November 26, 2013 Corning and Vina, California

We went south of Red Bluff and toured the olive oil, wine country. This whole area is orchards, primarily walnuts, plums, almonds and olives.

  We went to Lucero Olive oil in Corning . These are some of the varieties of olives grown. They are big, they look almost like grapes. Lucero is only one of the area’s oil companies.

The Lucero olive oil tasting bar. they also have balsamic vinegar tasting too, but they do not make the vinegar, they import if from Italy. I had no idea there were so many kinds. The olives are delivered here. They are crushed pits and all in the blue thing below the sign, then put in the big silver tanks below and centrifuged. Some go through another step called polishing to remove more impurities, then they go into the big vats in the cold storage room to the right. They sit there for about 3 weeks to let the sediments settle out, then they are bottled.

This is where they are bottled. Here is an olive orchard. The trees will continue to produce good olives for up to 100 years.

We found this giant olive in front of one of the orchards. After the olives we went to The Abbey of New Clairvaux vineyard in Vina, Calif.  It is a Trappist Cistercian  monastery. They grow plums, walnuts and grapes. They are half owners of the winery. The winery was  first owned by Leland Stanford in 1881. When he owned it , it was the largest winery in the world.  He started Stanford University, and on his death the vineyard when to the university. The Trappists bought it in 1955.

Sue and John in the tasting room.  Out front is the Chapter house they are are rebuilding. It was built in Spain  between 1190-1220 at a Cistercian monastery .  William Randolph Hurst bought it in 1931 , disassembled it and shipped it on 11 ships to San Francisco. He was going to rebuild it at one of his properties, but never got around to it, so he donated it to the city of San Francisco to put up in Candlestick park. They never got around to it, and the monks here spent the last 40 years trying to obtain the stones. They are now reconstructing.  When complete it will include a reception room, display area and archival library. It will be protected from the elements by an outer building. They call it the Sacred Stones. This is the front of it.

A window inside the protecting building with the vineyards behind it. The inside is these fabulous arches.

This is the outside building over it. The vineyards.

Back at camp there were some really cool clouds right before sunset, but they kind of dissipated at sunset. The Nutalls woodpecker decided she liked our bus today, she was flying at it and pecking on the windows.