Wine fun in Washington!

Since moving to Washington State I've learned that I live in the second largest wine making state in the country!  Those stats don't lie, there are wineries EVERYWHERE! It's amazing.  Even though I moved here before RoB, I checked out a few wineries on my own (which can be awkward, depending on the place, for example, Hamilton was great about it).  But I did get to try a LOT of local wineries during the spring barrel weekend. Some of my coworkers decided to get a limo for the occasion (for one day) and for other two days of the weekend a couple of us hard-core tasters checked out some others.

Spring Barrel is a special weekend in the spring when wineries let you try some of the samples straight form the barrels (as well as regular tasting, obviously).  Many of the wineries are on a passport that we bought.  These magical passes meant we didn't have to pay tasting fees for any wineries in the passport (not that it's a big deal since most wineries will refund a tasting fee if you buy a bottle) and if you get stamps from at least six wineries you get a commemorative glass!

For the best recap I will link to all of my yelp reviews for the wineries we went to!  We started at Airfield (even though it was bigger, still fun!), then went to Thurston Wolfe (great), and Gamache (meh).  These three were all walking distance from each other and there were a lot more within walking, but they weren't on our passports so we saved them for another time.  Next we headed north to Barrel Springs (a bit off the beaten path but beautiful and very friendly) and we ate lunch there because it was so nice!  Last stop in Prosser was Kestral (a bit snooty for my taste).  The limo made a final stop in Benton City at Chandler Reach before taking us back the starting point which was conveniently enough in the parking lot for our final winery of the day, Thomas O'Neil.

That was only day one of the weekend, the next day we went to Kitzke (a bit uppity), Goose Ridge (great wine, big estate), and Kiona (love!).  Then, on day three we went to JBell Cellars, Two Mountain, Wineglass Cellars, and had dinner out in Yakima.  We could decide which place to go since there were a couple listed in our wine passport so we just had appetizers at two places, 5 North and Second Street Grill.

I'm glad I got to taste so much over the weekend, but in general these special weekends aren't the best to go tasting.  For most people they are just out to drink, not out to try some good wine and learn about it. In general I wouldn't say the weekend passport is worth buying since almost all wineries refund your tasting fee with a purchase and I tend to purchase wine almost everywhere I taste.  I also prefer to go when the wineries can pay more attention to each individual person.  I have already checked out many other wineries and hope to share some of my favorites soon!

Kentucky Wine!

One of the things I've noticed about Kentucky is the lack of users on yelp.  Yes, businesses have a page but there are usually only a handful of reviews, so I'm trying to help that by throwing in some of my own.  I thought a good place to start would be to review all the wineries we have visited since moving to Kentucky!

The first Kentucky winery we went to was Chrisman Mill's tasting room in Hamburg, see my yelp review here.  The wine was not so good, the server didn't really answer our questions but he was nice, and the tasting room was very cute, that about sums it up!  After tasting wine there we were very nervous about Kentucky wine in general and worried that we might not be able to find any that we liked.

Our next free weekend we drove out towards Frankfort to try some wineries out there and had a nice meal at Holly Hill Inn (review here).  Our first winery was Prodigy (review here) which was a good stop, not really what we expected but still glad we stopped by.  Our second stop was Equus Run which we loved, and highly recommend!

Our next wine trip occurred during RoB's birthday bash, and you can read his details about it here.  We started at Grimes Mill which was a very friendly place with good wine, and also was interested in hiring RoB (talk about a great birthday present!) he now works there and blogs for them.  From there we went to Talon, which we had a groupon for, it was a  good deal but the wine was VERY hit or miss.  Last stop that day was at Jean Ferris, where we also ended up eating dinner.  My yelp review is just pertaining to the wine tasting, which was weird.  I wish they had a separate tasting room and not just the bar in the restaurant.  Their wine is great, but the wine tasting experience there wasn't great.

One day about a month or two later we were heading to pick up Angel from doggie day care and saw that Acres of Land winery was right around the corner, so we took a detour.  The wine was just ok, but the tasting experience was a bit awkward, I really hate it when you have to pay before you taste, and that's what they did here.

That sums up my most recent yelp dump, at some point I also plan to add Blackbarn and Harkness Edwards since we went to both of those during the McConnell Springs Barrel tasting.

The table was set, it must've been fancy...

