Barrel Tasting Weekend

This Saturday morning started out like most weekend mornings; with an early jog with Amanda McGowan!  Amanda met up with me in Rohnert Park this morning and we jogged around the city.  It was a good 10 miles.  I'm always surprised by how much we can chat and before we know it 10 miles is come and gone!  It was the first time I had my new heart rate monitor on me and it was great to have audible updates of my heart rate en route.  You can see the run and all my stats including my heart rate on my Runkeeper page.

Afterwords no time to rest!  I had to guzzle some water, shower and get fancy for barrel tasting weekend!  Tiffany White put together a huge group of friends to go barrel tasting in a stretch hummer limousine - AWESOME!

We had some drinks at Tiffany's house and then loaded up the limo when it arrived promptly at 10am.  I wasn't sure we'd get 20 people into it, but we did!  This stretch hummer had an additional 4-5 seats in the back in a circle seat.  That's where the drinks were poured and passed around to the group.

We started at a winery on the 101 just to check-in then headed up to Bella Winery.  It was probably my favorite of the places we visited.  They had huge wine caves with ample room for the hundreds of people visiting that day.  They had quite the spread of food- the bacon and grits I tried were delicious and of course the chocolate pairings with the wine in the cave was my favorite.  Here's a picture of me and Katelynn inside.

After Bella we went to Chateau Diana.  They had some very good and very unique tasting wines!  I really enjoyed the tastings here.  I took a minute and enjoyed my glass of Zombie Zin on the patio with some fresh sourdough bread.  Outside of the tasting room I snapped this picture of Tiffany, Alin, Katelynn and Kaela.  We couldn't have asked for better weather!

At one of the stops along the way we got this huge group picture with all 20 of us!  Such a fun crowd!

At one point we stopped off in Healdsburg and I walked over to Thumbprint cellars and tasted there and fortune had it they had my wine shipment ready so I picked that up then caught back up with the group.  I don't even remember where they were, but I found them and then we headed back south!  When we arrived back at Tiffany's place I took Katelynn's car back to our house and napped for several hours because tonight I'm headed to the city to go out with Brandon!