I know this was supposed to be the low lights from Christmas (and trust me they are coming and they are low), but Amanda 1 (who will for the remainder of this post be addressed simply as Amanda) and I did something today that is preempting that. Today was Vineyard Visiting. Yes, North Carolina has vineyards...quite a few in fact....around 90 or so to be specific. I had asked my friend Fuller to recommend some wineries that had either good wines or nice tasting rooms. He gave me a list and after doing some research on where they were located and their hours, etc, we narrowed it down to three (hahaha).
First thing in the morning, Amanda made a yummy breakfast with stuffed French toast, bacon, and potatoes. We figured we should have some food in our tummies before drinking lots of wine. We left and made our way to the first winery on our list:
West Bend winery---we arrived at West Bend and were the only people there. It was quaint and cute looking like a vineyard should be. The person in the tasting room seemed a little surprised to see us when we walked in. Amanda and I split the tasting (I wanted to start off slow), and bought a bottle of wine. Onto the second winery:
Raylen---Raylen was nice. However, let me mention this was the only winery where we did not get a free glass. A tasting was of 6 wines. I only wanted to try three of them, so he gave it to me for free. Nice. Amanda bought the tasting, but we realized afterward that he only let her taste 5 wines. Not Nice. He also gave us a little card that showed that if we visited 5 wineries and bought bottles of wine, we could get a free T-shirt. Game on! He also stamped West Bend since we had told him we had visited. Amanda bought two bottles of wine (one was actually my birthday present). Onto the biggest winery we visited:
Childress--On the way to Childress (or as Amanda once called it: Child Less) we came upon a sign that said "Caution: Line Painting Ahead." We weren't expecting two men with pieces of cardboard hand painting lines on the road. Childress was big and nice. They had a very large shop area and a restaurant (we didn't eat there, we had packed lunch to eat along the way). We both did the "sweet" tasting. Another bottle of wine was purchased. Those three were actually the vineyards we had planned to visit, but it was only 2pm and we only needed two more for the free T-shirt...so we plugged them into Amanda's GPS and were on our way to:
Allison Oaks-- We knew when we were getting close to the other vineyards because there were suddenly grape vines all over the place. This one we were in the middle of a town and before we knew it the jackass GPS guy had told us that we had gone to0 far and that it was "recalculating." Apparently the tasting room is about a mile from the actual vineyard. The tasting room is in like a strip mall. We walked in and interrupted a man typing away at a computer. We were the only people to be there all day, and he actually had to go to the cellar to get wines for us to taste. I wasn't impressed with his tasting room, and his wines were my least favorite, but he did have foods for us to taste the wines with (wasabi almonds, chocolate almonds, dark chocolate, etc.). Of course we bought a bottle, cause that's what we do....just one winery left and we get a T-shirt. Onto:
Rag Apple Lassie (or Rag Time as Amanda called it)---cool because it has cows on the bottle and also because we passed "A Storehouse for Jesus" on the way there. What exactly would Jesus have in his storehouse? A storehouse for JSto would have gummy bears, martinis, and fuzzy socks, but I think Jesus might be a little different. Also on the way to Rag Apple Lassie, I had my first inclination of the day to throw Amanda's GPS out the window (which is good since I normally want to throw GPS's out the window from the start.) It took us past the vineyard, then past some sketchy dirt road that I was apparently supposed to turn onto to get back to the vineyard. You know what GPS guy?...you think you are sooo smart....you think you know everything and that I'm the stupid one when I purposely ignore your directions, but guess what...you're not...you make mistakes too you jackass. Anyway, this place was a little weird because you enter through their tank room (I'm not sure if that's what it's really called) and think you have entered into somewhere that you shouldn't be, but you haven't. We both did a tasting (I mostly did it because I wanted to glass with the cow on it and might as well have some wine to go with it.) While all the cute cow themed wine stuff made me want to buy it...I didn't, i just bought the final bottle of wine and some coconut chocolate to go with it. And that means we got.....FREE T-SHIRTS!!! WOOHOO!! I'm not sure why this seems like such an accomplishment since we basically drank and spent money, but it does. In the parking lot, we were laughing, and some mean lady told Amanda that she was cut off from any more wine tastings....really we were just admiring our take for the day on the backseat floor of my car.
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