Hey all,
Anyone here didn’t make it down to Pinot Days too? Because of the storm.
Stay warm
It just killed me not to come in from the suburbs for this event due to the blizzard. The roads were closed late in the day, as was the railroad. I would have been stranded.
I’m about to post my one lone note of the day on the '10 Sojourn pinot noir RRV. I was in the mood. ![[wink.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/0/04707e6a7bbb03e0153e349d8a9270d30e1e9525.gif "wink"){kind=small}
maybe next year mother nature will cooperate for us.
![[cheers.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/0/0ff9bfcdb0964982cd3240b6159868fbdf215b1a.gif "cheers"){kind=small}
I was surprised how many people did make it to the tasting, probably a higher percentage of tasters were here than wineries that had signed up to pour. It was definitely worth it for us to be here, but now the challenge is making it back to San Francisco on Sunday. I have a car reserved to drive to Boston and try to get on one of the many flight options from Logan. I was a few seconds too late to get one of the last seats on the 10AM Amtrak to Boston.
Anybody get by the Westwood table? They had a clone 37 bottle that knocked me out. The other big surprise was the great perfume on City Winery’s Willamette Valley bottle. City Winery hadn’t really made it onto my radar in previous years, but I was way more impressed this year. Other, unsurprising, stars were Thomas Fogarty and August West. Even in those cases, I didn’t get thru the entire lineup, as the snow had sidelined both my backups, and my forays from behind the table amounted to abandonment of my post. The trade stayed away in droves, and it would be hard to cast this as a worthwhile trip across the country, but it’s amazing it came off at all. Pretty stalwart organizers, staff and consumers. The real highlight for me was walking thru SoHo after the event on silent, snowy, deserted streets.
I had a funny/mortifying episode the night before the event. A friend in the wine biz invited me to dinner at his house with a bunch of other wine people. One of them was a wine writer for a national mag. It certainly wouldn’t have hurt to make a good impression. Unfortunately, moments after he was grossed out by the fact that the family dog licked his hand (revealing germophobic tendencies), someone made a joke that caught me off-guard as I took a big sip of wine, and I blew the most enormous, involuntary spit-take of my life into a fine mist that slowly settled onto his person. He handled it with grace, but I’m sure it made his skin crawl. So much for that networking opportunity.