Good Morning!

I was walking through the grocery store and saw a magazine called San Antonio Woman and grabbed it. I guess my curiosity got the best of me. It is filled with places to shop for high end clothes and jewelery but it also had an article called Want to Learn about Wine. As I read about some wine shops and a little about Texas wines, it mentioned a couple of wine bars I had not heard of….soooo of course I had to try them out for myself.

This past week was my birthday and I felt no reason to celebrate turning 49…OUCH…but my friends were not having any part of my “I am getting old” pity party and forced me to pick a place to go. I picked Wine 101 in Old Town Helotes. It is a super cute old village with artists and shops and when we pulled up to Wine 101, I see that musicians were setting up outside and there are little intimate seating areas all over the lawn. The place looks like a cute little house transformed into a wine speakeasy.

We went inside and the wine list was filled with some great California and French wines. I was surprised I did not see many Texas wines on the list. Each room of the “house” was set up with little couches and coffee tables and you could have a large party in some of the rooms and some of the rooms were small and more for couples wanting some privacy. My friend ordered a bottle of Twomey Merlot and the massive cheese plate.

We ended up with the Twomey Pinot Noir, which was fine but we totally forgot to check out the bottle when our server James brought it to the couch. No problem, we loved the wine and started having some fun and decompressing. There was a couple on the couch across the small room from us and we started chatting about wine and life and before we knew it our new best friends “Howie and Alissa” engaged us in there great story of love, life and living to the fullest.

Howie is retired Navy and his wife is about to retire from the Army. They met in Spain and became engaged in Greece and they have lived all over the world. They have been in San Antonio about a year and they have about 1 more year and they are thinking they will live in Germany or Puget Sound when they finally retire. They talked about all the places, the wines, the friends and family they have met all over the world.

Silly me, I was complaining about turning 49 and I was caught up in what I think I was missing and this energy filled and love filled couple easily filled me with a reminder that everyday I need to live fully and enjoy the journey. Again my dear friend wine, introduced me to people who have forever impacted my attitude and life without them ever knowing what they have changed in my mind. This just fortifies the fact that wine is way more than just a really great beverage or a mood enhancer!

Much LOVE and wine,

Tammi

Good Morning!

It is Friday and I am excited to report I have a HUGE agenda all about wine ready for this weekend! It starts this afternoon and It will not stop until Monday night. I have 3 wine bars on the list and 4 wineries to visit and of course each time I eat, I will order up an new wine to see what I can taste.

I think the older I get the more of life I want to consume. I know normally the younger the person the braver (is that a word?) they are; like sky diving, eating habaneros on a bet or eating the worm in tequlia all these risky activities most people stop participating when they “wise up”. Well, I seem to be getting more adventurous with food and activities in general.

Recently, I had tomato wine, it was lousy, actually, it was like really thin/watery V-8 juice. I was not sure why I tried it but I did. Then I tried jalapeno wine and that was like fire water, but I still had to abuse my taste buds. I like sushi but just the rolled up stuff, the big chucks of raw fish, does not normally work for me, but I popped it into my mouth like it was popcorn. It really did not have much taste, so I was happy about that.

I have in the past shunned traditionally “sweet” wines. I thought I would not like them and thought only “beginners” drank them. Well, I owe the wines with nice amounts of residual sugar after fermentation, a big fat apologize, because I have found being opened to the flavors, I kinda like them…with the right foods.

Also, since spending so much time in Texas this past year, many of the local wineries make sweeter wines and I love hearing the stories behind the grapes they use and trying the wines with the mostly spicy foods everyone in the lone star state loves. Let’s not get me wrong, I LOVE my favorite big, massive, muscular, reds from California and the lovely, crisp, fresh, unoaked whites, from Washington, California and Oregon too. I am really looking forward to heading to the Finger Lakes in New York to start tasting and understanding their wines too.

I plan on tasting anything and everything I can find this weekend, I will share with you the experience next week…I hope to find a few hidden gems and bringing home some fun wines to share with my pals, I hope you will try something new and tell me about it!

Much LOVE and wine,

Tammi

Good Morning!

I was just wondering what the next “BIG” thing is gonna be. I was thinking 10 years ago only a handful of us had heard of the internet, 5 years ago Facebook was just becoming a known place to connect and 3 years ago, who is Twitter? What is next? I see a big surge in folks making their own homemade videos with these instantly uploading camera’s and this whole Google+ site seems to be getting a lot of attention, so maybe these are the next “BIG” things.

