Winter Wine Land

Winter Wine Land is something that I attended for the first time last year. It is and affordable, all you can taste wine tasting weekend that includes hundreds of wineries all over the region. This was actually a discovery made by my sister, who has bought boyfriend and I tickets for the past 2 years as our Christmas presents.

Let me be honest, I’m not a wine connoisseur. I judge on a scale of gross to grape juice. Until I moved in with boyfriend I did not own a corkscrew and used a screw and hammer to remove corks from any bottles of wine that I ever bought that were fancy enough to have something like a cork rather than a screw top. Before last year I had never been, or really had the desire to go wine tasting despite growing up about 20 minuets from wine country.

How I was really sold on Winter Wine Land was the food pairings. Each winery has elaborate food pairing, which last year included massive amounts of paella and chocolate, and this year included various stews and comfits prepared by well known area restaurants such as Zin. The winner for this year, as far as food pairings go, were the Hog Island Oysters. They were heavenly! While I quietly poured my white wine taste into my sisters glass, snuck two raw oysters, and topped them with the signature ‘Hog Wash’ my sisters boyfriend boldly bellied up to the serving table and downed at least a half a dozen.

We visited the Russian River Valley and the Alexander Valley over the course of 2 afternoons. We went to about 5 wineries each day. I would highly recommend this event to anybody who would like to go wine tasting but has a tight budget. Tickets are about $30 if you purchase ahead of time, or $40 if you get them the day of.

Remember to designate a driver as you get pretty loaded if you are not classy enough to spit out your tastes(or far enough out of college to let good alcohol go undrunk). The DD gets a coffee mug and there are alcohol free beverages at each stop.