For us, wine tasting is fairly rudimentary: rent a car, drive to the wineries, go from place to place sampling as much as we feel like with ample prudence, then drive back to wherever we started the day.\u00a0 We watch tourists pour off of buses with snobbish scorn: \u201cWhat do they know about wine?\u201d\u00a0 Even worse are the stretch limos that shuttle bachelorette parties from winery to winery, fifteen previously over-served twenty-somethings who scream and giggle and generally drive both winery employees and serious tasters to run, not walk, in the other direction.\u00a0 And it\u2019s not just giggly girls.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 We see long black Cadillacs pull up with a gang of conventioneers playing hooky in Wine Country.\u00a0 They can disrupt a tasting room from the moment they enter.\u00a0 Maybe some of these people really do appreciate what they\u2019re tasting, but whether because of noisiness or haughtiness they do spoil the experience for us and maybe everyone else.<\/p>\n
And then once \u2013 just once \u2013 we were the ones filling the limo with people who had little or no familiarity with wine tasting.\u00a0 At one point in his career, Steve led a national consulting practice and held a leadership meeting on a Friday in Portland, Oregon.\u00a0 Since there was budget for \u201cteam-building\u201d, he invited the consultants and their significant others to take a day trip that Saturday to the Willamette Valley.\u00a0 The event was held in mid-January, and the day dawned brisk and sunny.<\/p>\n
In a rented, chauffeured stretch, nine of us headed for the hills of northern Oregon.\u00a0 The Willamette Valley is only forty minutes from downtown Portland, if there is no traffic and at that time of year visitors and thus cars are few.\u00a0 None of Steve\u2019s colleagues had been wine tasting before so there was both expectancy and a little trepidation in the car as we drove south.<\/p>\n
If you arrive in the little town of Dundee, you\u2019ll find Argyle winery on the main road.\u00a0 Argyle is best known for its sparkling wines and Chardonnays and the Pinot Noirs aren\u2019t bad either.\u00a0 They have a tasting room, with the vines elsewhere in the valley.\u00a0 Our friends seemed a little ill at ease at first but a few sips loosened them up.\u00a0 \u201cHey, this is fun\u201d was the general sentiment.<\/p>\n
We continued down the Pacific Highway, had lunch and turned up Archery Summit Road, leading to the Archery Summit, Domaine Drouhin and Domaine Serene wineries. \u00a0Each one was higher up the hill and therefore had a better view.\u00a0 This was really the heart of Pinot Noir country, with several award winning wines for all of us to try.<\/p>\n
We all learned a few things that day.\u00a0 For one, Steve\u2019s colleagues learned about wine tasting.\u00a0 The day truly did build some team spirit, experiencing new things together.\u00a0 (It was our first trip to the Willamette Valley, so we were learning as well.)\u00a0 It was fun to see our friends open up to the wine tasting experience.\u00a0 Of course, they had all drunk wine before but few if any paid much attention to it.\u00a0 They had rarely if ever compared wines side by side and tried to detect the differences.\u00a0 It was our pleasure to share that appreciation with them.<\/p>\n
We quickly realized that it\u2019s nice to have someone else do the driving.\u00a0 Of course, that makes a visit more expensive but it is also less stressful.\u00a0 We still didn\u2019t want to get drunk, but we could take a few more second sips without worries.\u00a0 The stretch limo added some glamor, but other than for the size of the group, it wasn\u2019t necessary; just being chauffeured around was more than sufficient.<\/p>\n
And we re-learned that wine tasting in the off-season offers its own rewards: no buses, no crowds, and time to savor the wines because the server wasn\u2019t stressed either.\u00a0 If ever life presents you with the chance to visit Wine Country that way, take it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
For us, wine tasting is fairly rudimentary: rent a car, drive to the wineries, go from place to place sampling as much as we feel like with ample prudence, then drive back to wherever we started the day.\u00a0 We watch tourists pour off of buses with snobbish scorn: \u201cWhat do they know about wine?\u201d\u00a0 Even … Continue reading Living Large in Oregon<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/powertasting.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/powertasting.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/powertasting.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/powertasting.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/powertasting.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=223"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/powertasting.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":224,"href":"https:\/\/powertasting.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223\/revisions\/224"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/powertasting.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=223"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/powertasting.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=223"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/powertasting.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=223"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}