bobm
Garden Master
The newspaper had a whole section on events over the labor day weekend. There was an article on local wineries and that they offered free wine tasting over labor day weekend. So, yesterday, my wife and I made an afternoon of driving over scenic hills and dales to sip wine. We stopped at a fairly new ( 5 years now ) 6 acre winery owned and operated by 2 retired school teachers. The gentleman was bragging that he did all the work of planting 2 acres of grapes and built the tasting room as well as the 10 foot tall double doors ( plywood on the inside, with 5 horisontal boards on the inside and tongue and groove boards on the outside with black iron decoration spike fasteners ) as the entrance. This double door was nice looking but poorly built as the outside wood boards had shrunk and the inside hollow areas were occupied by numerous yellow jackets which made it quite dicey to enter the tasting room. The 2 acres of grape vines were full of waist high weeds. The vines were not in very good condition and still had grapes on them. Which made for not a very good crop. while the rest of the fields' weeds were mowed. The vinyard was too young to produce much of a crop yet, so the gentleman purchased grapes from other small growers that were still too new to make their own wine. We had 3 samples of his 3rd year of bottling his own wine, and he offered 2 small bites of cooked chicken white meat as palate cleanser between each type of wine. The wine was decent, but not good enough to buy at $15-- $ 23 bottle. When we started to get out of our chairs to leave, he presented us with a bill of $15 each ( $30 for the two of us ) for the wine tasting which was advertised as free for this weekend. On the flip side , we visited 2 other vineyards that were operated much better, enjoyed their wine samples for free and purchased 5 bottles of several types of wine ( for less money ) to enjoy with our own future dinners.
