The Wines

Today, a young man from Grassy Creek Vineyard out of Elkin, NC came by and we had a wine tasting to see which of their wines we want to carry in the store. I’m a complete wine novice, my basic staple of wine consumption and history started at an age when I shouldn’t have been drinking anyway and consisted of Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill.

I’ve grown up since then.

Kinda.

Anyway, I really don’t drink much, anymore. I had a bottle of wine that my boss gave me on New Years Eve, 2008. I had one glass of it that night and then I poured the rest of the bottle out when I moved in February 2010, so I guess you can say I’m not much of a drinker.

Today, I drank from 13 bottles of wine. No I wasn’t falling all over myself or anyone else. It started with Grassy Creek coming to the store so Thais could sample the wines. He brought six bottles and they were wonderful. They even have a wine that is sold in a glass milk bottle in reflection of the dairy farm that existed before it became Grassy Creek. The samples consisted of about an ounce of wine poured into a dixie cup. It’s very difficult to see the clarity and color of the wine and the weird part is you can’t smell the wine as well when you’re tasting them from a dixie cup. We’re going to carry all six of the grassy creek wines we sampled. I’ll keep you posted on when they will be the winery of the week.

Later in the evening, Thais and her husband and my husband and I went to Yadkin Valley to visit the Sanders Ridge Vineyard which we will also carry at Barnhill’s. This was my first trip to a vineyard and winery. The grape vines were all bare sticks poking from the ground and tied to guide wires but I could easily imagine them bright with large green leaves and heavy with grapes. The wine tasting room is in a beautiful log cabin which seems enormous on the outside but is cozy on the inside. A pathway leads to a dock and gazebo by a lake and it was lovely, even still held in the stark grasp of winter, the trees waiting much more patiently than I am for their leaves to emerge and beckon the warmth of spring.

Neil gave three of us a glass and poured the first of seven wines. My husband didn’t sample the wares because he drinks even less than I do and he isn’t a fan of wine. He was also our designated driver (see? I told you I grew up). The interesting thing about my husband, Tim, is that he smelled each of the wines I sampled and he could smell the parts that make up the blends. We may make a wine connoisseur out of him yet!

The wines were all very good.  I think I prefer the white wines over the red wines, but I also think I may prefer different wines whether I am eating or just having a drink. Some wines are very earthy and some are sweet. They’re all a little different and I’m learning what those differences are. At Sanders, I also tasted my first Muscadine wine and it was a taste unlike any of the other wines I sampled. At this point, it may be my favorite so far because it’s just so different from anything else I’ve tried.

When we left, I even got to keep the pretty wine glass with Sanders Ridge written on it. My first wine glass. There are over 90 wineries in North Carolina and I plan to amass an impressive collection of wine glasses!

[Via http://onlyatbarnhills.wordpress.com]

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