Wine time!

Happy Thursday!

 What a great day we had. oh my gosh! It was winery tour day!

Baking and Pastry and Boulanger all piled on our bus and we were off to our first winery, avondale sky. Really really beautiful. The main part of the winery was rebuilt from this old church that had to be floated up river, the boards were numbered and taken apart to get treated so they could legally use them (building codes). They had the original stained glass, really really stunning. So we got the history of it and we got a nice tour of the grounds. We were shown the testing ground where they grow certain grapes with certain soils and rocks then test them out to see what kind of flavours they have created. They had some dogs that were running around being funny so I got a little distracted and missed some of the other information...
 She also said the deer like to use the yards as daycares. There are a few mamma deers with babies that come in to the fields, leave their fawns in the grapes then the moms go off and do whatever momma deer do in the middle of the day then come back for their babies around 4pm. The workers are always on high alert when they are on their tractors for "brown rocks" that weren't there yesterday. If they come across one and are unable to reverse the tractor they are to turn off the tractor and leave it there until the mom comes back and takes her baby home. I loved that they are so respectful of that. But saying that, they are very protective of their crops (for obvious reasons) and they have a fake osprey with sounds that flies around. They have air cannons that fire randomly and they have lots of other intimidating bird noises that play to keep little pests away. They also have some electric fences for raccoons..cant blame them for that decision.

 After they filled us with information we were brought back to the cabin for some taste testing! We tried four different kinds. The first one was Summerville (I bought this one) it was so good. We swirled, we tasted we tried to identify what flavours were in it. I need more work on my wine skills. I know that i like what I'm tasting, but I have a hard time identifying key notes in the wine. *sigh* oh well practice it will be! twist my arm. The second one was another white called Tidal Bay. I LOVED this one. Very sweet and very fruity (I bought this one as well). At this point I was thinking "well..i'm going to be broke if i like the next two as well.."
The third one we tasted was called Bliss. Another white, but I didn't like it. It tasted like crab apples, it was very very tart and just completely dried out my mouth. not a fan. THEN we got the final one, a red. I don't even remember the name of it. She poured it for us and i was thought "i'm not a fan of red, but lets give it a shot..." yeah. bad. There were several people who were not fans of this one. It was very very strong. When the owner said "so, what do we think about this one?" the girl behind me said "its disgusting!" haha. oh boy. So the owner told us about the little dumping pot for people who didn't want to finish their glass or just plain didn't like it. I took full advantage of that pot. So many people were complaining about how much they hated it but no one was going to dump it out. So I marched right up and poured it out while everyone laughed. If I don't like it i'm not going to drink it! Chef came over and laughing he said "oh ashley, what are we going to do with you?...dumping wine!? you're not coming back on the bus." haha.

 So I bought two bottles of wine from them. Can't wait to try them out again.

 Then it was back on the bus and off to pete lucketts winery. We had a few people on the bus that were under age and couldn't drink and they were laughing saying "everyone seems to be much louder and a lot more giddy.." - well duh! lol. wine can do that to people...especially me.

 We got to petes and its just beautiful. The wine we had was okay..I wasn't blown away to be honest. But to be fair we only sampled two, a white and a red so my sample size was small. I'm sure they have wines there that I would love.
 They talked to us about ice wine (i love ice wine!) and about petes. a really amazing operation he has there. We were able to take a walk down through the vineyards to look at the grapes and to play around with the red telephone booth.
 funny story about the phone booth. A few people made phone calls and Sara said she wanted to call her sister. So she jumps in the booth and the friggen phone starts to ring! haha she answers it and has a lovely conversation with a man name Ed Harold (I believe that was his name). We are all standing around listening to her have this conversation with this total random man! Hilarious.  the best line was when she said "no...no...this is a phone booth in the middle of a winery..." How random is that!? So she walks up to tell the tour guide about the phone call she just received and he says "seriously? I didn't think we could receive calls on that?! Now that I know that I might cancel my cell phone lol" . fun times.

 Next we headed to a park to have lunch. We all brought something to have a potluck. It was wonderful :)

 On the way home a lot of us fell asleep. We looked like toddlers with the heads bobbing around. I mean grown ups or not you fill us full of wine and food then put is on a bus for an hour, how are we suppose to stay awake!?

 On the bus I was thinking and so far this doesn't feel like school. When I think about school I think back to high school where you are made to sit for hours and take notes and you're not all that engaged in whats going on. In this program while we are learning and being taught we are also experiencing. It's so wonderful and I feel so fulfilled and happy. I really appreciate the amazing teachers and my classmates and just the opportunity to be in this school. Couldn't imagine being anywhere else right now.

 If you haven't been to either winery I highly recommend going. Support local business!

 Tomorrow is yeast doughs and cinnamon buns! yes!

Here are some picture of our day!

Enjoy and see you back here tomorrow!

Avondale Sky winery. 

Avondale sky grapes

Avondale sky tour

Testing out the goods! 

Fake bird

summerville. mmm

LOVED this one. 

Petes. Thats his house right there. 

A beautiful fig that i was tempted to steal..but i didnt. 

Fig trees

petes grapes

a beautiful room where they hold the wine and have dinners. 

tasting at petes. 

view from pets dining patio

Jessica making a phone call 

Sara answering a random call from a random man. lol.