It’s that time again… my annual wine post. Since adding the category last November, I have only used it that one time. So here we go again. Susan and I, after going up to New Hampshire for a funeral, spent last night in CT with some friends. Today, we went to the wine and food festival at Stonington Vineyards. Never having been to a vineyard before, it was a neat experience. Fields of grapes are really beautiful in their nice neat rows, something I’ve only previously seen in pictures. It was fun learning how they go about making the wine and then we got to taste some. Now, one thing I love about the beer community is the sense of giving. I have yet to go to a beer tasting event that wasn’t free. Wine tastings, however, tend to cost money. I don’t know if it’s just because wine costs more (though the bottles at this place ranged from $10 per bottle to $21 per bottle) or because wine is snooty (I’d like to think it’s the former). Anyway, we paid $5 each to try some wine and got a small wine glass with their logo to take home with us (which made paying for it not too bad this time).
We started with their Sheer Chardonnay. It was a lighter, sweeter white wine. I wasn’t crazy about it (though I’m not crazy about most light-medium bodied wines). Next was their Vidal Blanc, a drier white that was aged in oak barrels. It wasn’t that bad, but again, nothing I’d write home about. Susan bought a bottle of this one. That was followed by their Seaport White, a light, sweet wine that was actually pretty tasty. Then we tried their Triad Rose, a pink wine that I didn’t like at all. Finally, we had their only red, a Cabernet Franc. This was my favorite of the bunch and while I would have liked to get a bottle of it, Susan didn’t like it (and I generally wouldn’t drink a bottle of wine on my own). It was medium bodied, something I wasn’t crazy about, but the flavors were nice.
Anyway, that concludes my annual wine post (unless I have another wine worth writing about).
I think it comes down to the atmosphere of the given vineyard/place. At most of the places we’ve gone in the Finger Lakes region, the only time I had to pay for a taste was for some special wine that was done in small batches anyway, such as late harvest wine or something like that.
I figured there were some free wine tastings (and like I said, we each got a glass with this one). There were a couple places tasting wines in Vermont when we were up there in June. One was a winery, but they charged like $2 for a teeny tiny sip out of a plastic cup. And Susan had made a comment once that wine tastings usually cost money. That was in reference to a wine tasting that was being held at a local liquor store (we didn’t stop in).