Hi all, just wondering if anyone recommends any wine tours out of San Francisco. Will be travelling to San Francisco without access to a car and would like to receive opinions on the trips that can be booked. Thanks!

I do not recommend the Wine Train. It's expensive and, I think, a ripoff because you can't actually get OFF the train and visit any wineries. You have to sit on the train as it rolls very slowly up the valley. Then it stops and rolls back again. No on-off privileges.

I think that the Blue & Gold Fleet offers combo ferry/bus trips to Napa: check www.blueandgoldfleet.com

If there's any way you can rent a car for a day, that's really the way to visit the wine country because then you can stop at a number of small wineries.

BTW, Sonoma is less crowded than Napa Valley and has many great wineries. Don't know of any bus trips there, though.

Agree with the thoughts about the wine train. You can hire special limo tours to the wine country (try sfvisitor.com) or it's easy to rent a car in SF just for the day and drive yourself.Most of the bus tours are pretty basic and I think you wouldn't really see the valley as you would want. If you don't know anything about wine they would probably be just fine.

Check out this site:

http://gocalifornia.about.com/cs/sftourguided/

Tour bus should pick you up at your hotel, take to the wine country with a visit to 3 wineries of their choice, and bring you back to your hotel.

I highly recommend renting a car. There are lots of maps of wine country that show where the wineries are. You can stop at the ones you want and leave when you want. Do a search...there is lots of information on line.