Our First Anniversary

On Saturday, Jason and I traveled to the Santa Ynez wine country to celebrate our first anniversary. Santa Ynez is only an hour and a half away and is tucked back into the mountains--which makes for a fun twisty drive but for extremely hot temperatures! Although most people think of Napa Valley and Sonoma Valley as the California wine country, Santa Ynez has quite a few vineyards and is not as touristy. It is actually the wine country used during the filming of Sideways.

We ate lunch at a quaint sandwich place that had plenty of shade and the best lemonade; tart but with enough sweetness to make it refreshing. After lunch, we went to three wineries. Jason had the fun of wine tasting and I had the fun of looking at art galleries and sampling other food offerings. The first place we visited was Artiste, a tasting studio that offers blended wine named after the artwork featured on the bottle. The studio owner works with current national/international impressionist artists to create both the labels and the wine. It was a fun place to wander and admire the art hanging on the walls and Jason enjoyed their wine best of all.

Our second stop was Gainey Vineyards, a much larger establishment that offers tours and a great selection of yummy foods, such as dipping oils, vinaigrettes, breads, salsas, pastas, and mustards. They also allow you to walk in part of the vineyard and taste the different selections of grapes. For some reason I thought the grapes would taste a bit sour, but they were quite delicious! And, if you concentrated very hard, you could tell a difference between grape flavors.

The third winery we visited was Sunstone. By this time however, it was pretty hot (staff at Sunstone were guessing it was 104) and we got caught up with a large tour of people so our visit was a bit shorter. Sunstone is set in a more rustic atmosphere and they have also have a separate, smaller tasting room where they sample some of their reserve wines, which Jason enjoyed. By the time we finished at Sunstone, we were pretty wiped out. We had dinner reservations at a different restaurant that we ended up eating an hour and a half earlier than anticipated! But, after sitting and downing a few glasses of water, we revived enough to make the most of dinner :)