Gordon Fetherolf

San Francisco Tours

2006-01-07T13:02:00.000-08:00

WOW! It has been a while since I posted on here. There has been a huge rise in business in the last 3 months. I own Explorertour.com and we offer San Francisco Tours as well as Los Angeles Tours. I started this company 2 years ago with my brother Greg, it hasn't been without struggle, but we keep moving forward and the business is starting to take off. It is unbelievable. I never realized business could be so rewarding. I will try and keep this updated with our San Francisco Tours as often as I can. Have fun touring!

Video: see Gordy drive

2005-09-23T13:41:00.000-07:00

press play to watch the video my brother made of me driving on my tour last weekend.

Tour Walk-Through

2005-09-22T14:38:00.000-07:00

Clicking on the picture will take you to a satelite map where you can follow where i'm going!
My tour leaves the san francisco piers..
.. and then I start driving up to my first winery, Kirkland.

Origins: wine

2005-09-14T15:56:00.000-07:00

Wine can be dated as far back as the begining of known civilazation. With the advent of permanent communitys and evolved agriculture, the Egyptians were the first to make wine during the Neolithic Revoloution.
Even then wine was cherished, and possesion of the finest spirits of that time became a symbol of social status.

Where: locate the best wine

2005-09-14T15:49:00.000-07:00

Napa Valley

Wine grapes grow almost exclusively between thirty and fifty north and between thirty and fifty degrees south of the Equator. The world's most southerly vineyards are in the South Island of New Zealand near the 45th parallel.

The many complicated elements to making a distinct fine wine

Learning how to taste

2005-09-02T14:16:00.000-07:00

Smell and Taste
Have you ever tried desperately to detect flavour from a food or beverage when you had a terrible cold? You probably tasted very little, if anything at all. Research indicates that 70 to 75% of what we taste is actually due to our sense of smell. Specialized "aroma" nerves in the nose are necessary to identify tastes more subtle than sweet, sour, bitter and salty. Smell and taste go hand-in-hand when wine tasting . . . without your sense of smell you would be unable to detect the delicate flavours of chocolate, herbs or smoke in your wine.

Wine Tasting Techniques
Wine tasting is not just like art, it is an art. While wine tasting can be subjective in nature, wine connoisseurs follow some general "guidelines" when judging a wine. It's very easy to learn the techniques of wine tasting, and if you already enjoy wine, learning the nuances will simultaneously increase the pleasure you derive from tasting.

3 Step Tasting (in a nutshell)

2005-09-01T14:20:00.000-07:00

Three steps of wine tasting:

Look

Smell

Taste

After tasting the wine, take a moment to value its overall flavour and balance. Is the taste appropriate for that type of wine? If the wine is very dry, is it supposed to be?

Some serious wine connoisseurs assign a point score to a wine to determine its quality. While this method can be useful, it is in no way necessary to determine a quality wine. The more different wines you try, and the more attention you pay to each wine, the better you will become at ascertaining and describing each wine's characteristics.

Wine Tasting 101

2005-09-01T13:01:00.000-07:00

Why swish? While it was originally thought that certain regions on the tongue detected specific flavours, we now know this is not true.

The front and back of the tongue
contain the taste buds and rather than specializing in a particular taste sensation, all taste buds are capable of detecting sweet, sour, bitter and salty flavours, although there may be some slight differences in sensitivity. So that you get the most out of your taste buds, when wine tasting, swish the wine around your mouth, which will allow all of your taste buds (and your sense of smell) to participate in the detection of the finer flavours of the wine.