My Tour of Widmer Wine Cellars - Fun and Informative

On a sunny but cool day, my husband and I drove up to the Widmer Wine Cellars facility in Naples. To tell the truth, I was looking forward to the wine-tasting more than the tour, expecting that the tour would be boring.

Well, it wasn't! Our tour guide, Jerry Karns, was a a lot of fun! He wore a name tag that read, "Helen", leaving all of us in the tour group wondering. Finally, someone asked him, and he confessed his real name. He explained that he wore the name tag as a conversation starter. I guess it worked!

Jerry made the tour fun, but it was also interesting and informative. We toured the storage facility, where we learned that the huge containers that store the wine are called tanks if they are upright, and casks if they are on their side.

We learned how wines are filtered, how ports and sherries are made, and how their Kosher Manischewitz line of wines are made.

Jerry led us through the bottling facility, where you look down on the bottling area. A computer monitors the line from filling to capping to labeling - up to 150 bottles a minute. Unfortunately, the line was not in operation during our tour. If you'd like to see the bottling process, Jerry recommended coming Monday through Friday for the 1 pm or 2 pm tour.

There's a small museum in the bottling facility. There are photos of 1942 fire that caused $3 million worth of damage to the winery, tools used in years past, and a photo of the founder, John Jacob Widmer, who came to the US from Switzerland in 1882.

Then it was on to the gift shop, for the wine-tasting. My husband and I tasted several kinds, and to my surprise, my favorite was the Manischewitz Cherry. My husband liked the Dry Riesling and the Semi-Dry Riesling. We ended up buying several bottles.

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