Flamenco night

We spent Saturday night up in Lodi at D'art, our fav winery, at a wonderful little event they hold yearly, Flamenco night. We were happy and full after a night of watching, dancing, tapas and paella. I'll let the pictures and video speak for themselves

Tempranillo

Oh how I love my wine. Upon arriving in CA I did not have the same feelings. Our trips to Lodi began my flirtation with wine and the subsequent travels to Sonoma and Napa only solidified it. We made another treck up to Lodi today to pick up our wine club release from D'Art since they weren't quite ready the last time up. We cannot manage to leave the tasting room without tasting and today was no different. BUT, there was a fantastic surprise in order. Over the past year I had grown to love the Tempranillo, a spanish wine with a bit of spice to it, and they had been out the last few months. Luckily, upon professing my love today the owner let on that she in fact had a few cases left and would sell me a bottle....SCORE! I'm currently at home enjoying what is hopefully one of my last glasses of wine for the next few years and it's one of my favs. To compliment my glass my fantastic hubby made me homemade pizza. I'm spoiled and I love it!

A dog day + wine = yummy :)

Since we have done just about nothing fun lately we decided to delay the floors for this 3 day weekend and have some FUN! D'Art (the second winery we became wine club members at) was having a bottle your own wine event and we just couldn't resist...but first we headed to the lovely farmers market before the heat over took everything...Yes we bring our own bags, and yes those are the ones you saw before. We don't use them near as much as we should be we ALWAYS remember to bring them to the farmers market.

Isn't that some delish California produce. This is one of the main things that makes it nice to live here.

Although I don't normally eat tomatos unless they're mixed into something I happen to think they're just gorgeous, look at 77 all those colors

A rather small haul, but there are only 2 of us and we don't want anything to go bad before we can devour it. After a quick trip to Best Buy to purchase our first external hard drive to store all these pictures we've amassed we made it up to Lodi and boy does a glass of wine make life better!

and here is my model husband; doesn't he just look so dapper. I think he should have the cover of GQ with this lookHow to bottle your own wine.....First, sign the label

Second, get your CASE of wine ready for the process
Bottle ready to go, check!

Then, you use the contraption to fill the bottle, it magically knows when to stop A closer look

Now you put the cork in...hold both buttons down until it's COMPLETELY in place, you'll see why I say that in just a second......

It's Dominic's turn now..... But wait, what have we here?? someone must have let up a little early...hunny???
Got that one fixed and then slide on the foil Pull this contraption over the foil and it seals everything in place

Voila! we have a case of wine all filled up and ready to label with our custom signed labels
Precision at it's finest...mind you we've been drinking the WHOLE time ;)

The name of the wine is Dog Day Red and has Maggies gorgeous mug on it
Now for some chow, they had grilled sausage, salsa, chips, and great watermelon.

We just relaxed and chatted for a while before finally heading back south.
Upon getting home I gathered my coupons and made a quick CVS run, no I'm not addicted I just like to get the things we use for nothing.
total for all this $2 out of pocket and I'm down 3 CVS bucks....but I should make that back tomorrow no problem....and yes John I'll get your shampoo :)
Here's me, a completely happy camper, this was a great relaxed day, we're so happy we chose not to do the floors and to just enjoy this last weekend of summer instead.

a game of cat and mouse, err rat? and another wine run

As many of you know already we've been battling some roof rats for the past several months and I think we've finally rounded the bend and MAY be coming to an end....from the looks of our yard yesterday the neighbor cat may be helping. Check out all that fur this must have been some fight!

Rather than sit around we decided to spend another weekend enjoying all that california has to offer and headed back up to lodi. Hey, our stash is getting VERY low. We went to the visitor center next to Wine and Roses (for anyone interested, this is where we're going to stay for the upcoming Harden-Rooney wedding and they have a great restaurant, check out that brunch menu) The visitor center has a great little overview of different ways wine is grown and the tasting room boasts wines from many of the wineries in the area. One of our tastes led us to retry Jessie's Grove which we found better, but still not near as good as some of our favorites. Many of the color flower shots are from the drive to this winery. We also headed to Housley's Century Oak and of course Jewel. We were running low on our favorite Viognier and had a shipment to pick up. Now for the pictures, the sign on the first one says 118 years old...that's a zinfandel stump

These are baby grapes...just wait until early fall they'll taste scrumptious

Lodi is dangerous

When we first moved to Cali we used to go up to Lodi, a wine appellation in central California known for their zinfandels, we love this area because it's so much smaller than Napa and Sonoma and really helps us to learn about the wine and tasting...for example today we met mr. berghold the owner of a gorgeous winery,

he actually did our tasting. On other occassions we've been taken back to the barrel room for impromptu barrel tastings and taken through vineyards for off the vine grape tastings! However, since we purchased our house we've taken very few trips (it's only a 45 min drive) because we tend to drastically increase our collection, case in point the picture below....

This is just todays purchases, some of these are meant to be aged for several months to several years so they're not all "available" at our whim.

You can see several bottles of Jewel wine. We're club members there and just love their wine. It's reasonably priced and tastes great, we always have a fun time at the tastings and even did a blending party last summer (this is much more difficult than we were intending but dominic and I would both encourage everyone to try it out) Guess not having much to do around the house and knowing we have a good sized refund check can be BAD influences!!!!