Westside Wine Club Runs a 5K

Photo taken mid-race. No, we weren't drinking coffee during our run

Three of the wine clubbers ran the LA Prostate Cancer 5K in Brentwood on a brisk Sunday morning (at least it wasn't raining).  After the 5K, we walked to Lululemon Brentwood for a complimentary Sunday morning yoga class with Gigi of Yogaworks, perfect for stretching out those post-run muscles.  A great start to a nice Sunday, hopefully we'll do more runs together in the future!

November Wine Club

November Wine Club will be hosted by Sunny in Venice on Nov 5 (Friday) starting at 7:30pm.
Theme is: "Tried and True" so bring a bottle of your "staple" wine... We will also be heading to April Nyygard's waxing room for waxing services!

Please contact Sunny with any questions!

** We will be outside - there will be a firepit, but please dress warmly as it gets rather chilly in Venice at night!

Hot Tub Time Machine September Wine Club

We had September wine club at Erica's last Saturday night.  It was a beautiful warm September evening, perfect for eating, drinking and hot tubbing.  Everyone came glammed up in their raddest 80s gear, and we tasted many nice bottles of white wine.  To start, we had roasted tomato, burrata, pesto crostinis, smoked salmon mousse with chives, and an antipasti platter with cheese (comte, blue castello, delice de bourgogne (triple creme), and gouda), salami and olives.  For dinner, we had a turkey and kale lasagna, and mixed greens with roasted golden beets and almonds with a shallot champagne vinaigrette dressing.  For dessert, we had no pudge brownies in the hot tub.  We managed to polish off 10 bottles of wine, all in all a successful evening.  Thank you to everyone for coming! Recipes can be found here.

The appetizer spread; it was too dark by the time dinner was served for pictures

September Wine Club - Change of Date

We will be moving wine club to Saturday, September 25th starting at 6pm. See you all there in your 80's gear!

September Wine Club - Theme

 The theme for September's wine club has been revealed: Hot Tub Time Machine.  Please come dressed in your raddest 80's gear and bring a white wine for a blind white wine tasting on Friday, September 24th.  Please let Erica know if you are able to attend.

September Wine Club - Save the Date

September wine club will be hosted by Erica in Santa Monica on Friday, September 24th.  Details and theme to come!

August Wine Club

Tracy hosted August wine club at her lovely new bright and airy house in Santa Monica.  It was a perfectly sunny day and we enjoyed relaxing and drinking champagne in her backyard and catching up.  Tracy (and Mike) cooked us a delicious brunch include scallion and goat cheese mini muffins, creamy ricotta and chive scrambled eggs, an heirloom tomato and caramelized onion salad and perfectly ripe cantaloupe.  We drank mimosas and a bottle of the "Bitch" rose bubbly.

Next Meeting - Champagne Brunch!

Tracy is hosting a champagne brunch starting at 11am on Sunday, August 15th.  Please bring your favorite bubbly!

Westside Wine Club Member's First Film Festival

Jen, her husband Mark and Dee Dee's husband Danny's first short film together, The Ricochet, got into its first film festival! It will be showing at the LA Shorts Film Festival on TUESDAY, JULY 27, 2010 at 10:00 p.m. at the Laemmle Sunset 5 Theaters located at 8000 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood CA 90046. Tickets are on sale on the festival's website and are $12 each. Your ticket gets you in to the 10:00 p.m. slot, which will show 8 short films.

The Film Festival:
www.lashortsfest.com

The Website:
www.thericochetfilm.com

The Trailer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YdXC_-52y4

Thank you all for your support!!

Welcome Chicago!

Some wonderful ladies in Chicago are starting their very own wine club with an inaugural meeting this month.  We look forward to keeping up with their adventures on their very own blog.  Cheers!

Happy 1st Birthday Westside Wine Club!

The Westside Wine Club is turning 1! Dee Dee will be hosting this month on July 23rd, time TBD.

Please RSVP via evite and bring a bottle of an anniversary edition wine or anything else that would fit in the birthday theme.

Can't wait!

