bellwether

morganlf and I just got back from a fantastic weekend. We spent the last three days in Yakima valley for the Yakima Red Wine & Chocolate event.

coraa and

jmpava invited us to stay with them at P's dad's place in Prosser, WA, where we were overwhelmed with amazing hospitality. :)

We ended up visiting 12 wineries in two days, and overall, I was really impressed with the quality of the wine. I'm primarily a dry red fan, but this weekend taught me what good sweet wines can taste like. I'll never look at an ice wine in quite the same way again. The highlight of the weekend was still a red wine, but we ended up buying a decent amount of whites as well!

On Saturday, we visited Hogue, Kestrel, Chinook, Hinzerling, Airfield, and Thurston Wolfe. We also hit Chukkar Cherry for gratuitous amounts of chocolate. I enjoyed all of these, but Kestrel was in particular pretty amazing. Tasting their Raptor was the highlight of the weekend--it was an amazing balanced and complex red.

Tasting notes: (work in progress)

Hogue's Reserve '05 Merlot was very good. I was not as impressed with the CS. I also liked the Hogue Sangiovese. Everything at Kestrel was good, although we tasted the reserves and premiums first, and this left me feeling a little iffy about their table wine. I think if we had worked the other way, I would be gung-ho across the board. I would definitely consider the Kestrel wine club. Chinook was a smaller family-run winery, but we had very good whites and reds. I ended up getting a few bottles at Chinook, while A played with the dog. At Chinook, another couple mentioned they had just come from sampling ports at Hinzlinger. We decided to check it out--Hinzlinger was a small, eccentric winery. While I didn't like the table wine here (I thought the chablis tasted fishy), the dessert wines here were excellent, and the vinegar was also very good. We picked up a bottle of a ten year tawny port and a bottle of chile vinegar. We enjoyed ourselves at the rest of the wineries for the day--Thurston Wolfe in particular had a good reserve tasting.

On Sunday, we went to Chandler Ridge, Hightower, Tapteil, Kiona, Terra Blanc, and Barnard Griffin. Of these, Kiona, Tapteil & Hightower were all great. Kiona in particular had some wonderful values, and A and I discovered that we quite like their ice wine.

Now that we're back home, we're pondering the newest addition to our family--a sister for Gus. We're looking at two different cats--jump over to

morganlf to see pics and provide feedback!