catching up

For this first post, and many to follow, you can expect the tasting to focus on a series of California bottlings. Keely and I just returned from our honeymoon trip to Sonoma and are spending the summer in Vail, Colorado going through the nearly 3 cases of wine we bought from various small wineries there. Well, we might need part of the fall to drink through them, especially since I get stingy about the good ones. In any case, the first few posts will be to catch up to the present with a bit of background.

One, I'm partial to French wines, I am also in love with Spanish wine (give me a quality Priorat any day of the year and I'm happy). Naturally, I have a healthy respect for the 100 odd varietals growing in Italy and feel glad to know (and consume)that Californian's are making world class wine. The Sonoma bottle we had tonight showed its color immediately. But first, a quick catch up on Sonoma, in case you haven't made the visit yet. In short, you should. I'll get to the review of the Martinelli Pinot Noir we drank in a later post. So here goes the quick rundown/background. I'll only start with the wedding party (which had a great wine and cheese tasting if I do say so myself), since anything before that is history.

Keely and I actually were married August 18th at the courthouse in downtown Manhattan near Wall street and all that financial business. We had been back from Tibet for only 4 days when my cousin and best friend Josh showed up to say hi. We figure, hell, we've got a witness. Let's go. It took us 2 weeks to tell her family. A couple weeks later I told mine and by Christmas we decided to actually have a party for our friends and immediate family. After Keel's mom encouraged us to ditch the vermont camping trip (we thought we'd rent an entire campground out and make everyone come with tents), we came up with a long weekend over Memorial Day on Block Island. We ended up rented 3 houses, 1 for each side of the family and 1 for the "kids". And we had a blast.