Sonoma Wine Tasting

During my last trip up north in June, we spent a day wine tasting in Sonoma and Healdsburg with a focus on the region's renown pinot noirs and zinfandels.  Sonoma and Healdsburg are great; the towns themselves are quaint and charming with some nice restaurants, and the surrounding vineyards and wineries are picturesque and relaxing.  It's much more laid back than Napa; during my last Napa trip, we needed appointments at pretty much every winery we visited, and made our dinner reservations a month in advance.  There was also some pretty bad traffic on the main roads.  In Sonoma, most places we visited did not require reservations (more like Santa Barbara), and the people were super friendly and laid-back.  We tasted some fantastic Pinot Noirs at Sojourn Cellars and Copain Wines (pictured above) and nice Zinfandels at Mauritson Winery.  We wanted to try more zinfandels at wineries around Mauritson in the Dry Creek Valley, but unfortunately we ran out of time.  We also had a lovely dinner at the Girl and the Fig in downtown Sonoma and a casual lunch at Bovolo in Healdsburg.  For more pictures and details, visit here.

Wine Tasting Event @ Bin 73

The June wine club event was held at local wine bar, Bin 73, in Marina Del Rey, which is next door to Mercedes Grill, both owned by Mercede Ahrablou. She put together a special menu for the club which included 5 generous pours paired with 5 delicious appetizers. Thank you Mercede for providing such a wonderful evening for us!!

Here we are enjoying the first wine, a bubbly rose, which was paired with the beet fruit salad.

The delicious ahi tuna poke was paired with a crisp Spanish white wine.



We all loved the filet mignon panini, paired with a smooth Roth cabernet.

And of course we had to have dessert! Love the signature '73 on the cookie, which we hear is the year the owner was born.

Here is crew with Mercede, our server Ryan, the self described wine snob, and our super friendly busboy.

A Quiet Night at Pourtal

Pourtal Wine Tasting Bar in Santa Monica seems to be one of the few places in the city (and probably only because it's new) that offers a quiet, low key wine tasting environment. Like Ugo, Pourtal's wine tasting concept uses the pay-as-you-go tasting credit cards that you can load up or cash out as you like. However, unlike Ugo, Pourtal offers ample seating and elbow room. On Saturday night, May 29th, Chris and I loaded up $30 and were able to get 8 pours total.

Portal offers a rotating wine selection of "boutique, vintage, cult and value-driven" wines. I especially appreciated their section devoted to female winemakers from around the world, many of which were organically grown. Interested in trying some? Below is the full list:

• Cantine del Castello di Conti "Boca" - Italy (Organic)
• Pfneiszl "Starling's Favorite" Shiraz - Hungary (Organic)
• Domaine Felines Jourdan Merlot - France (Organic)
• Patricia Green "Estate" Pinot Noir - Oregon (Organic)
• Ampelos "Gamma" Syrah - California (Super Organic!!)
• Niner Bootjack Ranch Sangiovese - California
• Lopez de Heredia "Bosconia" Reserva - Spain (Organic)
• Domaine La Lorentine 2004 Lirac - France (Organic)
• Donkey & Goat "Isabel's Cuvee" Rose - California (Organic)
• Lopez de Heredia 1997 Rose - Spain
• Nikolaihof "Hefeabzug" Gruner Veltiner - Austria (Biodynamic)
• Cold Heaven "Le Bon Climat" Viognier - California (Organic)
• Inman Family Pinot Gris - California (Organic)
• Gunderloch "Diva" Riesling - Germany
• Gentilini "Aspro Classic" - Greece
• Hoyt Family Vineyards Chardonnay - California

I especially enjoyed the Niner "Bootjack Ranch" Sangiovese which was rich, complex and full of great fruit and spice flavors. I went back for 2 more pours!

Pourtal also features "Angel Shares Happy Hour" that features discounts on wine and appetizers and a portion of your tab goes towards local non profits! A votre sante!!

SATC 2

The Wine Club caught a lunchtime showing of Sex and the City 2 today at the Century City mall.  The movie was a lot of fun; it was good to see the old characters again, the clothes were fabulous, the settings a little over the top.  I thought it was good follow-up to the relate-ability of the TV series (and much better than the first movie), with some realistic depictions of married life.  After the movie, we grabbed some margueritas and sangrias and food outside in the patio of the Pink Taco.  It was a gorgeous 70 degree day outside, and lovely to spend it with great girlfriends.  Special thanks to Michelle for organizing! We have a Memorial Day bbq coming up in a few days, so stay tuned for more pictures, more drinking, more food and more fun.

