Taste Your Vacation

Get hands-on with regional specialties through these edible, immersive experiences. BY NAOMI TOMKY

CREATE A COFFEE From the lanai of Sunshower Farms on Hawai‘i, seemingly endless shades of green intermingle, while on the table, it’s a variety of shimmering browns: each of the five cups of coffee in front of you are an almost imperceptibly different color—at least for now. In a short while, though, you’ll be an expert in distinguishing the difference between each cup, which beans were used, and how they were roasted. And then you’ll roast your own coffee.

A day at Sunshower starts with a walk through the orchard to learn just how the same things that make the Kona coast ideal for vacationing—long, sunny mornings and mild weather—make the lush green hills above it perfect for growing coffee. Once you’ve pet all the resident dogs, fed all the goats, and sampled the cherry (fruit) of the coffee tree, you’ll head to the porch to learn to cup (that’s pro speak for tasting coffee). A spread of multicolored cups holds a diverse array of coffees—differences in bean type, processing, and roasting—all grown on the farm stretching out below as you soak in sunshine, coffee, and knowledge. Owner Kate Hickey walks you through the process of cupping like a professional—smelling and slurping to tease out the tiny nuances and hidden flavors of everybody’s favorite aromatic alarm clock.

Once you’ve teased out scents of ripe plums and finishes of lingering cherry, understood chocolatey complexity and full-bodied smokiness, it’s time to make your own: Hickey teaches the basics of turning raw green beans into the dark, no longer mysterious, brown gems you usually buy at the store. But not this time; you’ll take home two pounds of your own special blend. sunshowercoffee.com

SHOP LIKE A PRO “Did you taste the ‘Oh My God’ peaches?” “Did you see them throw the fish?” “Did you try the Greek yogurt?” There are certain things that are hard to miss at Seattle’s Pike Place Market—and your friends are sure to ask you about them. But few will ask you if you helped make roasted muscat grapes with seared halibut cheeks topped with lemon olive oil: that’s insider information.

As one of the longest running farmers markets in the country, the market plays host to around 85 farmers bringing in their produce and products each day and more than 225 independent small businesses. It can be hard to know exactly where to find the best fruit, the most interesting vegetables, and the freshest fish. Even worse, many visitors miss out on using fresh spot prawns or those halibut cheeks because they don’t have a kitchen in Seattle to cook them in.

Atrium Kitchen and their tours with chef Traci Calderon solve all those problems at once: Calderon leads you through the market, weaving into fruit stands and dodging behind stacks of vegetables to show off the market’s hidden gems. By the time you’re back in the Atrium Kitchen, she’s collected the supplies to teach a cooking class—which, of course, ends in a meal created from the local, seasonal ingredients. atrium kitchenpikeplace.com

BLEND YOUR OWN BORDEAUX Step into the AVA Room, the private tasting chamber of Napa Valley’s Conn Creek Winery, and you’ll see groups of barrels of wine: soft, supple, complex, rich, or bold. These are the flavors that a winemaker considers as they put together the perfect blend— adding a little of this and a little of that.

While most Napa visitors pop in and out of wineries, learning what they can from tasting room staff, Conn Creek, which started making Bordeauxstyle red wines in 1973, offers visitors a chance to dive deep into the flavors behind local wines with the Barrel Blending Experience. One part high school science class, one part wine tasting, and one part improvisational cooking, you first taste your way through cabernet sauvignon from the various areas of Napa, identifying the vanilla flavors you love or the blackberry notes you detest to create your own base wine. You’ll learn some of the distinctive traits of cabernets from Napa’s various sub-AVAs, or regions, such as St. Helena, Calistoga, Rutherford, and Yountville, and select the wines you want to include according to your preferences in tannins, flavor complexity, and more. Once that’s picked and swished together in your beaker, you can add in a spot of malbec for spice, or maybe a splash of petit verdot to balance it out. At the end of the class, you’ll leave with an understanding of how winemakers put together their blends—and a bottle of your own blend, ready to sit for a few months before you drink it. And yes, of course, you get to name your own wine and decorate the label, too. conncreek.com

CATCH AND EAT JAM OUT Reel in fresh salmon, Turn sour cherries crab, and lingcod, into sweet jam just then sit down to a a pit’s throw from chef-prepared feast where they grew at starrring your catch Cherry Hill Orchard at Wolf in the Fog & Market in eastern in Tofino, B.C.

FORAGED FARE Learn about the secrets of seaweed and the most-hidden mushrooms as you tame the Bay Area’s wildest foods with Forage SF’s classes. foragesf.com

DIVE FOR DINNER Throughout Mexico’s Baja peninsula, seafood is the star: in ceviche, tacos, or on the half-shell. In particular, the almeja chocolata—the chocolate clam—shows up on menus time and again. Named not for any hints of cocoa, but for their rich, brown color, these baseball-sized bivalves supply the true flavor of vacation for many visitors to Los Cabos and the surrounding area of Baja Sur: as charred clams in the traditional clambake in Loreto, served raw with a dash of hot sauce and a glug of beer, or lightly marinated as escabeche. But if you’re looking for the purest taste of saltwater and sunshine, Esperanza Resort in Los Cabos offers an experience that will bring you straight to the source.

That source isn’t easy: To find the sweetest, most tender clams, you’ll journey to the less-populated, less-touristed east coast of the peninsula’s tip, to Cabo Pulmo, where the pristine blue sea of a national park stretches ahead. It’s a bumpy off-road ride in an ATV down to the beach, where a local fisherman takes you out diving for the clams. Snorkeling through the crystalline waters, watch for the tiny eyes in the sand—little circles that tell you where the clam lives, usually about two inches below the surface of the sand. Then dart down, dive and dig for the buried bivalve treasure.

Once you’ve worked up an appetite—and a stash of bivalves—head back to shore, where Esperanza’s executive chef, Guillermo Gomez, will take over, preparing an epic picnic from your uniquely fresh catch. aubergeresorts.com/esperanza