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!

March Wine Club - Ladies of Leisure

Our March Club theme was "Ladies of Leisure" where the girls got together at Michelle's place in their fabulous lounge wear, to drink champagne cocktails. We tried sparkling Shiraz and champagne with fruit, sparkling orange soda and sparkling pomegranate.

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.