Gjelina

 Photo from Gjelina website

I know most of the wine clubbers, especially the Venice girls, have been to Gjelina, but I just wanted to share thoughts on my latest meal in case you haven't been recently.  Saturday night, a friend and I headed to Gjelina over on Abbot Kinney for dinner.  We did not have a reservation, but got seated at the communal table after only a 15 minute wait at 7:15pm, which passed by quickly after opening a bottle of wine.  I've found that trendy places like Gjelina (and a few places in NYC like Lupa) that have a decent portion of the restaurant, like a large bar area, set aside for walk-ins, generally overestimate the wait significantly; I think they do that to not only scare away tourists and newcomers who are more easily discouraged but also maintain an aura of popularity and exclusivity.  That's just my theory, but it usually works.  Even though we were originally told that it would be an hour wait, I could see that there was no one else waiting, so we just decided to wait it out.  As long as you can get a drink, I usually don't mind waiting.  We had the oysters in the halfshell (kumamoto, kushi and malpeques), roasted sunchokes with salsa verde, grilled chicory with bacon vinaigrette and a fried egg,  hen of the woods mushroom with truffle oil on grilled toast, grilled squid with white beans, and an olive, chili, anchovies pizza with burrata.  We paired everything with a bottle of a 2009 Carneros albarino which was perfect with all the food, crisp with a little fruit and just enough acid to stand up to the food. Those Spanish whites are such a perfect match for food, and I was excited to see a California producer using the Spanish albarino grape. I really enjoyed the food; my favorites were the malpeques (I like malpeques from my NYC days; they were the most prevalent given the proximity to Prince Edward Island), the sunchokes (nice charred grilled flavor on the edges) and the mushroom toast (so decadent with the truffle).  While they are a tad heavy handed with the olive oil, the food is delicious nonetheless and the wine was helpful in balancing out the richness.  Service was good too, they checked in on us often and there was good pacing with the food; never once did we feel rushed even though there was a long line of people waiting by the time we left.  At $73 per person for just the right amount of food, a bottle of wine, and gratuity, the meal was relatively reasonable.

Gjelina
1429 Abbot Kinney Boulevard
Venice, CA 90291-3740
(310) 450-1429

Napa Trip

Keever Vineyards

On Saturday, I went up to Napa with a couple of friends to do some wine tastings at some smaller, boutique producers with a focus on high-end Cabernet Sauvignon, which Napa is particularly well-known for.  We had some amazing wines in some beautiful settings.  We visited:

• Keever Vineyards: a small family owned vineyard with only 6 acres of vines, where we tasted a Sauvignon Blanc ($28), Syrah ($45) and Cabernet Sauvignon ($90).  I think Keever is worth a visit for the views alone.  They also did a great job of taking us through their whole wine-making process; we went on a private tour of their wine making facilities and caves.  Appointments are necessary, tastings are $20 and include the tour.
• Whitehall Lane: we made an impromptu stop here, no appointments are necessary.  We tried a lot of wine, but they weren't as notable.  Their wines are more widely available at local retail stores.
• Pride Mountain: Pride was very cool, up in the hills north of St. Helena, towards Sonoma / Calistoga. My favorites were the complex and elegant Viognier ($42), and really nice Merlot ($56) and the Cabernet Sauvignon ($66).  Prices are mid-range for Napa, but definitely worth it.  Pride is definitely worth a visit; most of the tastings are poured inside the caves during the tour; we even got to do a couple of barrel tastings.  They have some picnic tables for lunch.  I would definitely visit them again.  Appointments are necessary well in advance (even for Will Farrell who took the tour after us), tastings are $10, including the tour, but waived if wine is purchased. 
• Merus Wines:  We tasted some really wonderful 06 and 07 Cabernet Sauvignons at Merus, but they were quite expensive at ~$130 a bottle.  Merus is a very small, exclusive producer that only makes Cabernet Sauvignon.  I believe that you need to be on the mailing list in order to get a private appointment, although the tasting and tour is free.
• 750 Wines:  This was an awesome little wine shop in St. Helena that our host at Merus sent us to after our tasting.  They carry a well-edited selection of boutique, mostly mailing list only producers.  We tried a variety of interesting wines, including roses, chardonnay, merlot, cabernet sauvignon.  It was a great experience; the proprietors were very cool.  I would definitely make a return visit; it is a really nice way to taste a variety of wines from a variety of producers with some very knowledgeable hosts who are passionate about what they do.  Appointments are necessary, tasting is free. 
• We finished with dinner at Redd Restaurant in Yountville.  Dinner was very good, but since there are so many great restaurants in the area, I'm not sure that I would make a special trip back.

 More pictures and details can be found here.

