No Whining Here, Just Wining...lame name

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Trip Start Oct 23, 2009 Previous
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  Santa Barbara, California
Friday, November 6, 2009

Here we headed from Morro Bay into the Santa Barbara Wine Country. From what I understand, Napa Valley wine country just north of San Fran trumps this one, but Santa Barbara is number 2, and number 2 is great in my book. Since 6 of the 7 of us were over 21, Sumner was our Designated Driver (with cap and all!). We tipped him accordingly with a bottle of wine at the end of the day.

We were interested in doing a couple random wineries/vineyards and hoped to tour one as well. Christa scooped a brochure from Morro Bay and her and Ryan sorted through which ones we'd stop at.

Stop #1 - Tres Hermanas
...how could I not be stoked about this one from the beginning? A short fight with the GPS later and we pull into the small winery decked all out like a farm with a big red wooden barn and lots of earth tones wood structures. We talk with the friendly bartender? (not sure if they've got fancier names to fit the fancier Establishments), and decided to browse the grounds before trying our wines. We checked out the endless rows of grapes and an overly friendly dog named Nellie found us. She about looked comatose when we were rubbing her belly...eyes closed, all four legs in air. I think maybe she was a Golden Retriever. She decided to take us on a tour and we all followed thinking she'd lead us around from people to people. As we walked and walked, it triggered that maybe this dog is taking us to somewhere we aren't that interested in seeing. But in the red barn she goes, and in we follow...to a barn filled to the top with hay bales. Now that dog was silly, it was off climbing in between the rows, disappearing then popping up unexpectedly. I got her to climb to the top with me at one point too. I liked that dog.

Hm right, winery story...back inside we got 6 different wines to taste and the barkeep (I'll try out a few different names for them as the explanation of the day proceeds) let us keep our glasses. At this early stage in the day we thought it was very nice of her...and then we got 3 more glasses each for the different vineyard visits.

This started the day nicely. Back in the RV..with a bottle of wine.

The ride up and down and through wine country was beautiful. Trees spotted the hills intermittently, all windy and growing sideways, and sorts. Most of the fields were rows and rows of grapes. One vineyard had grapes for miles, literally. Exactly like you would imagine, which is a beautiful thing.

Stop #2 - Fess Parker.
Here I split the 6 glass tasting with Seb, I think. Generally it seemed to go three whites, three reds. The barman was super friendly and I think this is where the serious drinking kicked in..we easily got 10 tries each. This one was a bit more commercial and therefore a little less likable in my mind. Not much to report here...we all got a group picture and Seb (short for Sebastian FYI) dropped his glass. The man cleaning it was a happy bloke. Umm, I wore a Davey Crockett hat. The best part of this vineyard was the fun I had filling in the note sections of the tasting sheet. Such ridiculous ways of describing wines...I mean how can one determine that a wine has a whisper of a kiss of oak..."Can you hear the whisper?"-Matt
...forest floor (why is dirt in my wine?)
...smoked meats (non-veggie friendly!)
...gets paired well with outgoing cheeses (oh those chatty cheeses!
...notions of earth (sounds nice but...what?)
...OMG (explains nothing.)
...framed with subtle soft backgrounds of..whatever
The explanations alone were funny but then with the Brits I added my notes on each wine...exasperating, sublime, rumple stiltskin, flabbergastingly typical, lovey jubilee...
and after all of that fun..I left my paper there...typical.

Stop #3 - Koehler Vineyards.
I liked this one more than the last. The land the vineyards were on were the most scenic of all and exactly the type of vineyards I imagined existing in wine country. The hills were rolling with nothing but grapes. I full sprinted  barefoot down a row of grapes, coming to an opening, and seeing nothing but grapes neatly plotted endlessly. That was cool. I think I'll like the pictures that whoever took while that went down. I also cut my foot during that run and its filled with dirt, annoying. I figured while I was in with the grapes I should check them out. Pulling some off in grape bits and also with sticks (which now hang in Lola overhead). The grapes were green, firm, and bitter. I highly doubt they were ripe. But I did try to get Christa to eat some from overhead, and offered to find a palm leaf to wave and finish it all off. I think at this vineyard that cat found us as well. The places are blending as the wine goes down.

