Tuesday, January 6, 2009

First trip to Moshin Vineyards (Winter Wineland 2008)

I think this will be one of our most anticipated yearly events: Winter Wineland along the Russian River Wine Road. We went last year for the first time and it was an awesome weekend. My parents joined us for one of the days and they fell in love with the area, too.


Here are details for this year's event, January 17-18 (coming up SOON!):

http://www.wineroad.com/winter_wineland/annualevents/1



I'll tell a little about last year and maybe entice some of you to head up there!



This event last year was the first time we visited and stayed at Moshin Vineyards. P sells an exclusive Pinot Noir of Moshin's (Moshin Barrel Select Sonoma County Pinot Noir), so he was anxious to visit the winery, get a tour of the inner-workings, and taste more of their wine! We arrived in Healdsburg on Friday afternoon so we could get an early start for Saturday's event. That afternoon, we were lucky enough to get a private tour with Rick Moshin, who showed us his gravity-flow system. Wines produced there are treated much more gently than wines that must be run through pumps in order to move them from vessel to vessel throughout the winemaking process. Here's a link to a chart on their website:


http://www.moshinvineyards.com/HTML/tours.html


During our tour we also got to do some barrel tasting. We tasted a Savignon Blanc that was still fermenting. It was actually spritzy because it was still giving off lots of CO2! It was interesting to taste wine at this stage. We've actually become quite close to this particular wine throughout its life, but I'll save all the details for another blog post!

We really enjoyed our tour of the winery. It was so cool to see how things work. I never knew how complicated the whole process can be!

Next we got to taste a whole array of Moshin wines. They are known for their Pinots, and now I know why! I don't think I tasted a wine there that I didn't really, really enjoy. P felt the same even though he usually likes heavier reds.


The wine we absolutely, totally and completely fell in love with was the '06 Moshin Potion, Late Harvest Semillion/Sauvignon Blanc. Unfortunately, it is now sold out. :o( Luckily, we snatched up a bottle before it was too late and we're hoarding it! I think this stuff might be my favorite dessert wine EVER. It is super sweet, which some people don't like, but P and I enjoyed it. You taste a lot of fruit along with the sweetness, so it's not a mouthful of sugar. From some tasting notes, the flavors include: nectarine, intoxicating honeysuckle, crisp apple acidity which holds the lush viscous sweetness through and through. ::sigh:: I can almost taste it now... This wine would be perfect with cheesecake, even drizzled over cheesecake... or a fruit salad... or anything really. It's THAT good. We've also been told it makes an excellent martini when mixed with vodka. Man, do we wish we'd gotten more than one bottle while we had the chance! Anyhow, I'm sure you don't want to hear me keep gushing over wine that's no longer available (I'm going to have to search online now... there has to be some somewhere!), so I'll shut up. :o)

I've feel like I've babbled long enough and didn't even talk about the actual Winter Wineland event! I think it's easy to tell that we really like Moshin Vineyards, though. We ended up joining their wine club and have visited several more times for wine club events. It's a fabulous place with excellent wines and lots of fun things planned all throughout the year. I'll have to remember to rave about them more some other time.

For now, I'll leave you with a glimpse of their guest suite where we've been lucky to stay a few times. I cannot express how generous Rick, his wife Amber, and the staff there have been to us. Big shout out to Julia, she's the best and you're likely to be greeted by her smiling face if you visit their tasting room. Much love to Moshin!









Maybe I'll write about the actual event tomorrow since I got totally sidetracked! I could actually go on and on (and on some more!) about most of the places we visited, so I'll have to work on a condensed version...

1 comment:

Alison said...

WOW!! That sounds like so much fun! And suite... oo-la-la!