Tensley 2008 Syrah

Wednesday night I decided to cook up a Bon Appetit Sunday Dinner recipe from the May 2010 issue. The dish was a feast of Salmon, Quinoa with Spring Vegetables and Black Beans.

http://www.bonappetit.com/recipes/menus/2010/05/grilled_salmon_for_4

I decided to indulge in the Tensley 2008 Syrah we all loved during the our wine tasting. First the cork broke when I went to open the bottle. I know that could have been my own error, but I had not had a drink yet! When I did indulge, the wine was heavy rather than fruity and well balanced. Though this dish would have been best paired with a chardonnay, I was craving to taste this Tensley again. My guests agreed that the wine did not have the combined floral and fruit notes we remembered from our tasting. In fact, the more I sipped, the more I thought of the cranky sommelier!

Photo is not the label we purchased but only photo I could find.

Costco Wines

While I usually visit Wine House to look for a specific wine for a specific occasion, I often browse the Costco wine section when I am at Costco shopping for other things. I've found that the Marina del Rey location actually has a decent and interesting selection at a range of values. Their selection rotates quite often, particularly with international producers, and there is always something new and interesting to try. Currently, there are three wines in particular that I've purchased multiple times (you can find them stacked in the boxes section to the right of the wines that are in the wooden crates).

1. 06 Bodega Norton Reserva Malbec from Argentina: this has been our winter staple, particularly for dinner parties where we go through multiple bottles. It is full-bodied, yet well-balanced and drinkable. It drinks well on its own or paired with a variety of hearty food, from steaks, to chili, to pizza, to pasta. At just over $12, it is a decent value for an everyday red.
2. 09 Crios Torrontes from Argentina. Torrontes is an Argentinian grape that I haven't really seen elsewhere. It has a nice perfume-y floral nose, like a viognier, and a very nice, interesting and rather intriguing taste. It has a relatively dry finish, despite the initial perfume. It pairs well with rich or heavily seasoned food, like Chinese food. I had it last week with macaroni and cheese and this week with whole roasted fish simply seasoned with garlic salt, zucchini and young garlic soup, and Japanese celery sauteed with chicken. A bottle is $11.89 at Costco. I've tried some Crios reds, including the malbec and syrah, and they never disappoint; they are all decent values around $12 as well. If you like viogniers and dry rieslings, you'll like the Torrontes.
   
3. 08 Sterling Sauvignon Blanc made with Organic Grapes from Mendocino: we tried this at the Spa Theme wine club at Jen's house. It tastes like a straightforward nice sauvignon blanc, crisp, refreshing, with just the right amount of fruit; very easy to pair with foods. We had it last night with homemade spinach and garlic pizza and rainbow chard, proscuitto and egg pizza (pictured below!) At $9.99 with organic grapes, it is another great value for an everyday wine.

March 2010 Meeting

On March 19, 2010, wine club was at Jen's house. The theme was organic / biodynamic wines paired with healthy food. Erica, Dee Dee, Ramona, Tracy and Jen sampled healthy appetizers including a veggie flatbread finger sandwich, green apple and walnut salad, raw veggies and hummus and hard cheeses. Most of us had not tried "healthy wines" (or at least remembered drinking a good healthy wine), but the wines that we sampled were surprisingly good, including:

1. Rare Earth Vintage 2006 Cabernet ($15 at Bevmo).
2. Sterling Organic Sauvignon Blanc 2008 ($10 at Costco).
3. Paso A Paso Tempranillo ($16 at Whole Foods).

All of the wines were made from organic grapes. It was a great night with some great friends!

Lazy Ox

Friday night I tried Lazy Ox, a new restaurant in Little Tokyo. I enjoyed Pig Ears, Sheep neck, Mussels, and more. The restaurant is unique in that it's philosophy is food and wine should not be intimidating. Though I mentioned more unusual dishes, this tapas style restaurant offers traditional fare too. The small plate motif allows you to try many dishes! I enjoyed two wines during this feast. Prior to dinner and with our appetizers, I was sipping pinot noir saintsbury gamet from 2008. This wine is fuller bodied and very fruit forward. We paid $13 for a glass and I believe the restaurant charges $40 for the bottle. As we enjoyed more food, we decided to go for a lighter wine. We then drank sangiovese rubicone from 2008. This wine was $27 and was a perfect complement to the meat ragu pasta we were indulging in. www.lazyoxcanteen.com.

Santa Barbara Continued...

