We were ready and waiting to be picked up from the motel at
10:40 for the second wine tasting trip of our travels.
After a couple of pick-ups the bus was full with twelve of
us including the driver and we made the quick drive to winery numero uno of the
day – Castaro Cellars. There is something like 240 wineries in Paso Robles with
plenty of room for more and we’d only be making the smallest of dents on this
number as we were set to visit four in the day.
We arrived at about 11:10 at this very picturesque little
winery where we made our way through to a bar at which we could all be served
by the three staff members on hand. We were certainly well looked after here
and the two of us settled in at the bar for the long haul; pulling over a bowl
of crackers and taking our time with the sampling. The rest of the group had
long moved off to explore the gardens etc but we had plenty of time left and so
stuck it out at the bar chatting away with the staff and supping away at the
selection of very good wines. This area is more famous for its reds and so
Danny was in luck with the huge selection of offer here. This made up for the
tour in Marlborough which was dominated by the whites. We got to try a couple
more wines than the rest of the group did by sticking around; including a
really nice dessert red that we sampled once, then enjoyed a dark chocolate
truffle, before sampling the wine a second time. This whole tasting session was
excellent and had us itching for more.
By stop two the whole group was mingling well and the banter
was flowing as was soon to be the wine. Things slowed down at Croad Vineyards
as we sampled a mere five wines, though this was fine by all of us as we were all
feeling the effects of the earlier samples and were quite ready for our lunches
now. For lunch we all sat at a table outside on the balcony overlooking the
vineyard rows and tucked into our hearty meals, served with a glass of red wine
from a very generous couple we’d got chatting to. After the meal we all talked
some more before it was soon time to be moving on to stop three.
At 14:00 we arrived at Changala Winery though when we
entered we were faced with two bars and two separate companies: Changala and
also Kaleidos. To the groups delight we were informed that we could sample both
companies’ wines and so set about wasting no time to complete this task. A
total of twelve wines were sampled along with a few that were served with an
accompanying cupcake pair especially to the wine. The cupcakes themselves were
delicious and so these wineries were a great success. We even had ten minutes
or so to chill out in the sun before we were ushered back into the little bus
for our final stop of the day.
Rotta Winery offered a further twelve wines to try and try
them we did… or so we think… we drank the wine and chatted some more to our
fellow wine tasters until it was eventually time to be dropped back off at our
accommodations. The ones left on the bus were impressed when we asked to be
dropped off next to the orange car at the motel and we said our farewells to
them all as we made our way to the room.
We were obviously in no state to drive and neither of us
fancied walking a long way to get tea so we went online and Googled Dominos
pizza for tea… yum!
We’ve decided that we love wine tours as: obviously you get
to taste lots of wine but also because you meet lots of people and, when the
weather is great, can enjoy some amazingly relaxing and fun times in a
selection of different wineries.
No comments:
Post a Comment