Every few months, grapes shed their skins, exposing their soft, alcohol-oozing underbelly. Taste the fruit-bellies with today's Groupon: for $39, you get a two-person wine tasting, two wine glasses, and a bottle of wine of your choice at Laguna Canyon Winery in Laguna Beach (up to $88 value). A boutique operation, the winery sources its grapes from low-yield vineyards in Napa and Sonoma Valley to ensure they have been personally tended and handpicked, and then transports them to the winery for the crushing, fermentation, and aging process. Choose ten of the vineyard's 16 wines for their tantalizing tasting and then select a bottle of your favorite (up to $48 value) to drink out of two keepable, logoed crystal wine glasses ($20 value). On your visit feel free to try out this year's award winners, the '06 Wyland Organic Los Carneros Syrah or the '08 Napa Valley Chardonnay.
Reviews
Laguna Canyon Winery has a four-star average from Yelpers and five Citysearchers and an average of 4.5 owl eyes from three TripAdvisors:
- The inside is very open and they have about 20 wines to choose from. In my humble opinion some of the best wine I have had from California. I recommend going for a tasting, then pick up a bottle and head to the beach for a sunset. – kprunella, TripAdvisor
- I went to celebrate my birthday; my friends and I all had a really great time! – Nicole M., Yelp
Laguna Canyon Winery
Having grown up on a farm in central Canada, Marlowe Huber already knew about crop harvesting and soil when he began making wine in the early 1980s. He refined his skills still further by studying oenology in Vancouver before embarking on his first wine-business venture with his brother, Darren. Together they ran two wineries in British Columbia for 15 years before opening Laguna Canyon Winery in 2003.
Today, staffers pour out a diverse selection of Laguna Canyon wines at two tasting rooms in downtown Laguna Beach and at the winery itself. Marlowe and Darren also collaborated with marine artist Wyland to create his Wyland Cellars label, whose bottles he adorns with colorful undersea scenes. Grapes for these wines are sourced from low-yield growers in Napa and Sonoma valleys, who cultivate subtle flavors by hand-picking and home-schooling their fruits.