A Beautiful Sunday at the Temecula Vineyards
Every year for Amy's birthday, Jenn and Ally join her to go to the Temecula wine country for a few days of R&R. Well I never get invited to that and always feel like I'm missing out. So this past weekend I invited myself along with Jenn (who's always invited) Jake and Amy while Ally was in Cancun. We met Jake and Amy down in Temecula after going to the 9AM service of church at Mariners over this past Memorial Day weekend.
Jenn's Requirement for 9AM Church Services = Donut
We met right off the 15 freeway and drove one car into wine country. Unlike most of our outings we really didn't have a plan. So we started just looking for wineries that looked good and stumbled on Baily Winery and went in. We each got their tasting round which gave us each six generous pours of their dozen wines. We all had different strategies, Jenn stuck more to the reds, Amy more to the whites, Jake and I a combo of both. My personal favorites there was the Cab/Merlot blend. I came really close to buying it.
By the time we had each got done with our six tastings we all were feeling much better. Sadly the tasting didn't have any food to speak of, though we did get to keep the free wine glass. From there we went to the Bel Vino winery which was far more popular then the first. We only paid for two tastings at this one and split them among the four of us. They had just as big of a selection of wines. And I'm not sure if its because we were all a little more loose at this point but the wine was great. Sadly I remember less about what we ordered here but do remember that we all had a great time and our wine guy was nice enough to split the pours three ways.
Our plan was to hit another winery but we were all starving so we went back to where we parked Jenn's car and went to have lunch at Gourmet Italia. We've all eaten there before. Its a spot to meet in the middle when we have people coming from San Diego (Grandma/Ally), Orange County (Me/Jenn), Riverside (everyone else). Jake's review on Gourmet Italia is that "it's the best Italian food he's ever had outside of Venice." I'm not sure I'd go that far but it was really really good. Jenn and Jake split the spaghetti with meatballs while Amy and I split the chicken parmesan.
It hit the spot and finished off what was a really fun day in Temecula Wine Country. I would expect this to be the first of many posts about us all meeting for some more wine adventures.
Also here's a panoramic shot I took on the Ortega Highway on a drive back from Temecula and Gourmet Italia. I was pretty proud of it.
