Emily's Totally Awesome 3-Day Weekend...

One great thing about being a woman of leisure is that you don't need to wait for a holiday to go on an exciting 3-day weekend, although it does help to have friends who are willing to take a day off of work and come with you on your adventure. When I lived in Santa Barbara, Steph and I (and assorted friends, varying from year to year) would go on annual 3-day weekend wine-tasting trips to Paso Robles. Since I'm not sure when I'll make it back to Santa Barbara, this visit seemed like a good time to go on one more Paso trip. Apologies in advance for the length of this post, which I anticipate will be somewhat excessive...

Friday: Remembering How Much I Love Syrah
On Friday morning we packed up the rental car and left the smoke-filled air of Santa Barbara to head 2 hours north to Paso Robles. Our traditional first stop (Mastantuono) no longer exists, so we went up to another that we usually enjoy to get things started. I'm won't mention the name here because the wine was pretty underwhelming on this trip. I was actually a little worried that 2 months traveling and not having any great wine had messed up my palate, but our second stop of the day, Booker Vineyards, proved me wrong. This is a small-production (1200-case) winery with absolutely spectacular Rhones. I met a Syrah there (which now resides in my cellar) that reminded me why I love Syrah so much.
After two more stops (at wineries that were good, but not mind-blowingly so) we stopped for a picnic at Castoro. After years of wine-tasting experience, Steph and I pack a mean picnic. The selection this trip included pate, Smoked Salmon Spread, a stinky delicious cheese, Port Salut, apples, rotisserie chicken, and pita chips. After lunch, we tasted at Castoro before heading on to 4 more wineries. Denner was another winery that made me very very happy, again with Rhone varietals. We also had fun wine-and-cheese pairings at both Jada and Sylvester, and caught a gorgeous sunset coming over the mountains as we drove home.
When we got back to the always-classy Motel 6, we prepared our traditional wine-tasting-trip aperitif (equal parts muscat and sparkling wine) to sip as we and got things ready for dinner. Our assignment for the wine-tasting day is usually to track down a wine to pair with diner, and for our rib-eye steak dinner on Friday (note the lovely Motel 6 bedspread backdrop...) we found a nice Petit Verdot at Midnight Cellars. We used to get strange looks and comments from people when we grilled at the Motel 6, but things went off without incident this time.

Saturday: A Reunion and the Quest for Something Good
On Saturday morning Mel came down from the Bay area to join us for our second day of tasting. I hadn't seen her in 2 years, so it was a lot of fun to hang out again, and by the end of the day it was feeling just the good old days when the three of us lived in the same city...
We started out at Adelaida (view from the tasting room pictured above), which is one of my all-time favorite Paso wineries. (It was an Adelaida Pinot Noir 4 years ago that was the first wine to ever really blow my mind, so they have a special place in my heart...) Their wines were totally awesome (as usual) and it was a great start to the day. After two average wineries, we found our way to a fairly new winery called Dubost and were quite pleasantly surprised. Everything they poured for us was fantastic, and the owner was totally awesome. From Dubost we headed over to Tablas Creek, a winery specializing in Rhone varietals. Steph and I had tasted there a few years ago and had been rather underwhelmed at that time, but on this trip we found it difficult to refrain from bringing home one of every wine they poured. I'm so glad we decided to give them another try. At this point the day was going fairly well, with 3 fantastic wineries and 2 average ones. After this point, however, things started going downhill.
We arrived at our next stop and opened the trunk to get the cooler containing our picnic lunch... only to discover that we'd left it at the hotel. This made us feel like freaking geniuses, especially since we'd opened the trunk several times already that day to put our wine purchases back there... We got back in the car and drove to the hotel, noting several times during the trip how absolutely brilliant we all are. We deposited our wine in the room (better not to have it in the trunk anyway) and retrieved our picnic, then headed back out to the winery where we'd planned to picnic originally. After our delicious picnic we did some tasting at the winery, only to find that everything was extremely mediocre. We went on to a winery that we'd enjoyed a few years ago and found that... everything was extremely mediocre (despite the presence of an adorable winery dog, pictured below). We then went to another winery that came highly recommended and that we vaguely remembered enjoying a couple years ago, where we found that... everything was extremely mediocre.
At this point Mel and I were getting a bit tired and cranky. I had no energy for more mediocre wine, but I didn't want our last day of tasting to end on such a lame note... Before our last mediocre stop I proposed the idea that, if this winery wasn't good (really good), then we needed to just get off the beaten path and drive out to Cass. So, after 3 straight mediocre stops and fears from Mel that lunch had somehow ruined our palates, we made it over to Cass and discovered that, in fact, our palates were just fine. We don't always make it to Cass when we come to Paso since it's not really on the way to anywhere else, but it's definitely one of my favorites. After our first sip of Grenache our spirits were lifted and we knew that everything would be OK after all...
Back at the hotel we again made a batch of champagne-and-muscat tasty beverages to imbibe while we did the prep work for our dinner of Indian-Spiced Chicken Salad. I love this dish, and it pairs beautifully with Viognier (in this case an amazing Viognier we found at Adelaida that morning). It may seem like a lot of work to prep nice, somewhat involved dinners in a Motel 6 room, but that's just how we roll.

Sunday: Pub Food and Football...
My original plan on this trip was to wake up crazy-early on Sunday and make it back to Santa Barbara in time for the Bucs-Vikings game. As we lounged around enjoying great food and wine Saturday night, however, this plan began to seem deeply stupid. We made some calls and found that Downtown Brewing Company would be showing my game on a big ol' HD TV and decided that a liesurely morning featuring brekky with Mel before she headed back up north made much more sense.

I won't get into the details of the game again, but the pub breakfast was pretty decent and it ended up being a fun morning. The pub is only open for breakfast on weekends, so the only two menu options were an egg sandwich:
or a breakfast burrito:
The beers ranged from delicious (Porter and Wheat) to pretty good (Red) to sort of gross (IPA and (Steph tells me from a previous experiment) Blueberry). We ordered some nachos and jalepeno poppers (below) around halftime of the game, and were reminded of why these foods are always a much better idea in theory than in practice...
Ah, well. The important thing was that the Bucs won and that I got to watch it in vivid crisp detail at a reasonable time of day rather than streaming a slightly-pixelated version at some ungodly hour... As much as I loved traveling, I'm so glad to be back in a country where such things are possible. (This is quite possibly my favorite thing about America, in fact...)

Steph and I stopped at Avila Beach (pictured below) near Pismo on the way home and picked up a gorgeous hunk of Ahi from a fisherman at the pier there, which will be our dinner tonight...
In summary, it was a totally awesome weekend and I'm loving being back in California... I'm trying not to think about the stupid laws in Massachusetts preventing these fantastic wineries from shipping me their wines after I've moved to Boston...