Sunday, July 19, 2009

Pilgrimage through wine country...the beginning!

For the past week I have been on a journey...a pilgrimages if you will through California wine country. The mission, was to get some great wines at a great value and I believe mission accomplished! Of course this trip to wine country started out with a plan, so as not to miss
anything and to make sure we didn't spend the week on a wild goose chase (getting lost and just stopping at whatever winery we happened to run into). I even checked out "The Sotheby's Wine Encyclopedia"from the library so I could find the exact regions I should be getting specific varietals from

Ah..."The best laid plans". I did drink a lot of wine, visited many beautiful vineyards and even had a couple of REALLY good meals! Most of which were NOT part of the plan.

So I guess spontaneous wine journeys can be good too.

First of all my guy and I decided to make the journey from Phoenix to California wine country via car, so we could purchase wine and bring it back...because we happen to live in a "three tiered state" as the wineries call it. Which means they can not directly ship us wine to our house but have to ship to a distributor then they have to put it on a UPS truck and drive it over. During the summer especially they are not real happy to ship to Phoenix...because it is hotter than hell! So we packed a large cooler into the trunk and we were on our way!

After an overnight stop in lovely Pamona California, we headed to Paso Robles to taste some
wine! Over the next few blogs I will take you with me on my journey through wine...or with wine, at least what I remember of it! I tried my best to take notes, pictures and to get as much information as I could so that you, my readers could feel you were there and maybe even encourage you to try some wines you may not have otherwise. Of course after spending about an hour at each winery tasting...things get a little blurry. Guess I should have been spitting, but that just seems wrong!



In any case coming from Phoenix which has the color palate covering all things brown, wine country is absolutely beautiful. Rolling hills that are either covered in rows of grape vines or sections or golden grass, I know the golden is dead grass but from afar it resembles velvet.

The best part there was not a cactus in sight!

2 comments:

  1. Sounds FANTASTIC! (the 'not in Phoenix' part) Although, you haven't seen rolling hills till you've been to Pennsylvania... but they're not known for wine....

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  2. Any rolling hills that are green sound great! I have heard Pennsylvania is beautiful.

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