Tasting Room Hours

Is there a definitive and comprehensive list of tasting room hours in Nama/Sonoma? I know the weekly magazines list a large number of the properties alphabetically, but what would be much more useful would be a corresponding chart, showing half-hour increments from 9:30 to 11:00 and 4:00 to 6:30, indicating who's open and who has closed. It's frustrating to know you have time to visit another winery but not be able to figure out who's close by that might still be serving. Thanks!

I don't know of one, David. We usually try to pick up one of those magazines and use it when we're out in Napa or Sonoma. As you imply, though, they're not a perfect solution and we often end up blundering around after 4:30 trying to see who's open and who's not.

By the way, welcome to the forum! Hope you like it here.

[Jenise]

Is there a definitive and comprehensive list of tasting room hours in Nama/Sonoma? I know the weekly magazines list a large number of the properties alphabetically, but what would be much more useful would be a corresponding chart, showing half-hour increments from 9:30 to 11:00 and 4:00 to 6:30, indicating who's open and who has closed. It's frustrating to know you have time to visit another winery but not be able to figure out who's close by that might still be serving. Thanks!

What Mike said. We typically plan our route with a local wine map and circle the wineries with the latest hours so that we can take advantage of that last half hour or so of the day. We have also been known to stop anyplace that has a lot of cars, on the off chance they'll pour for us anyway.

As a general thing, though, you will usually find that the tasting rooms that are a bit out of the way will often have later closing times while the ones that are clustered in the center of things will tend to have the shortest hours. They have figured out how people travel, and depending on their interest in catching passers by (some need walk-in traffic more than others) they'll decide their hours accordingly.

The last time I was out there I had a map with hours and whether or not you had to call ahead. But I found in some cases it wasn't accurate.

Pick the wineries you really want to visit, find out their hours, and work the others around it.

Oh..and visit Van Der Heyden when you're out there. Trust me on this.

I appreciate everyone's suggestions. It seems as if there's a general need here that isn't being fulfilled. I know hours are subject to change, but I wonder how difficult it would be to get such a project off the ground?

We, too, like to visit the smaller places, if for no other reason than to avoid some of the crowds at the well-known giants. We haven't been to Van Der Heyden, but that will go straight to the list for this year's trip.