Into the Winery & Vineyard! Part II

After spending the morning relaxing by the pool and eating lunch we decided to head to the winery for a tour. They showed us how traditionally barrels were used, but you can only reuse them a few times and that gets expensive. They have switched to stainless steel fermentation tanks.

To keep the cedar flavor from the barrels, they use cedar chips in the tanks.

Here are the fermentation tanks. They are temperature regulated and as you can see, this one had ice on the side! They chill the wine to stop the fermentation process.

We also got to see the bottling, corking and labeling area. Our tour guide was a bit annoying and would always have a personal story about wine and her experiences with it. Let's just say she wasn't very wine educated, which she needed to be.

Onto the tasting! We had over 40-50 people in our group. It was a huge group and hard to maneuver around, but the bar area went across the whole back of the gift shop so we all fit. We even got to keep the wine glasses as souvenirs.

We got to try 5 different wines.You can see the list of wines behind us. Here is an interesting fact. The only grapes they grow on the property are for the Pinot Grigio. They import other grapes from Georgia and California. That was a little disappointing to me, but guess I'll have to make it out to California wine country one day. David enjoyed the Port, which is a dessert wine and we tasted it with chocolate. We brought home their best seller, a Summer sweet wine, and the Pinot Grigio.

After the tasting we decided to go explore the vineyards. The muscadines are a type of grape that is used to make the Pinot Grigio. Here I am with my shopping bag of wine ready to explore.

The grapes are hard to see unless you get really close to them.

We had fun with the camera and set it up on a picnic table to take some shots. Here's the best one, it kinda looks like I'm falling, but we are experts so no worries.

View from the top of the winery going into the vineyard. It was a very fun day and we enjoyed ourselves. I bet you are wondering what we ate though. Stay tuned tomorrow for the food post, because besides wine that's the most important thing, right?