To recap, we spent a week in Tahoe for a short summer vacation.  Some of the highlights were 2 days spent backpacking, and one day painting preschool equipment.  We also cooked my parents a fancy-ish dinner as a birthday present!

Both of their birthdays happened over the summer and since we hadn't seen them until our recent trip to Tahoe we thought it would be a good time to take advantage and do something nice for them.  Luckily, Rob is a very good cook, and I am very good at telling him what to do.  So we I decided we he should cook this really great dinner for the main course, something including buttercream for dessert, and I had my eye on a few different appetizer recipes.  I also thought it would be nice to have a wine to pair with each course.

For the appetizer I decided to use this recipe for a blue cheese and leek bruschetta.  Rob was skeptical because he has a problem with serving something we've never cooked for ourselves.  But I knew my superior cooking skills would come through, and they did!

mmm...bruschetta

We paired this course with a Sonoma cab from Mutt Lynch Winery, Canis Major.  These were an overall hit, and very simple to make.

For the main course Rob cooked this wonderful Julia Child's recipe again.  He poached sole in a dry white wine and then covered it in a parisienne sauce (not really sure what this is, but it tasted good!).  This was served with a side of asparagus and multicolored carrots.

I was so excited to eat that I almost forgot to take a picture

We paired this course with a dry white wine (that was also used to cook the fish in) that was on sale at Whole Foods (although we'd recommend just using two buck chuck, that's what we did last time).

For dessert we made shortbread and buttercream.  Using the buttercream skills he learned we made the most simple one.  It normally uses Cointreau to give it an orangy flavor, but I wanted to try and use Chambord since I love raspberry and chocolate together.  We compromised and did half with Cointreau and half with Chambord.  For the shortbread we used my grandma's secret recipe (Ok not really secret, I just don't know it, but I'm sure Rob could tell you).  We paired the dessert with a red port from Kaz Winery.  We had made waaaay too much dessert (probably enough for 8 people), luckily we had friends coming into town that night and they finished most of it!

I think my parents really enjoyed it, we really tried to make it a nice atmosphere, too.  It's normal for us just to cook them dinner so actually setting the table and using nice place settings and glassware made a difference.  Eating on my parent's back deck with a great view of Lake Tahoe is a perfect backdrop for a nice summer dinner.

Fancy table

nice view



Baked Green Tomatoes

I've recently discovered green tomatoes and the wonderfulness of frying them. The dp (formerly bf, actually he doesn't need to be anonymous since he has his own blog where he calls himself ~RoB, but I think that is kinda stupid, so I'll just call him Rob) fried them the first time I brought them home from the farmer's market.  Then I saw a post over on my friend Mandy's blog about green tomatoes.  She did something a little different though, she baked them! And then she topped them with blue cheese and basil vinaigrette!

So I told Rob the next time I bought green tomatoes that we should try doing it her way, and guess what? He listened to me! You can see the whole recipe over on her blog (and check out some of her other recipes, they are awesome!) but I'm just showing you the finished product here!

Delicious!

They were very tasty and I loved a new idea for the toppings, not sure if the baking part won me over, I think I still like fried better, but if I'm trying to be healthier I guess I could work with it.  As you can see in the picture we paired it with a lovely wine, Bardessono Petite Sirah, that we got at Uncorked in Tahoe City.  Oh, and I started the meal with a little cheese that we happened to have have left over, one of which is my new favorite, Drunken Goat (you can get it at whole foods).

Sonoma + Pupperz!

A couple weekends ago the BF and I went to Sonoma (yes, again).  He gives a pretty good rundown of our trip here.  One of the big differences in this trip was that we brought the dog with us! He is a great car dog but can be quite a handful when interacting with other people.  One downside was that we had to find a place to stay that allowed dogs and we were trying to stay on the cheaper side so we ended up at a Travelodge, which was pretty much as expected, bare bones but clean enough and only charged a $10 dog fee.

The main purpose of our trip was to pick up wine from our wine club, Hook and Ladder!  They had a pick-up party which included tasting any of their wine they had open, food, and a fun party atmosphere.  They had some good snacks and great wine (as always).  We walked away with 8 bottles and spent under $100, and even though we were pretty late for the party we still felt very welcome while we were there.