Rancho Sisquoc Winery

Koehler Winery

Stolpman Tasting Room

Tensley Tasting Room

Brander Vineyards

Lincourt Vineyards

D'Alfonso-Curran Tasting Room
Lunch at Chef's Touch, Solvang

Beckmen's Cuvee Le Bec

While we didn't actually taste Beckmen's wine during the last trip, I thought I would still review the 07 Cuvee Le Bec that I had with dinner over the last two evenings. The Cuvee Le Bec is a blend of mostly Grenache, Syrah, Mourvedre ("GSM"), similar to France's (much more expensive) Chateauneuf du Papes and Australia's nice GSMs. The wine was paired with whole fresh citrus garlic fish, quinoa salad with roasted beets, avocados, almonds, raisins, roasted curried kabocha squash and broccoli, young garlic shoots sauteed with Chinese sausage, butternut squash soup, and a kale and ricotta salata salad. I thought it was only ok; the wine did not have the fun liveliness that I usually associate with GSMs; it was a little dark, heavy and not very fruitforward. While it didn't combat the flavors of the food (which was quite heavily seasoned), it also did not enhance the food. I remember liking the wine a lot more when I tasted it at the vineyard about a year ago (but it was also at the end of a long tasting day).

Tasting Rooms in Oakland?

Today's WSJ has an interesting article, "Vintners Gravitate Toward Urban Crush."
Wineries Crop Up in Oakland and Other Cities as Oenophile Entrepreneurs Spurn Pricey Napa; Trucking In the Grapes

OAKLAND—The brochure for Jeff Cohn's wines feature pictures of the idyllic vineyards where his grapes come from, complete with glistening fruit, wooden posts and perfectly arranged rock piles.
The wine itself is made in a former Oakland sweatshop overlooking Interstate 880.
Mr. Cohn's JC Cellars shares these less-than-pastoral confines with another winery, Dashe Cellars. Both moved into the 16,000-square-foot warehouse in Oakland four years ago, and since then have equipped it with giant fermentation tanks, hundreds of oak barrels and a tasting room where visitors can sample wines.
Far from the bucolic vineyards in Napa and Sonoma 50 miles to the north, JC and Dashe are part of a growing scene of East Bay wineries. Drawn by the ability to pursue their dream careers in the wine industry while still living in an urban environment, a growing number of vintners have opened up shop in Oakland, Berkeley and Emeryville in the last several years. Wineries here range from JC and Dashe, which distribute their wines nationally, to start-ups launched by self-taught amateurs. The East Bay Vintners Alliance now counts 21 wineries, up from 11 in 2006, operating seven tasting rooms.
"The grapes don't care where they're made into wine," says Steve Shaffer, who this month opened a tasting room at his Jack London-district Oakland winery, Urban Legend.
Going urban is a cheaper way to break into the wine industry. Buying a vineyard isn't practical for many winemakers. In addition to the cost of the land—"insanely expensive," says Michael Dashe of Dashe Cellars—it takes several years before newly planted vines produce usable fruit. In the East Bay's wineries, winemakers buy grapes from all over Northern California.
Cities like Oakland are helping to promote the cottage industry. Mr. Shaffer's 2,500-square-foot winery is on Fourth Street and Martin Luther King Jr. Way, in an area where the city is encouraging redevelopment. Oakland officials gave him $50 a square foot in grants and helped him secure the permits to operate a commercial winery. The city gives Dashe rebates on taxes it pays on the equipment it buys.
The wineries are "great branding for the city," says Margot Prado, a business-development specialist for Oakland. Many food- and beverage-related businesses have moved into Oakland recently, she adds, and the city is trying to turn their presence into an attraction.
The sprouting of such wineries is, in a way, a return to yesteryear. While grapes always have come from rural vineyards, most of the wine sold in the U.S. before Prohibition in the 1920s was aged and blended in warehouses around San Francisco, says James Lapsley, who teaches wine history at University of California, Davis. The vineyard-centric wine culture so familiar now evolved in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when baby boomers started buying more expensive wine and image became important to sales, he says.
In the East Bay, by contrast, the winemaking process usually starts with a truck to pick up the grapes. The winemakers crush, ferment and age their wine in their wineries, then use a mobile service to bottle their wines. With a mobile service, a bottling truck arrives early in the morning and winemakers run a large hose to it from their vats. Bottled and labeled wines come out the other end.
Profiting from these ventures is no sure thing. Mr. Shaffer, a 53-year-old former telecommunications consultant, started making wine in his bathtub five years ago and decided to turn professional in the fall of 2008. While he says he always dreamed of owning a vineyard "somewhere in the foothills," he decided that warehouse space in Oakland was more practical. He spent about $200,000 on his lease and equipment, and lost about $50,000 last year. He produces 700 cases of Barbera, Sauvignon Blanc and Teroldego, and figures he won't break even until he can make and sell around 2,500 cases a year. "Basically, I'm betting my retirement on this," he says.
It is possible to succeed as an urban winery. Rosenblum Cellars has been making Zinfandel in Alameda since 1978. Production has grown from 400 cases a year then to 120,000 today. In 2008, Rosenblum was acquired for $105 million by beverage giant Diageo PLC.
Meanwhile, Messrs. Dashe and Cohn both worked at other wineries for years and leased space from Rosenblum before setting out on their own. They produce 10,000 and 6,000 cases a year, respectively. Mr. Dashe says it took about five years to turn a profit. He has made enough money from his winery to support his family comfortably for some time. Many of the wines from these makers have received ratings of 90 and higher out of 100 from majorcritics.
Mike Millet, wine buyer for Rainbow Grocery in San Francisco, recently toured several East Bay wineries. He has stocked JC Cellars, Dashe and Urbano in the past, and decided this month to buy three cases of Mr. Shaffer's Sauvignon Blanc. He says he has tasted a few East Bay wines that he wasn't enthusiastic about, but at Urban Legend "the price is good for the quality of the wine in the bottle."
Mr. Millet says he doesn't pay much attention to the fact that these wines are made in an urban environment. "It's just different," he says.

