We have been visiting the Paso Robles wineries and tasting rooms for over 15 years.  We have watched the area grow from 30 wineries to over 120!  Like you, our free time is limited.  Consequently, we need to be able make the most of every hour we spend in the Paso Robles area. This means we do not want to “guess” which tasting rooms to visit for the best wines, a great wine tasting experience, and a good time during our short getaway. 

We both enjoy different aspects of wine-tasting. Bob loves meeting the winemakers and learning about the winemaking process. Cindy loves historical information, wine trivia, and checking out the tasting room gift shopping and food items.  We both love traveling and discovering great wines and unexpected values and bargains.   When we could not find a guidebook that met our needs, we talked with friends who suggested we develop our own.    

 So…in mid-2006, we visited 90 wineries and tasting rooms in the Paso Robles area that are open to the public to identify those that offer the most enjoyable wine tasting experience.  Unlike many travel writers who never actually visit the areas that they write about, we personally visited the tasting rooms and sampled approximately 500 different wines.

In addition to ranking the individual wines, we evaluated other elements, including: tasting room ambiance, staff knowledge and friendliness, wine clubs, awards, prices and discounts, access to the winemaker, and any other unique aspects of the facility. 

 Our top scoring wineries and tasting rooms in all of these categories are the ones we recommend to you in our The Grape Escapes guidebook.    

We hope to see you along the Wine Trail.     Happy Tastings! 

 Bob & Cindy Rhodes            

Bob and Cindy recently relocated from Southern California to the quiet, rural life in Sequim (pronounced ‘Skwim’), Washington where they are busily checking out wineries in the Pacific Northwest.

You may write to them bobandcindy@thegrapeescapes.com

or contact us at info@thegrapeescapes.com

About our Website Designer 

We cannot say enough good things about our website designer, Sue Forde of Dynamic Graphics.  Sue’s performance surpassed our expectations in all areas. 

Dynamic Graphics is Creative – Suffice to say, Sue took our best ideas and made them better.  More importantly, she came up with ideas that we would never have developed on our own. 

Dynamic Graphics is Responsive – We found working with Sue to be fun and painless. We especially enjoyed her on-line method of collaboration.  We exchanged one or two Emails a day for the first three or four days in order to achieve our initial website mock-up. 

Dynamic Graphics is FAST! – From start to finish our website was up and running in about two weeks, including set-up of PayPal, the service for on-line credit card purchases.  

Dynamic Graphics is Affordable – Amazingly, Sue’s total charge for our entire website was less than that being charged by other website design agencies for just the initial development consultation.