07/03/2025
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Tahoe Tastings
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- Tahoe Tastings
Lake Tahoe’s only wine tasting boat tour - featuring unique varietals and boutique wineries
Address
2435 Venice Drive
South Lake Tahoe, CA
96150
Opening Hours
| Monday | 9am - 8pm |
| Tuesday | 9am - 8pm |
| Wednesday | 9am - 8pm |
| Thursday | 9am - 8pm |
| Friday | 9am - 8pm |
| Saturday | 9am - 8pm |
| Sunday | 9am - 8pm |
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Our Story
Diondra and Shane Colquhoun, embarked on a journey in 2016 with an idea that originally started as a wine bar in South Lake Tahoe. Shane was looking for a new boat, a Chris Craft specifically, and happened to find the Golden Rose. He suggested taking the wine bar on the lake so they changed courses and shifted their business to wine cruises on Lake Tahoe and so began Tahoe Tastings.
Tahoe Tastings and the Golden Rose are proud to bring our guests on not only a tour of Lake Tahoe but also a tour through Northern California wineries! On your wine tasting tour from South Lake Tahoe to Emerald Bay, you will taste 8 different wines, beginning with a sparkling wine and including both whites and reds. We rotate our wines throughout the season to offer wines from a variety of regions, including the world-famous Napa Valley wine country as well as wines from Anderson Valley, Calaveras, Placer, Nevada, Amador, El Dorado, Monterrey and Yolo counties as well as the Central Valley. The wines that you will be tasting on your tour have been hand selected by us from our favorite wineries in each region. The wineries chosen are high-end boutique wineries and the chosen wines are exclusive to the winery tasting rooms, with the exception of our cruises! We have bottles available to purchase at the end of your trip to enjoy during your stay in Lake Tahoe or to take home to add to the rest of your collection. All of this will be on a semi-private tour aboard the one-of-a-kind vintage Golden Rose, a 1953 Chris Craft Venetian Water Taxi docked at the Tahoe Keys Marina.
The Golden Rose was built in 1953 as a Chris Craft Double Cabin Fly Bridge Cruiser and was originally named “In the Mood”. In December of 1996, a blizzard hit the Pacific Northwest and pummeled the Puget Sound marinas. The snow collapsed several roofs of the marina boat docks, damaging hundreds of boats, sinking over 300, one of which was In The Mood. She was partially sunk and heavily damaged, she was taken to a boat yard to be scrapped.
Terry Buzzard, the owner of Island Mariner Cruises, the first whale watching tour company in Bellingham, Washington, saw her in the scrapyard and instead of allowing this beautiful Chris Craft to be scrapped, he decided to recreate her as a Venetian Water Taxi. He stripped her down to the hull, sanded, refinished the original mahogany, added Yellow Alaskan Cedar, Ironbark from Australia, Pernambuco wood from Brazil and meticulously rebuilt each part by hand with his friends at Glen Cove Boatworks. The original gas engines were replaced with two Caterpillar 3208 diesel engines. Her large windows have a rose etched in the glass at each corner. All of the original chrome pieces were plated in 24 karat gold, which is where she gets her name, Golden Rose. The boat is such a fine piece of workmanship that Christopher Columbus Smith III (3rd generation Chris Craft), commented after riding in it, that he wished the company had made such a beautiful boat themselves.
