Sunday 2/3/08

After Saturday's rain, I very cautiously peeked out the window Sunday morning, and saw a beautiful blue sky and sunshine! We turned out to have wonderful weather the rest of the trip, until the flight home. More about that later.......

After much research on the web, I chose to tour this winery because a) they are actually a working vineyard as well as a winery and b)they have a small olive grove and process the olives for oil, and we could tour that as well. Round Pond winery is fairly new, although the family has been growing grapes and selling them to other vineyards for many years. Although the grapes are dormant now, the vineyards were still amazing.

Ryan, our tour guide, pouring a barrel tasting for us. This is wine as it comes out of the barrel, before filtering, bottling or anything else. Later we tasted 3 different wines, from different years. Each wine was paired with a small, appetizer-sized portion of cheese, bread or fruit, specifically chosen to enhance that wine. Although the wines did all taste different, I thought they were all pretty good. And they should have been, for the prices they charged per bottle. Let's just say this would be for a very special occasion.

It seemed unusual for us to see palm trees, citrus, and other semi-tropical plants growing alongside of plants that I think of as more northern plants, such as peaches, grapes, nut trees and other items that don't grow in our hot humid climate. The snow covered mountains in the background were different too!