By Steve Hicks

The Post Ranch Inn’s restaurant, Sierra Mar, protrudes from a cliff over the beautiful Big Sur coastline.

It is not every day one has the opportunity to lunch at Big Sur’s Post Ranch Inn and participate in a blind tasting of some of the best wines the Northern Rhone has to offer. We were in the midst of one of April’s many storms, and Highway 1 is sometimes daunting even when the sun is shining. We decided to go for it and make the drive. The Post Ranch Inn is 30 miles south of Carmel. It rained and blew all the way, but the road was passable.

If you have never been to the Post Ranch Inn, and I had not, it is a real treat. The rooms even include a tree house. This is a unique and wonderful place, with rooms and small houses built in an ecologically organic style on the cliffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean. The room rates reflect this one-of-a-kind experience, with a range of $525-$2,400.

You walk to the Sierra Mar restaurant up a footpath of railroad ties through trees and ferns, arriving at an all-glass building perched several hundred feet above the Pacific and cantilevered out over the ocean. The panoramic vistas are amazing.

The food and wine experience was very good. The cellar houses 20,000 bottles with 4,000 selections. Craig von Foerster has been executive chef at Sierra Mar since 1998 and has been winning awards for his cuisine ever since.

There were 12 in our tasting group. We drank flights of three wines with each course. A chanterelle and porcini combination on toast with an onion reduction sauce was exceptional combined with the earthiness of the Syrah. The next course was a salad with duck ragout, and the Rhones won. The highlight was medallions of lamb surrounding a mushroom risotto in a wine reduction sauce. It was a perfect pairing with the wine. Cheese and another flight finished off the lunch.

We had red wines from all the great growing regions of the Northern Rhone: Côte Rôtie, St. Joseph, Hermitage and Crozes Hermitage. I have been to Côte Rôtie (”Roasted Slope”) and it looks exactly like its name. It is very steep, extremely rocky and red in color. It is amazing that anything can grow, let alone be harvested there. However, it often produces the best wines of the entire Rhone Valley.

One of the best and most expensive wines from the Côte Rôtie is Guigal’s legendary La Mouline. We were treated to a 2001 vintage. It undoubtedly will live for decades but was a joy to drink now.

The entire Hermitage area is a hill of about 300 acres. There are a couple of good stories about this appellation. One holds that a returning Crusader built a small shack on top of the hill and, as others followed, they became known as hermits - hence the name Hermitage. Eventually that small shack was turned into a chapel. The most famous wine from the area is made by Jaboulet and named La Chapelle. A 2001 Hermitage by Guigal won our tasting. It is a huge wine with big tannins and big fruit.

Cornas is another hillside region making immense wines whose popularity and prices keep increasing each year, no small thanks to wine critic Robert M. Parker Jr. We had a 2000, and we did it a disservice by drinking it way before its time.

St. Joseph is an area that produces less expensive and more accessible wines. These wines are the bargains of the Northern Rhone.

The Post Ranch Inn is a romantic spot.

Steve Hicks is a wine adviser and consultant and partner in a winery.