Windsor Vineyards has taken the fun, customized labels and mediocre wines from its former tasting room on Healdsburg's plaza (page 185) and gone back to its mail-order roots. Parent company Fosters Wine Estates was smart enough to realize that the prime retail location would instead be a better place to showcase wines from its many premium wineries around the world that, fankly, all make far better wine than Windsor.

And so Windsor Vineyards was kicked out and the new World Wine Estates tasting room was unveiled in the fall of 2005 (alas, too late for the first edition of the book). Among the Fosters family of wineries represented here are the company's California stalwarts like Chateau St. Jean, Stags' Leap Winery (as opposed to Stag's Leap Wine Cellars - see page 50 for the rivalry),  Beringer, Etude, and Meridian Vineyards down near paso Robles to some biggies from down under, including Australia's Penfolds, Wolf Blass, and Annies Lane, and New Zealand's Taz Vineyards.

Visitors cannot taste wines from all the wineries represented here all the time, but instead should expect five or so wineries to be represented at the tasting bar as part of a rotating tasting menu. It's always worth asking what other hidden gems might be stashed behind the counter, too (something worth doing at any tasting room).

Also worth noting is that the World Wine Estates tasting room is currently the only place you can taste wines from nearby Chateau Souverain. The former Souverain property was sold to Francis Ford Coppola in early 2006 and the Souverain-label wines are now made at the historic Asti Winery near Cloverdale, a nice winery in it own right but one without any public tasting room (yet).

More international wines can also be found at a new Healdsburg tasting room reportedly being opened by the owners of the cavernous and popular wine shop in Santa Rosa called the Bottle Barn. No sign of it yet (as of March 2006) but I'll have another look next time I'm up there snooping around.