Crown Valley Winery

Continuing the tour of the Sainte Genevieve area, we next visited Crown Valley Winery.  Located only a few miles down the road from Cave Vineyard, the property has much more dramatic, panoramic views of the countryside.  It is also part of the Crown family of businesses in the area which includes the winery, a brewery, champagne house, port house, saloon, a tiger habitat, and several lodging options.  All of these are spread throughout Ste. Genevieve and the surrounding areas.  As a courtesy to their guests (and a smart business move), they offer free shuttle services between all of their properties.  This is definitely a large scale operation, and it shows.

When you first enter, you arrive inside the large gift shop.  The first thing that we noticed was the bird theme with many of their wines.  Apparently one of the owners is a fan of birds as many of their wines are named for birds, and are packaged with a matching picture on the label.  When we did our tasting, we actually stuck with the bird them and only tried their bird wines.  They do make several non-bird inspired wines as well.

Once you pass through the gift shop to head towards the tasting room, bistro, and wine deck, you enter this very large open are filled with the vats pictured above.  There are 24 of these enormous vats that you walk above on a bridge area.

Once you arrive on the wine deck, you are immediately greeted by the lushness of the surrounding area.  It is absolutely gorgeous.  This is also a very large piece of property with several acres of grapes, bison, a few lakes, and horses.  One of the things that I was most looking forward to was the hour long wagon ride through the property.  Due to the heat on Sunday, they were not offering it.

View from our table.

Fizzy Izzy is a root beer brewed by Crown and named after Crown Ridge Tiger Sanctuary's tiger, Izzy.  As many of you know, Tony isn't a fan of wine, so he got a bottle of Fizzy Izzy to drink while we were there.  Unfortunately, neither of us are able to recommend it.  He even got me to take a sip of it, and it was awful!  At least the bottle is cute.

Another view from our table.  Tony put a quarter in the machine so that I could see, but I was much too short for that.

For $6, you get to pick five wines to sample, a free wine glass, and a taste of the wine of the month.  Not a bad deal!  As I said earlier, we did a bird-themed tasting.  We tried the Casper White, Sweet Bluebird (white), Sweet Redbird (red), Robin Rose (sparkling), and Patriot Red (has an eagle on the bottle).  Out of those, the Casper White was our favorite, but I have to say that I wasn't a big fan of their wines.

Bison!

One of the many parts of the Crown empire is a website called Blue Bison where you can order their bison meat.  As expected, it is also on the menu in all of their bistros and the Tiger Ridge Restaurant which is a fancy restaurant that overlooks the tiger habitat.  There are currently six tigers living in the sanctuary.  They close early on Sundays, so we'll have to do a tour another day.