Since we had Angel with us there was a dog winery I had heard about and wanted to check out.  I couldn't remember the name and when I googled "dog wineries in sonoma" about 50 different wineries came up!  Apparently you can take your dog to many tasting rooms, but we just went to the one I had previously heard about, Mutt Lynch.  It was small but very dog friendly (they had a bed for Angel) and they support many dog organizations.  Their wine was better than expected, reasonably priced, and cutely named (Merlot Over and Play Dead).  They also shared their warehouse with another winery, Deux Amis, so we walked over two steps to try their wine, too.

Princess and his Daddy

The last dog friendly thing we did was check out a nice dog park near the city of Glen Ellen.  It was part of the Sonoma Valley Regional Park, called the Elizabeth Perrone dog park.  Sadly, there weren't many dogs there but it was a nice sized park with benches and grass for Angel to run and play.  It was also close to a few other wineries we tried, check out the bf's post for that info.

This is a picture of my breakfast in Healdsberg, I just forgot to mention it anywhere in this post, oops!

Napa Part 3: Day Two Adventure

This is the final post from our Napa trip, I finally got around to writing it!

We woke up Sunday morning without much of a plan for the day, thinking we might go drive to some wineries and then maybe just head home.  But the bf started thinking and got us heading out the door with a crazy itinerary in hand.

We started the day back at the oxbow public market to buy the cheese from the night before and to see if there was anything else we needed/wanted.  We bought the cheese, then came across the chocolate vendor who makes the Ceja chocolate wine sauce.  We had wanted to get something for Trish (the awesome pourer at Mason) and thought a cute little bottle of wine chocolate sauce would be great.  She was so excited to see us again, and loved the gift!

We then said goodbye to downtown Napa and headed north to hit a few wineries, the first was Frank Family.  The bf had some of this wine at the Pasadena wine festival and that was our main reason for visiting.  The place wasn't super friendly or personal, you had to pay as soon as you walk in and then you go to different stations for each type of wine.  We split the reserve tasting since I wanted to try the sparkling wines and he wanted the reserve reds.  The sparkling wines left much to be desired (and were pretty expensive) so we moved onto the reds.  The reds were good, but it was in a very small room with lots of people and only one pourer crammed into the corner.  A weird experience after all the fun downtown rooms we tasted in the previous day.  Off to our next stop, Chateau Montelena!

For those of you who don't know, Chateau Montelena pretty much put Napa on the map in the 1970s.  I highly recommend the movie Bottle Shock for a quick and fun history lesson (if you remember, we also tried the wine from another winery featured in the movie, Gustavo Thrace, the previous day).  We were a little concerned that the tasting would be similar to Frank Family and not very personal, luckily we were wrong!

The grounds and building were gorgeous, see above, and we decided if it looked too crowded inside we could leave.  Pretty soon after we walked in someone motioned us to head to a back room where they had more tasting areas and we had a pourer just for us!  The tasting fee was expensive ($20) but we split it and felt like we got our money's worth since we got to try bottles that sold for $150.  The wine was great but mostly out of our price range although we did walk out of there with a copy of Bottle Shock signed by Bo Barrett!

Now for the real adventure we headed to the next valley over, Sonoma.  The last time we went wine tasting in Sonoma we LOVED it, and we realized it wasn't too far out of the way and we could get back home just as easy as if we had stayed in the Napa valley.  First pit stop was at the Dry Creek General Store for some lunch.  The sandwiches here are wonderful but the wait can be long, in the end it was worth it and we enjoyed our sandwiches.

The next stop was Dry Creek Olive Oil since the bf is a member of their club.  We got to try all the current releases they have and since he gets a 20% discount we bought a bottle of some cara cara orange infused olive oil that wasn't part of the shipment he got.  The person there recommended we drizzle it over goat cheese which we have since done and it was delicious! The bf also wanted to get a new shirt since his was lost in the great flood of 2010/2011 (a pipe burst in his wall).  When they couldn't find a shirt in his size they gave him the size bigger for free!

The last stop was our favorite winery from our last trip, Hook and Ladder.  I was a little worried that we were thinking too highly of it since it was one of our last stops last time.  It lived up to all our expectations, and since we liked it so much we decided to join their wine club (it's the first one we joined so its kind of a big deal).  We bought three bottles, got a cute reusable carrying case (that we were told fits two bottles and two wine glasses) and were on our way home.

