Barrel Tasting, Harbinger of Spring: #WRBT 2012
34th Annual Wine Road Barrel Tasting, aka #WRBT
Advance Ticket Sales end this Monday, 27 February! Price rises $10 at the door; Event does not sell out…. ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW!
At Quivira Winery- I cadged a shot off of Facebook…don’t miss out on all the thieving!
The weather along Wine Road has been Faux Spring all week, temperatures here hitting 75 yesterday, with blue skies, puffy white clouds and the breezes of Printemps hinting at the warmer weather to come….
Speaking of Quivira, here is how it looked there yesterday….
Vineyard across the street from Quivira. Look at those Sunbeams from Heaven.
Just up the street at Martorana….
Martorana vineyards….
Blossoms along Dry Creek Vineyard, across from the Dry Creek General Store.
Ditto- the other direction.
And back in Healdsburg- the colors are intense greens and delicate pinks, bright yellow….
Love those daffodils and those bushes I like to call “Red Bud”, as if I live on Walton’s Mountain, instead of Fitch….
“Look at the Red Bud, John Boy! I will be heading into Charlottesville to get Mary Ellen at the bus….”
Acacia…though on Walton’s Mountain I think we call it “mimosa”…here that is a delicious breakfast drink, not a yellow hay-fever tree.
Grassy! (mmmmmmm- sauvignon blanc….)
The Russian River, greening up…steel head cavort….
Spring in Northern California- to me, it is Barrel Tasting (I first attended the Event in 1983!) and a roller-coaster of warming weather and chilly rains. An author I like, Annie Lamott, expresses it beautifully in an article in SUNSET Magazine March 2012:
Northern California spring is not a nice orderly progression that you can recognize from any other part of your life. It’s a kaleidoscope. On almost any day, it can be almost any season. Hot, warm, very cold, rainy, then gray, then blue….Don’t get me wrong — there are aspects of spring that I do not like. Deer ticks, for instance, and everywhere you look, couples falling in love, and the air is saturated with the scent of giddiness and doom.
What a great description of our Heaven Condensed.
Here’s looking at you, kids.
TR
Appreciators of Red Bud….(When I was in high school, I used to be likened to Mary Ellen which really annoyed me as I thought that her acting style was so wooden.)
P.S. I just looked up “Red Bud“- it can be “Red Bud” or “Redbud”- aka “Judas Tree” (hmm?)- and it is a town near the Walton home….but the mystery flowering bush here will still be Red Bud in my heart….
And now, James Thurber:
This just in from my friend, Meilani, who solves the mystery of what I call “Red Bud” and what seems to be Flowering Quince- comes in red and in white- Meilani also solves the Acacia v. Mimosa debate- TR
This is what Meilani writes:
And we have white flowering quince blooming in our lobby arrangements…so cool. After bloom it sets on leaves nicely but has blooms for quite a while. And the deer don’t eat it!
And Acacia (which my son suffers from an allergy to) and Mimosa are two different trees. Acacia is the huge bunch of yellow pollen that blooms this time of year.
Love your blog…always impatient to open it to see where you ended up this week.
Charlotte (and now Jasper too) says Hi! (Inn Cats- Ed.)
Meilani
Farmhouse Inn & Restaurant
http://www.farmhouseinn.com
ph. 707-887-3300