Time for the Grape Harvest

Who needs a spa to relax when you can spend the evening stomping and squishing around with your friends in a gigantic barrel full of cabernet grapes? Well, here I am three weeks into my four weekend traveling stint. I am exhausted from the constant running around in the last few weeks, but not too exhausted to partake in the harvest festivities that I have been looking forward to for the last month.

When Marissa first started talking about the festival in Temecula, she had me at the grape stomping. Sign me up! I was immediately fascinated. The grape stomping didn't hold the same allure for Paul as it did for me, but he had a good time nevertheless.

Here are some of the highlights from the trip:

Harvest Festival at the Callaway Winery
The Callaway harvest festival was the main event in Temecula for the weekend. We weren't really sure what to expect, but between the wine tasting, Italian dinner, grape stomping, Lucy and Ricky look-a-like contest, live band and cork tossing game (which Paul won), it was a great time.

Paul and I met up with the rest of our group at the winery : Marissa, Karie(who subbed in at the last minute for Marissa's husband Jeff who was stuck at home with some work responsibilities) and Marissa's law school friend Brooke and her boyfriend, Matt. The event room was lined with barrels, all of which were full of fermenting wine. There were people of all ages there including a group of red hat ladies and two women dressed like Lucille Ball. The cost of the event got us a delicious Italian dinner and 6 meticulously measured one ounce wine tasting pours which we quickly learned was not going to be enough to last us the evening. We'd all planned to buy some wine to take home with us anyway so we headed to the Callway's wine shop and got a case to share between the 6 of us. Matt even managed to charm the lady in the shop into giving us a free corkscrew.
After that it was into the barrel for me where Paul brought me refills in between cork tossing. He won the cork tossing game with 1,000,010 points and got to bring home 3 bottles of wine as his booty.

Grape Stomping
While most of the crowd jumped in the grape barrel for a few minutes and a quick photo opp. and quickly got out, I on the other hand, was completly enthralled by the whole grape stomping experience. I spent nearly an hour in the barrel stomping and squishing the warm grapes, making new friends and cheering for everyone next to me doing the cork toss. I, being my gracefully clumsy self, managed to spill half of my glass of chardonnay all over my pants when I slipped on the way in. Unfortunately, the grapes we stomped will never be fermented and made into wine. I thought it would be neat to be able to buy the wine that we stomped, but I guess people don't want wine that has been touched by hundreds of dirty feet. I guess I don't really want to to drink wine that has been stepped on by hundred of dirty feet either.

The Stellar Cellar Wine Bar
I have to say I really wish we had places like this, or even a place like this back home in Vegas. The Stellar Cellar is a cozy little wine lounge in the middle of Old Town Front Street in Temecula. The ambiance was great, it was a small a softly lit room with wine bottles crammed into every nook and cranny and saxaphone player and floutist playing jazzy melodies . My favorite wine of the trip was one I found here - J Pinot Gris. I have never heard of Pinot Gris before, but I'd like to hear more of it.

Tasting Wine Straight from the Barrel at Leonesse
On day 2 of our trip I learned a new expression - hair on the dog.
In the morning, the phone rang about 8:00. It was Marissa and Karie. They had already been up, showered, gotten completely ready, gone to eat breakfast, practically had time to read War and Peace cover to cover and were getting bored sitting around the room.
I should have known. While I thoroughly enjoy luxuriating under the covers as long as possible in the mornings, especially on weekends, especially after a night of drinking and especially on vacation, Marissa has to restrain herself to stay in bed past 5:30 am. We had planned to go tasting at a couple of other wineries this morning while Paul, Brooke and Matt went golfing. "There's no chance you're ready a little early, is there?" Marissa asked me. Still tangled in the covers I laughed. Um, no. They decided to go to Starbucks and grab some coffee to stave off the boredom while I got ready.

By the time we were headed out to Wilson Creek Winery for their awesome almond champagne, I was still feeling sick and trying to chase away my thundering wine headache massive amounts of water and Advil. Going wine tasting in the morning had sounded like such a good idea last night. This morning not so much. The mere thought of more wine was enough to make me nauseated. "Come on," Marissa and Karie told me, "Hair on the dog." Huh? Hair on the what? I had never heard this expression before but apparently it means that the best cure for a hangover is more of the hard stuff. Uggh. I have never subscribed to this theory and wasn't about to, but I figured, hey how often am I in wine country? I steeled myself and decided to try some wines at Wilson Creek. The lady running the tasting room was teasing us about being there so early. "You girls decided to skip church this morning and come worship at Our Lady of St. Wilson, didn't you?" We got five tastes for our $10 fee and I gave up after the first two reds that were making me sick. I told the lady at the counter that I wasn't feeling so hot after the harvest festival at Callaway last night. "Hair on the dog!" she told me. How have I never heard this expression before?

After that, I went straight to the almond champagne which was a welcome change. I guess champagne seems like a more acceptable morning drink, you know with mimosas being a brunch drink and all. Maybe the hair on the dog was working, I just needed a different breed.
Next up was Leonesse. This was my favorite winery by far on our February visit. I was especially looking forward to going there today because, as newly enrolled Leonesse wine club members, Marissa and Karie (and up to fours of their friends) got to go to a special tasting in the barrel room and try wines that aren't even released for sale yet. When we arrived we hopped on a golf cart that took us through the twisting vineyards where we got to eat cabernet grapes off the vine. Then our young driver took us to the barrel room, a building hidden from view of the main tasting room where all the winemaking magic happens.
Stepping into this room felt like some kind of backstage pass to the wine world. It was so much fun. We tried a 2006 Savignon Blanc, Four, a Cabernet Zinfandel Limited edition that had been sold out for months
and the mother of all red wines on the trip, a spicy and bold 2005 VS Cabernet straight from the barrel. This is a wine that won't even be bottled until next month and won't go on sale until next June! I'm not the biggest red wine fan, I usually prefer white, but this was unbelievable. Norma, our wine tasting guru used a contraption that looked curiously like a turkey baster to transfer the wine from the barrel into our glasses. I'm not sure whether my opinion of this wine was clouded because of the coolness factor that came with drinking it straight from the barrel or whether it was just that good, but I ordered a bottle that will arrive in June so I guess I'll get to find out.

