Ponte Winery: Buffett Beach Night

The heat lets go somewhere around dusk and the whole estate turns gold at once, and by then you have a glass in your hand and no particular reason to be anywhere else. That is the trick this valley runs every summer: brutal at noon, perfect after. The evening events on the grounds are built entirely around the second half of that sentence. You arrive for the setting, you stay for the cool-down, you leave when the stars are out. What a Buffett night adds is the grammar, a whole catalog written about being somewhere between the equator and civilization, played to people sitting in a vineyard an hour inland who have decided that for one evening they are. Rancho California Road in Temecula wine country, with the food and wine handled by the estate. You bring nothing but the person you would actually want beside you when the last song turns out to be one the entire field already knows.