Tag: red wine

A Wine Festival

Posted on by LFFL

Wine Festival

YES!!  I had the pleasure of attending a wine festival this year with one of my girlfriends and how lovely it was.  I’d never been to a wine festival before and was a little excited as to what was might lie ahead.

Well, I can tell you WINE IS DEFINITELY EVERYWHERE!!  So make sure you eat a double cheeseburger and fries before you attend one of these shindigs, people!

This particular wine festival was being held on the grounds of an estate and tents were set up all around it.  Most of the tents had different vendors from various places selling bottles of their assorted wines and giving away free tastings of them all.  So—WHOA!  That’s at lot of wine going down your insides.  There were also other tents that were selling and giving away free tastings of different snacks of food—and you know I had no problem trying them ALL!

The tents.
Proof I’m at least 21.
The murder tape around the bees’/hornets’ pit.
Horse-drawn carriage ride.
Singing and playing guitar.
Chair massages.
Bottles of wine everywhere.

When we first arrived, we had to get wrist-banded so the vendors would know we were at least 21 years of age!  First things first, you know.  Then we were given our very own personal wine glass to enjoy all the tastings.

I’ll tell you—the lines to some of the tents were RIDICULOUSLY LONG!  I couldn’t believe how long we stood in one line just for a tasting!  So needless to say, we opted to go to tents with shorter lines—which were few and far between.  I mean, we stood in one line for 35 minutes at one tent just waiting our turn for a tasting!

Pumpkin Coffee Cake

Pumpkin Coffee Cake

And OH, I found a coffee cake tent!!  HEAVEN!!  And pumpkin coffee cake at that.  It was so amazingly good I had to buy a whole one just for myself to take home.  I swear I’m going to stalk this company and order more throughout the year.

In the end, all the food and drink tastings were awesome and I came home with one bottle of sweet red wine, one bottle of sweet white wine, pumpkin coffee cake, and a big jar of yummy apple butter.

So, if you have nothing else to do today, attend the next wine festival you can find in your town.

Take-Away Life Lesson:  If you don’t eat a double cheeseburger and fries ahead of time, you won’t be able to make your way around to all your rounds of wine tastings like you want to—if you catch my drift.

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Cooking With Wine

Posted on by LFFL
Pinot Grigio
Moscato

If you’re going to cook with wine, I’d suggest you get a cheap brand of wine—because it’ll all just probably go into the pot anyway.  I got mine at a local Walmart browsing the alcohol aisle—and I didn’t have a clue what I was looking for.

I mean great googly moogly—there are so many to choose from!  What’s the big difference between all the different types and brands anyway?  The recipe called for “white wine”, so I grabbed a white wine once my eyes could zero in on any particular one.

I’m not very experienced with wine or wine-cooking, but I remember when I first came across a recipe I wanted to try that called for a white wine.  Though I went to the store to get the necessary ingredients for making the recipe, I couldn’t help but think my food was going to have a strong taste of alcohol and reek of the stuff.

How wrong I was, indeed.  I mean, I even had one recipe that called for a whole bottle of wine and had the fish floating inside an entire pot of it boiling away—but when it was all said and done I couldn’t taste any alcohol in the fish at all.  Go figure.

So, if you have nothing else to do today, give cooking with wine a try and see how you like it—whether you put the wine into a recipe or whether you drink it as you cook along makes no difference—it’s still “cooking with wine.”

Take-Away Life Lesson:  Makes you wonder why a recipe calls for 1/2 cup wine during the cooking process if you can’t really tell a difference from if you hadn’t cooked with it at all.