Hoo Doo Red

We had a couple bottles of Longoria Wine's Hoo Doo Red with dinner at the wine country cottage Saturday night. It is a very easy to drink blend of syrah, tempranillo, merlot and malbec. It is very drinkable now, and paired well with pizza, salad, lemon bars, ants on a log and "i never." At $16 dollars a bottle, it is a relatively good value for Santa Barbara wines which were generally over $20, particularly red wines. Unfortunately, we were unable to visit Longoria's lovely tasting room and garden in Los Olivos as it closes relatively early at 4:30pm (for future reference).

May 2010 Meeting

Mark your calendars...May's meeting will be on Friday, May 21st at Carrie B's place. The theme will be good wines under $7 dollars. Carrie will be preparing everday food to go with our everyday wines.

Santa Barbara Wine Country Trip

at Foxen Vineyards

(Starting from top, L-R: Denise, Michelle, Jen, Erica, Janelle, Carrie, Ramona, Sunny, Karina, Dee Dee)

On April 17-18, the wine clubbers and friends drove north to wine country just north of Santa Barbara to do some wine tastings at vineyards and tastings rooms. We visited all the various regions of Santa Barbara wine country, including the Foxen Canyon vineyards, the tasting rooms of Los Olivos, the Ballard Canyon / Alamo Pintado vineyards, the tastings rooms of Solvang and the Route 246 / Santa Rosa Road vineyards. We had a great time; the weather was beautiful and sunny, we tasted a good variety (and quantity) of wines, picnicked and ate lots of good food at vineyards and back at the cottage in Los Alamos.

Vineyards / Tasting Rooms visited in order:
Saturday:
Tres Hermanas
Rancho Sisquoc, where we had a little Bay Cities picnic at the tables around the winery
Foxen Winery, a cute rustic shack overlooking the hills of Foxen Canyon
Koehler Winery, a beautiful winery with ostriches (or emus) and sheep
Stolpman Tasting Room in Los Olivos (free thanks to Dee Dee!)
Tensley Tasting Room, where we met the winemaker, Joey Tensley, and tasted some of the best syrahs of the trip, including a syrah rose and the WS 95 point 08 Colson Canyon syrah (although most of us preferred the WS 91 point 08 Tierra Alta syrah)
Olive Oil Tasting Room

Sunday:
Brander Vineyards
Lincourt Vineyards, a pretty house in the middle of sauvignon blanc and merlot vines on Alamo Pintado. Nice Sauvignon Blanc and Chardonnay
D'alfonso Curran, a tasting room in the Danish town of Solvang with unique white wines and a lovely pinot noir under the Badge label
Foley Wines, a beautiful winery in the midst of a huge vineyard on Highway 24

Foxen Tasting

Walking around Los Olivos

Olive Oil Tasting

Vineyards at the cottage in Los Alamos

Outside of Beckman, which we didn't taste at

Lincourt tasting

Solvang

D'alfonso Curran