That concluded our Napa adventure, glad I finally got it all written (only 4 weeks late :)

Napa Part 2: Dowtown Wine

One of the reason we went to Napa was because they have a downtown Napa tasting card.  For $25 you can taste wine for 10 cents at 12 different tasting rooms all within walking distance of each other.  When we talked to the innkeeper about this he said no, the card isn't worth it since he had a bunch of 2 for 1 tastings and many places would comp your tasting fee if you buy a bottle.  So we decided not to buy the cards, although we heard different opinions about it throughout the day.  We took a look at the tasting cards the innkeeper gave us gave us and mapped out where we wanted to go.

We started at the Vintner's Collective, which was recommended by our B&B but we didn't have a tasting card, luckily they gave us a 2 for 1 price anyway.  This was a collection of many different smaller wineries, most pricey (above $50 a bottle, yeah we're kinda cheap).  It was nice getting to try all these wines but it was our most expensive tasting at $25 per person which unfortunately wouldn't have been applied had we bought a bottle. 

We tried to go to Twenty Rows next, but when we got there found out they were open by appointment only (which was contradictory to their tasting card, and the open sign in the window) we tried calling and knocking but no luck, so we moved on.

The next stop couldn't have been any different from the first. Mason was up next, and we went into a cheery room with a great wine pourer named Trish.  First bonus is that they have complimentary tastings, second bonus was when we realized how cheap their wine was and how much we were enjoying it.  They specialize in Sauvingnon Blancs, which aren't my favorite and the bf really doesn't like them, but all the ones we tried here were great and fruity and we ended up buying three bottles.  They also had some fun reds and we took a bottle home of their Merlot, which is something that we have never done.  Fun fact about Merlot from the movie Sideways: the main character bashes Merlot throughout the movie and the sales of Merlot apparently suffered from it, however the wine that he has been saving for a special occasion and ends up drinking at the end is actually 70% Merlot!  Trish said it was a fun inside joke in the wine community.  Our second stop of the day and we already have four bottles, but Trish sad she'd bring them back to our b&b for us and that if we buy bottles other places to drop them off with her and she'd deliver all of them.  We <3 Trish!!

Next up was Taste which had two different wineries, Wasterstone and Mahoney.  We came to this tasting room two years ago after a lunch on the wine train that Mahoney had paired wines with and had given us free tasting passes.  The last time we came was really fun and one of the main pourers was a huge Michigan fan and was wearing a Big House t-shirt so we were very excited to return.  Sadly this place didn't live up to our expectations.  The pourers were boring and didn't engage us in conversation. We did still end up buy two bottles because we liked the wine.  This was another place where they didn't apply the tasting fee to the bottles (we did have a two for one) but they were having a 20% discount for Valentine's day so that made up for it, I guess.  The service there was still boring.

We headed next door to Gustavo Thrace.  We found out from a previous tasting that it is Gustavo from the movie Bottle Shock!  They shared a tasting room with Toolbox and we got to pick two wines from each one to taste.  All was good but most of the wines were just a little out of our price range, except the Third Bottle.  The Third Bottle wine is meant to be your third bottle at dinner after you've drunk your more expensive, fancy wine, however we think its a great first bottle and ended up buying one.  The tasting fee here was applied to the purchase of the bottle, which is awesome.

At this point we took a break for a snack, see this post.

After our snack we went across the street to Uncorked.  We walked in and the place was super busy, but we had a complimentary tasting pass for two so we figured it'd be ok to wait.  They were very kind to us while we were waiting and eventually we got to try some wine.  The pourers here were very friendly and made for a fun atmosphere.  Ahnfeldt and Carducci share this tasting room so we got to try some of both.  We ended up buying one bottle here before we left.

Our last stop before heading back to our B&B for their wine tasting was at Ceja.  One of the best things about this tasting was they had iPads for you to rate all the wines you try and leave comments.  We also had a delicious cheese plate here.  As we were making our purchase (of course we couldn't leave without buying a bottle) we got to try their chocolate cabernet sauce, omg so good!  So we ended up with a bottle of that as well.

That concludes our downtown Napa wine tasting.  It was awesome being able to walk everywhere and we had a great time at all of the tasting rooms.  By the end of the day we had purchased 9 bottles of wine and one bottle of chocolate sauce!