I LOVE information and I could read all day. I can and have lost hours of my life looking up obscure information, just to see if I could figure out how to make something or find cooking techniques that I may or may not ever use. I like to look up stuff about winemaking and read what the “Best” winemakers have to say. I have posted much information on my blog. I really love it when I post information from an expert and then another expert writes to me and says, that is a bunch of crap! I send them where I found the info and let them figure out who’s right.

The internet has made many people millionaires and the internet is filled with correct information and some real junk too. The internet is filled with X rated stuff and dogs riding skateboards. I love the babies who laugh for no reason and cats who do tricks, I love the fact that almost any moment in time can be found online. I went to the Newseum, in DC last year and it has me pondering what will be next. They said that media is instant history now. We can capture all and see it almost instantly.

I just returned from a long weekend of fun and was thinking, I have so many emails, blogs and articles to catch up on and I want to see all the latest wine shows on the internet and I need to see how my peeps on Twitter are doing…then I have phone calls to make. I am personally feeling a bit overwhelmed by the information and how quickly I can access it. Today, I feel like just reading a book about mindless beach romance and enjoy some wine. But I keep checking my email and updating Facebook….I might need a 12 step program to limit my data access!

How are you feeling about your information these days? I don’t want to complain because I love knowing and communicating with all my friends and peers so easily, but I just felt a little overwhelmed this morning!

Tomorrow I will discuss wine again! Thanks for being the best therapy I could ever have!

Much LOVE and wine,

Tammi

Good Morning!

One of my favorite groups of friends all gathered in San Antonio, Texas this weekend. There ended up being 9 of us and the weekend started off on Thursday night. Sometimes we have tons of activities planned, this weekend was a bit more laid back. We wanted to catch up, laugh and decompress. We were wildly successful in all aspects.

I think when women get together it is exactly like when men gather, but our plans are a bit more set. I am not sure if that is a good thing but since I am a planner, it works for me. I had started a batch of infused vodka 4 months ago, so that takes some planning and since I had a few meals planned we had to go to the store before everyone arrived. My son, when he is having guy’s weekend, they all show up and then hit the grocery store and as he says…they “wing” it.

My friends came from California, Houston and Dallas and we heard stories about the kids, school, work, life and then of course the real fun started when we starting discussing old stories and the wine flowed the real connecting started. We tried wines and laughed and made tons of new memories. Wine is the ultimate networker. It helps people talk about the easy subjects and it will ease you into the deeper subjects. We talked about the country’s unemployment levels, politics and without much blood shed we all agreed on what to grill for dinner.

I find wine makes everyone equal. It does not care that you are a VP of Sales for a fortune 500, it does not care that you a re a Bank President, it could care less if you are a social worker, a Factory Manager, and Accountant or even a winemaker. Wine shows it’s self to everyone the same way, but how we each perceive it is up to our collective past experiences.

We always bring tons of wine and last year we went crazy for unoaked Chardonnay made by Cindy Cosco of Passaigo wines. This year we went wild for 2010 Cellar Rat Wine Merchants Verdelho, made by my pal Ryan Sciara. If you get a chance to meet Ryan, it is a must. He is a cool guy, marathon runner, tattooed artist who happens to own Cellar Rat Wine Merchants in Kansas City. Everything, I try a wine of Ryan’s it is special, not the same old, same old. He plays with different grapes and I am always inspired to find great foods and friends to pair with his wines!

I hope you had a great weekend too! Thanks girls for all the fun, safe travels home!

Much LOVE and wine,

Tammi

Good Morning!

For some reason this week, I have met a lot of new people and when they ask what I do for a living and they find out I make wine or “host grapes”, each person has followed with the question, so do you like reds or whites better? I think I have brought this up before, but I wanted to address this again.

My answer is really simple, it depends on the situation. I don’t favor reds over whites or whites over reds… I don’t prefer dry over sweet or still over bubbles. The great thing about wine is I have so many options and the only way I get bored is if I just drink the same thing all the time. For years I owned multiple vehicles and I did not prefer one over the other, but I drove the Lexus when I would have people with me because it was 4 doors and when I went to the grocery, I took the truck, because getting the bags out of the back was easier. That does not mean that I never had passengers in the truck, but each situation I had a choice and I was blessed with two options.

I guess if I were on a desert island and only had one choice of what I could drink for the rest of my days I would want champagne. I really like Moet…so there is my forever answer! But now I am sad, because all my choices are gone and I am stuck on an island. Though the optimist in me is really excited I have a life times supply of something great to drink and I am not stuck without a corkscrew!

I hope you all have a great weekend! We are having a heatwave and a girls weekend of fun so my stories next week might very well be margarita filled adventures!

Much LOVE and wine,

Tammi