He then poured for us the most delicious dessert port I have ever tasted.

This week it looked exactly as I remembered it. On the shady walk, we paused to look at a loquat tree covered with fruit and heard a voice call, “Help yourself!” Michael gathered some of them, took a bite, and said “Wow! This is delicious.” I tried one. To my surprise, it was sweet and juicy, unlike the tart, hard loquats I used to steal from our neighbor’s tree back in Monroe.

We continued up the walk, following the signs that directed us through an enormous wooden door, into what looked like an old carriage house. Yes, here was that same, dark space with the wine casks, and beyond that, the same little room, though the white-bearded man wasn’t there. In his place was a short, stocky, florid, moustachio’d man in his thirties, and a taller, thinner fellow of roughly the same age.

The room was small and dusty looking, with wooden walls, a concrete floor, a counter with bottles ranged on it, a sink with a window over it that looked as if it had been sprayed with fake cobweb goo for a movie set. There were some Catholic icons, a family picture showing the Ernest Hemingway guy surrounded by short, stocky, florid blond people of various ages, and on the walls, many, many dollar bills and foreign currency. The deal was five dollars a person for tasting seven ports.

They were all delicious. Not the cherry-flavored port I remembered and had longed for, but close enough. The short, stocky fellow led the tasting, going through his patter without it seeming like a patter. The tall man, his brother-in-law it turned out, took care of another couple that wandered in. Michael bought a couple of bottles that he insists will be for us, not for guests. As we were going back to the car, we paused to pet a fat, affectionate tabby cat that met us on the walk.

Thursday was the highlight of the visit. That was the day we set aside to take our guests to the wine country in the car Michael had rented.

It wasn’t as nice a day as we’d hoped, being a bit on the gray side, but it wasn’t cold. Just kind of colorless, and because the sun wasn’t out, the countryside didn’t look quite as pretty as usual, especially when we got caught on a Sonoma county road jammed with one of those mysterious California backups, a long line of motionless cars on the two lane rural road. That held us up for about forty-five minutes while we sat and looked out over a predominantly gray and off-green landscape of scraped-looking hills.

By the time we got to the Sattui Winery, we were all hungry. Sattui is a favorite wine country stop because of its deli. You go in, taste some wine in the shop and wine-tasting room, select and buy a bottle, then go into its aromatic, richly-lit deli and look over the selection of domestic and imported cheeses, pates, sausages, breads, mustards, olives, etc. I picked out some wonderfully creay-tasting brie, sharp, pale cheddar, a Cotswold. My sister-in-law picked out a Zinfandel. We ended up with peppered slaami, prosciutto, duck pate, all of which we carried out to one of the picnic tables outside.

Wonderful food, good wine, good company. The perfect picnic, in spite of the tables being set on cedar shavings, the gray sky, the sound of the highway nearby. A family walked past carrying an infant who watched us with a steady and mysterious delight, a little spider the color of burnt gold skittered across the table, we had as much to eat as we wanted, and no place we had to be afterwards. When we finally gathered up what was left and cleaned up the rest, it was slowly, with a lazy, contented ease.