By Amy Wolf, Sunset travel editor
Especially in these lean times, there's something about the idea of a castle—I mean, a truly grand, enormous castle with turrets and torture chambers and gargoyles and banquet rooms with handpainted frescoes—that's downright dreamy and fun. With that in mind, here are two ways to get an eyeful of the kind of castle I'm talking about.
1) See the new Adam Sandler flick Bedtime Stories, which features a lot of footage of Castello di Amorosa, the Calistoga winery that's also a castle.
2) Forget the flick and instead visit the real Castello di Amorosa, the most outrageously extravagant winery you'll ever lay eyes on.
Here's a short list of what's outrageous and extravagant about Castello:
• The price of admission. A tour plus tasting costs $25–$50 depending on the day and the type of tour you sign up for. Ouch! (A cheaper option is the $10–$15 tasting without a tour, but then you'd be missing the best part.)
• The size of the castle. It's 121,000 square feet. Picture the size a modest Bay Area home, multiply that by 80, and you get an idea of how big that is. It's 8 stories high and has 107 rooms.
• The time it took to build it. Construction took a whopping 14 years. Daryl Sattui, the owner (whom the tour guides refer to as "Dario") obviously needed a project.
• The gimmickry. Don't miss the torture chamber, where Cal-grad Dario is said to have laid a Stanford-sweatshirt-clad dummy on the bed of nails on Big Game day.
• The caves. There are 900 feet of 'em dug into the mountainside beneath the winery.
Speaking of caves, don't leave Calistoga without visiting Schramsberg, where you can tour caves and taste some of the West's best sparkling wine.
One more bit of advice: instead of driving home after all that wine tasting, spring for a night in town. Pull out all the stops at the fancy new Solage Resort, or go a little more moderate at Indian Springs Resort, whose mineral pool is just the ticket for the midwinter blues, or save a buck and stay at Dr. Wilkinson's Resort, an above-average motel with its own mineral pool. It's no castle, but that's what movies and winery tours are for.
