The Days of Wine and...Hords of Fruit Flies!
I have to say that one of the most wonderful things about blogging is getting to know other bloggers. I have been lucky enough to find S'Kat from S'Kat and the Food. I was reading her site while we were playing with the highspeed connection in our hotel room and I noticed the wineries she listed on the sidebar. So I clicked on them. I saw that one of the wineries was really close to where we were and we ended up going there because S'Kat told me it was a wonderful place. So we planned a field trip and ended up at the Veritas Winery. We checked out the Veritas site and got directions. It was about a 20 minute drive. The drive out of town from the motel was a pleasant one. The air was cold and crisp and the sun was shining. It's too bad that the leaves are late changing colors this year. Our scenery up the mountain to the winery was greener than we had hoped. There were lots of signs pointing us to the winery on the tree lined country roads. When we got to the winery we noticed there weren't a lot of cars in the parking lot. We walked toward a large building that looked like a country mansion. This is what was on the porch right before you go into the main room of the winery. I saw this on another blog and knew we had to take a picture. Once we got inside the tasting room, a nice young woman greeted us and showed us a list of wines that we would be sampling. Each listing gave a description of the wine and a price. I really didn't pay much attention to the prices thinking that we were just out for a fun day and wouldn't be purchasing any wine. We tasted the whites and I found one that I really liked that I had prejudged I wouldn't ever like. My hubby tasted the reds and we both decided we like the same white and ended up buying a bottle. Price was not a consideration. We ended up buying a bottle of Sauvingnon Blanc for $14.99.
The one thing that I did not enjoy about the tasting were the hords of fruit flies buzzing around the open bottles of wine. Each bottle had a plastic spout to make pouring the wine easier. Then there was a piece of some sort of paper stuck inside the plastic spout. I am guessing that was to prevent the fruit flies from doing the back stroke in the bottles. It was very annoying swatting fruit flies away from my glass and face to taste the wine. Thankfully only one fly tainted a sample of red wine that hubby was about to taste. The poor girl was embarssed and said that the flies get really thick at certain times of the harvesting season. I have never seen or heard of this before. You learn something new everyday! Thanks to S'Kat for the recommendation! We had a great time and ended up with a nice bottle of wine to boot.