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