Last weekend a group of us made the ~300 mile trip up coast to Central California wine country for a fun few days of beautiful scenery, Disney movies and of course, lots and lots of wine ;)
On the way up, we stopped at Paso Robles - a pretty mid-California town with a lot of wine shops on the main street where local wine makers sell their products. We stopped by a few to sample some wine and buy a few bottles - the boot of the car was jammed-full with bottles by the end of the trip! I'm not usually much of a wine drinker as I prefer my cocktails, but this trip helped me learn to appreciate wine more and taught me how to 'taste' wine properly.
In each wineries 'tasting room' you would typically try out 5 or 6 different wines, usually starting with one or two whites or roses, then moving on to the reds. You are only poured a small amount into the wine glass rather than a whole measure, and there is always a 'tipping bucket' on the table where you can discard of the rest once you've had enough - the staff aren't offended because if you're visiting lots of wineries you'll end up pretty drunk by the end of the day if you drink every single sample! Professional wine tasters don't actually swallow the wine and just spit it out, but none of us did that of course ;)
The tasting menu listed all the wines, including what type of wine it was (lots of Syrahs), the year, the different 'notes' you could taste in it, how many cases have been made and what meals it would compliment best. You start by swirling the wine around the glass a little, then take a sniff of it to take in the smell before tasting it. All the tasting rooms had a plate of snacks such as crackers or breadsticks to take a bite of to cleanse the palate in-between wines.
Feeling pretty tipsy, after we'd finished in Paso Robles we then drove another hour north to King City, a small town where my friend Elizabeth's parents live and who were very kindly letting us stay for the weekend. They cooked us a nice dinner then we had a chilled evening playing board games and drinking more wine (...what else?) The view from their house was so pretty and they had the cutest dog ever :D :D
View from the house
Soooo cute!
Saturday was a lovely sunny day, perfect weather for driving around the surrounding country side. It was nice to experience a different type of environment after spending over a month in very dry Southern California and to actually see grass and fields! We visited several vineyards, including the one where Elizabeth's dad works. He gave us a guided tour of the whole place, including the vineyards (where we ate some grapes straight off the vine), barrel store, tanks of wine and pretty garden area which is hired out for weddings.
Tasting room open, yay!
Lots and lots of wine....
Grapes growing
Lots of flies hovering above this..!
This is how wine is made
After a massive meal to soak up all the alcohol we'd been drinking, we headed back to the house for an evening of trivia quizzes and Disney movies (complete with drinking game... yes more wine involved!) The following day we stopped at a few more wineries on the way back home, then took the coastal route back to LA including a stop at Santa Barbara for dinner.
Beautiful fields everywhere...
More wineries
So pretty
HOW much wine did we all buy...?
On Tuesday we had a night out to celebrate my birthday, involving a delicious meal at Hamburger Marys, an amazing restaurant in West Hollywood that do the best buffalo burger ever and massive cocktails. We then went to Koreatown and hired out a booth at a karaoke bar and drank a strong Korean spirit that Amanda noted tasted like nail varnish remover... no wonder our singing sounded terrible. The instructions and everything on the remote control were in Korean, but we managed to figure out how to work it. The night ended with the obligatory group sing-a-long to the ultimate karaoke song, Don't Stop Believin' - a great end to a great night!