The barkeep was super hilarious and fully fit for the job he was working. A total people person working in a smaller vineyard. He explained things in terms I could understand...calling one a hot tub wine, explaining that Cali uses different words for the same wine (Shiraz = Syrah [sa-rah]). He told me a couple fun facts, like, to put a grape name on the bottle, the wine must be made up of 75% of that grape, otherwise a names got to be made up for it. He was a bigger man and said he was made for comfort, not speed. That he practiced Karma...or was it Karma Sutra. Helped make fun of the child who was there and looked like he was working..and that kid did the moonwalk.

Stop #4 - Firestone
Last and final stop of our day trip in Santa Barbara Wine Country. This place would not have been anything super special had we not ran into a good situation. Either Koehler was the really beautiful outside that I liked or it was this one, and now I'm thinking it was this one. We snapped some pics and Ryan was equipped with his official looking filming camera. We arrived within 10 minutes of their closing and quickly downed the first couple tastes. The three-day-old manager came around and chatted us up and I asked about all their tours and whatnot. Firestone was one of the only vineyards in the area to do full tours and tastings, exactly what I was interested in from the beginning. We missed the last tour by several hours but he decided to take us back to a library room they normally did tour crap in. The walls were adorned with tons of pictures of famous people I can't now recall. I'm barely gripping these memories correctly but I'm pretty sure Albert Einstein and Thomas Edison? were on there with the originator of Firestone...so whichever Firestone family member founded their winery. Same family as the tire company...how American.

The GM took us back to their vat/casks room as well, and this is where I became well interested. I chatted up the workers cleaning out some vats and switching wines from the vat to bottles. The workers are where you get real information. The cask room was amazing. Nothing but barrels and barrels of wines from floor to ceiling. Rows and floors of wine. I'm sure he regurgitated lots of statistics and information but they remain a mystery to me at this point. Ryan probably got some great pictures in that room, too. (I hope) Surprisingly (if I'm still correct in pulling this info), one barrel of wine makes 300 bottles. I was shocked to hear that and still can't believe thats correct...but then again, maybe it's not.

We stayed in Santa Barbara that night, parking Lola somewhere near downtown. I really enjoyed Santa Barbara, both for the town/city and the times I had there. We kept the night going, got some appetizers and whatnot at a cool outdoor place. Things took a bit of a left turn when I became a Harry Potter face using the face paint from Halloween. I had a spatula as my wand (the first time I had a great stick). I wasn't fully on board but Ryan insisted that it was a great idea to go out like this. ("How could I not encourage behavior like that??") Not only did I scare a woman away (whilst forgetting I was a Harry Potter face) I embarrassed myself in the process and had to get it off. We were on the street watching an outdoor small band play cello and something else. I went inside the coffee shop/really earthy cool store and chatted with the very friendly owner and coffee drinking woman at the counter. They assured me that the Harry Potter face was OK but was probably better off. They liked the whole cross-country trip we were doing and were fun to cross paths with. No worries, Harry would be back again shortly.

Instead of spending money out and leaving Sumner in, we got some (more than some) cases and stayed to chill in Lola. We had some good music going, conversation outside that seemed to last forever, and

Seb's hilariousness; Colorado toad stretching and milking; Devil tripping flowers; wearing 4 watches to time out the life of a drug; gonna puke for the next 30 minutes but then it'll be great; roll-ups; being loud and outside for probably 3-4 hours; then inside; spa channel on Sirius radio at the end of the night as always.

Randoms:
-Jame, attached a picture of the barn at Tres Hermanas...!
-Got the Brits inboard with hanging out the window.
-"Christa, those drunk eyes look good on you" - me
-"Christa, can you still taste anything? -Sumner, Lil rough days Christa
- Jamie, Julie, Leah...I was such a good Harry Potter face.

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