In reviewing the photos I took on June 16, I find that there are – none. This is not surprising, as this is the day John and I drove from Newport up into the Willamette Valley region of Oregon. We went there to sample wines, specifically pinot noir. We are big fans of Oregon pinot noir.

I do believe we took the camera, but be honest: who really wants to see pictures of people sampling wines? A lot of people treat a tasting as a pub crawl, but John and I were really tasting – swirling the wine in the glass, taking a big ol’ sniff of the contents, sipping a bit and swilling it around our palates and then – I know, it’s kind of horrible – spitting the wine out.

My guess is that a lot of people who visit the vineyards to taste the wine are actually drinking it, because a a couple of the tasting rooms we had to ask for a dump bucket, and at least once got an odd look for doing so (and at another, were complimented on our “restraint”). But we visited about ten vineyards/tasting rooms and sampled between two and six wines in each of them. The average-sized pour when you’re sampling is about an ounce. If we drank every pour we got, we’d have been legless within two hours.

So anyway – no pictures of that day. We had an 11:00 AM appointment at
Adelsheim, an old favorite that never disappoints, but we arrived in the area half an hour early, so we went up the hill to Bergstrom Winery, which was already open, and sampled their wines. Then we backtracked to Adelsheim and spent a good hour there. Many of the wineries in the area do tastings only by appointment, and still others are not open during the week (we were there on a Tuesday, which is definitely an off-day), so our tasting selections were largely based on which places were open. Other than a break for a leisurely lunch, we tasted from about 10:30 AM to 5 PM, when most of the tasting rooms closed. We tasted a lot of wine: Ponzi, Sokol Blosser, August Cellars, Rex Hill, Hip Chicks, Fox Farm and another old favorite, Erath, plus some others I can’t remember. On our way back to Newport, we stopped at another favorite, Flying Dutchman, which is located on the coast, right by the Devil’s Punchbowl.

And yes, we bought a LOT of wine.