My First Foray into Wine...

This past weekend Ali and I went on a bike tour of various wineries in the Russian River area of Sonoma County.  The tour was through Gears and Grapes, a young company who specializes in bike tours of wineries in Russian River, Napa, and soon Santa Barbara.  They like to take travelers to lesser known wineries where you are able to taste some of the best wine the locations have to offer.  I do not think we tasted anything less than a $40 bottle of wine.  There were ten of us on the trip, four couples and a brother/sister pair from North Carolina. It was definitely an interesting cast of characters.  Our guides, Devin and Sam, were good at what they did, extremely knowledgeable, friendly, and encouraging.

Russian River is known for its Pinot Noirs, a red wine.  Each location provided us with one white, a bunch of Pinots, and then maybe another variety of red to round out the experience.  It became a little redundant over the trip.  We stopped at Gary Farrell, Arista, Twomey, and Mill Creek.  I would definitely say that Mill Creek was the best of the four.  It could have been that I just finished biking over 12 miles for the day and had been drinking wine the whole time, but the wine at Mill Creek was the best by far.  They also provided us with a variety of different wines, something I had been missing throughout the day.  Cab Sav, Chardonnay, Pinot, Syrah, Merlot, and then they finished it off with dark chocolate and a fantastic Port.  Then on top of that they threw in 25% off any wine purchased that day.  Long story short, Ali and I are now a part of their Wine Club and have a new bottle of Chardonnay and Port.  I will need to buy another 2 bottles every 3 months at 25% off.

Going into this, I knew absolutely nothing about wine.  After this trip, I still know nothing about wine.  Well I know that it is not as bad as I thought it was.  I did learn about some cool breweries to visit out here from the pourer at Arista.  So, I will check those out in the future.  The upside of being a part of the Wine Club is now Ali and I have something to do every three months.  We get to drive up to Mill Creek taste some wines and get some edumacation.  We are excited about it.

The trip home was also interesting.  The brother/sister combo was in the van behind Ali and I.  The sister, Katherine, was quite drunk at this point in the later afternoon.  She began to continue to babble about completely irrelevant things.  Her brother, Robert, was clearly embarrassed by her sister's rambling, and Ali and I were trying to not laugh.  Katherine was making some sounds for a little bit.  According to her, they were her triceratops sounds.

What a great way to round out a fun trip.  And to think, I thought it would be Ali making dinosaur sounds before passing out.

Until next time...

-Justin