Wine-o-clock

It has been wine-o-clock all weekend long! Paul and I are in Solvang, CA enjoying a weekend together before I run off to Switzerland for a semester. We arrived on Saturday after sleeping in (I have been feeling terribly sick) and packing hastily (Laura forgot her phone charger, we forgot the camera cord, and Paul did not pack a bathing suit). Saturday was dedicated to getting dinner and wandering around the touristy town. All the buildings are built in traditional German style, and there is a noticeable absence of suburban type shops (minus the requisite Subway restaurant). All the inns are in the same style as the town, and as I noticed, are ALWAYS full on Fridays and Saturday nights. If you want to take a trip to Solvang, you cannot plan it last minute!





Sunday morning we woke up ready to hit the wine tastings, which, by the way, are everywhere! I was envisioning just a few large wineries in the area, with sophisticated wine tasting setups, all of which you had to drive down an estate entrance to get to. No, no... everyone has a winery here. It is like truck gardens in Pennsylvania. You cannot pass a street without a winery. So, walking through even the small town, you can go to wine tastings at little local wine tasting shops, or even at the mini mart! We started off with LUCAS & LEWELLEN which has a satellite wine tasting in town. Although I liked some of their wines, particularly their port wine, I was not in love with them. For a moment, I thought going to Volcano winery as my first ever wine tasting might have spoiled me (they had incredibly unique wines there... try the Guava or Honey wines!). However, as the day progressed, I did find some special wines.

We then headed out of town to a lil' winery called Mosby wines. The guy working the wine tasting bar was a good salesperson, but the wine was also really good, so we bought some to take with us:






Of course this is only the second winery we had ventured to, but I needed to eat. Thank goodness Paul was smart enough to stop by Subway and pick up some sandwiches (which I had already broken into.) We headed down to Sunharvest winery, which Paul had read had a picnic area (check!) The winery was the prettiest one we visited and had a nice picnic area. Their Rose wine was fabulous, as was the $75 dollar Cab, but we passed on the later of the two.









I got some chocolate in lieu of the Cab (this chocolate went VERY well with the wine, yumm-o).



As we were tasting each wine at all these vineyards, Paul and I were taking notes. Not serious wine afficianto notes, like flavors and smells, but rather a ranking system... 1 to 10 and "I like that one a lot, let's get some = BUY" on our notes. Ironically, even after seeing us wolf down subway sandwiches, so uncouth and unsophisticated by wine tasting standards, we were asked by a young lady whether we knew what we were doing since she saw us taking notes. LOL!

After this vineyard, I was almost toast, so I said let's make one more winery stop, then it is snack time (aka first dinner). We decided to venture into Los Olivas and went to a conglomerate wine tasting. I have no idea what the technical term for this is, but this group buys wines from local vineyards and labels them, or mixes and makes them, however, they have no real crops of their own.




The town was all but two square blocks with a traffic circle in the center, but they had an outdoor cafe that served cheese plates, salads, and beef skewers- perfect to top off a day of wine tasting.



Paul's idea of a vacation:



And a cool picture of us: