2nd Annual Santa Barbara Wine Country Trip

The group at Roblar, our first stop

On May 21st, the Westside Wine Club headed up north to Santa Barbara wine country for a day of winetasting. To be safe and maximize the fun, we hired a private shuttle to take the 11 of us around. Our first stop was Roblar Wineries, which had a large, beautiful tasting room and lovely grounds and was the perfect start to our trip. Next we headed to Rusack in Ballard Canyon, where we had a private tasting on the patio under the trees where we also had a leisurely picnic lunch. The grounds are beautiful, large shady trees surrounded by acres of vineyards and rolling hills in the background. We spent quite awhile relaxing at Rusack and then headed to our next appointment at Buttonwood Farms. The wonderful Graham gave us a tour of the vineyards, fermentation and barrel rooms, bottling facilities and even got to barrel taste a white wine. It was interesting, educational and fun, all at the same time. Finally we ended the day in Los Olivos, where we went to a couple of tasting rooms including the Cupcake tasting (which everyone really enjoyed, pairing wines with cupcakes), Longoria Wines and Tensley Wines. After a lovely day with lots of wine, we headed back to our rented house in Mesa, Santa Barbara and hung out for the night, ordering pizza and catching up. The next morning one of the cars headed back early while the other car went shopping in downtown Santa Barbara on State Street and had a lunch at the Super-rica Taqueria. A fabulous girls weekend with great friends...can't wait for next year!

Riding in style (and safety) in our shuttle. Definitely the way to do winetasting.

Rusack

Fermentation tanks at Buttonwood

Barrel tasting (I think it was a Rousanne)

Karina checking out baby grapes

Baby grape cluster, so cute!

Karina learning to throw up "westside" hand signals

Almost getting the hang of it, just backwards

The quaint town of Los Olivos. Where most people are probably a little tipsy all the time

Happy belated birthday Jen!

Shopping on State Street in downtown Santa Barbara

The famous La Super-Rica in Santa Barbara. Yes we did wait an hour but it was delicious!

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

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).

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