The Girls Book and Wine Club is Up and Running

Here's a good quote for all of us wine lovers out there:

"Sometimes when I reflect back on all the wine I drink I feel shame. Then I look into the glass and think about the workers in the vineyards and all of their hopes and dreams. If I didn't drink this wine, they might be out of work and their dreams would be shattered. Then I say to myself, "It is better that I drink this wine and let their dreams come true than be selfish and worry about my liver." ~ Jack Handy

Cheers to that!

So, after several months of planning and rescheduling and shuffling plans around we finally kicked off our Girls Book and Wine Club the last Sunday of August. After several hours of catching up, snacking on fruits and veggies, and taking full advantage of the wine part of the book and wine part of the club, we finally launched into our discussion on our first book, Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. I was delighted that everyone loved this book as much as I did.

Here's a picture of the "founders" at the top of the post me, Michele, Karie, and I in the back and Abby and Marissa up front.
To be continued... with the story of how the Girls' Book and Wine Club came into being.

Rewind and Fast Forward

Okay, I know I have disappeared from the face of the earth for a while. I started blogging about Paul's and my time on the Camino with very good intentions of keeping regular posts and pictures along the way. However, as the weeks wore on I promptly got so involved in living the Camino that getting to a computer to write about our journey and my reflections fell to the wayside.

The good news is that, while I didn't always have a computer nearby, I did spend a considerable amount of time snuggled up in my albergue bunk beds with my headlamp blazing writing about the day in my journal. So here's the plan - amidst new posts about current happenings, books I'm reading and trips I'll be taking, my goal is to go back and recount our camino story piece by piece. I'll backdate the posts to the dates in July and August when they took place so you will have to scroll down to check for new stories.

The five and a half weeks we spent trekking across Spain were some of the most exhausting, challenging and yet most exhilarating and memorable that I have ever experienced. Who knew I could walk 20 miles in one day when I was sick and could barely put pressure on one foot? Who knew I could go a month without make-up and still feel confident and beautiful? Who knew that Paul and I would find friends so similar to us living half a world away? Who knew that everything you need in the world can fit into a backpack?

It is a saying among the pilgrims that the Camino truly begins once you reach Santiago and set out on your own path from there. In my future blog entries I hope to share my experiences on the road in Spain as well as my journey forward from Santiago without the arrows and scallops to lead the way.

The Girls Book & Wine Club is Up and Running

Here's a good quote for all of us wine lovers out there:

"Sometimes when I reflect back on all the wine I drink I feel shame. Then I look into the glass and think about the workers in the vineyards and all of their hopes and dreams. If I didn't drink this wine, they might be out of work and their dreams would be shattered. Then I say to myself, "It is better that I drink this wine and let their dreams come true than be selfish and worry about my liver." ~ Jack Handy

Cheers to that!

So, after several months of planning and rescheduling and shuffling plans around we finally kicked off our Girls Book and Wine Club the last Sunday of August. After several hours of catching up, snacking on fruits and veggies, and taking full advantage of the wine part of the book and wine part of the club, we finally launched into our discussion on our first book, Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. I was delighted that everyone loved this book as much as I did. Here's a picture of the "founders" at the top of the post me, Michele, Karie, and I in the back and Abby and Marissa up front.

Here's a little background on how the Girls Book and Wine Club came into existence:
One thing that's been on my mind a lot in the past months is making it a priority to spend more time with my friends and family, really working to reconnect with the people who are important in my life.

Its always been important to me to spend time with my girlfriends, both old and new. Unfortunately, its not always easy when everyone has spread out geographically and had grown in different directions in their careers and lives. In the college days, luckily, it was just a matter of walking down the hall. It was in the hallowed (and generally hazy) halls of the dorms at UNLV that I I met Abby, Michele and Marissa, (here's a picture of us from the good old days) the girls who would soon become my best friends and partners in crime. We spent our college years and beyond as a tight knit group of friends. We loved each other in spite of or maybe partly because of our quirky habits - mine of playing Shakira and Enrique Iglesias songs on repeat at an alarming volume, Abby wanting to go to sleep on the ground exactly where she was after a night of drinking, Michele's alleged "cheating" at mancala and Marissa's tendency to get dressed up and then fall asleep before it was even time to go out for the night. We were there for each other during that intense, awkward and exhilarating time when we were just trying adulthood on for size and learning how to find our place in the world. I think that there is something about spending a lot of time together in intense situations where a lot of personal growth is involved that bonds you together for life.

As we've gotten older and moved on from our college days, we've all grown a great deal. Each of us has met more people who have touched our lives and become our close friends. Marissa and I are both now happily married. With all of the positive things that have happened, still our lives and careers seem to pull us in different directions. I guess that's part of life, but I don't want to let go of my friendships just because its not as easy as it used to be.

I was thinking about all of this at the same time I started reading Eat, Pray, Love, (which I felt an immediate need to share with everyone I know) and the idea of the book club was born. My idea was to provide a shared experience that we connect through and give us some regularly scheduled girl time. The first meeting was great - good book, good wine (and mimosas) and best of all good company. Our next selection for October is Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer.