Wine Tasting at J. Lohr
Dec. 18th, 2025 09:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
canyonwalkerThis past Saturday I went wine tasting with my friend Anthony at two nearby wineries. One, I already wrote about. That was Byington Winery, up in the mountains above San Jose. For our next stop we drove back down into Silicon Valley to visit J. Lohr Winery, in San Jose's Rose Garden neighborhood.
J. Lohr, like Byington for that matter, is a winery I've visited before. But my previous visit to their San Jose tasting room was 10 years ago! Things have changed a bit since then. Oh, the winery and tasting room are in the same place, but now they charge for tasting. (Free tastings are a thing of the past.) $25 for the cheap one, $50 for the reserve wines. Anthony and I both picked the cheaper flight as it looked more interesting. The reserve was all Cabs.
We sat down at a table— the tasting room being reconfigured for tables instead of standing at the bar is another thing they've changed in 10 years— and chatted amiably over a flight of 5 glasses of wine. The pours were more generous here than at Byington. That wasn't really a selling point, though, as I poured out the last bit of almost every wine instead of finishing the glasses.
"Oh, that's what these buckets are for!" Anthony exclaimed. Technically they're called spit buckets, because professional tasters spit out wine after tasting it so as not to get intoxicated, but I just poured out the excess from my glass.
Anthony wasn't impressed by the wines, either. "We visited these wineries in the wrong order," he quipped. J. Lohr's wines were soft and honestly kind of bland after the rich wines we both enjoyed up the hill at Byington. We finished our tastings, paid, and left without buying any bottles.
J. Lohr, like Byington for that matter, is a winery I've visited before. But my previous visit to their San Jose tasting room was 10 years ago! Things have changed a bit since then. Oh, the winery and tasting room are in the same place, but now they charge for tasting. (Free tastings are a thing of the past.) $25 for the cheap one, $50 for the reserve wines. Anthony and I both picked the cheaper flight as it looked more interesting. The reserve was all Cabs.
We sat down at a table— the tasting room being reconfigured for tables instead of standing at the bar is another thing they've changed in 10 years— and chatted amiably over a flight of 5 glasses of wine. The pours were more generous here than at Byington. That wasn't really a selling point, though, as I poured out the last bit of almost every wine instead of finishing the glasses.
"Oh, that's what these buckets are for!" Anthony exclaimed. Technically they're called spit buckets, because professional tasters spit out wine after tasting it so as not to get intoxicated, but I just poured out the excess from my glass.
Anthony wasn't impressed by the wines, either. "We visited these wineries in the wrong order," he quipped. J. Lohr's wines were soft and honestly kind of bland after the rich wines we both enjoyed up the hill at Byington. We finished our tastings, paid, and left without buying any bottles.
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Date: 2025-12-20 08:33 am (UTC)