Spring Release weekend in Walla Walla, WA happened a couple weeks back. This is the time of year when all of the local wineries open their doors for tastings and highlight recent vintage releases for an extended weekend. We went down for the entire event. It got really crowded on Sat & Sun, so our strategy--to head down on Thu afternoon--was definitely the right call. We were able to get some f2f time in with some of the winemakers and owners.
We picked up a slew of great tastes in the process. Our collection has slowly been growing (or rather, not depleting faster than it grows ;) ), and has surged past the 100-mark to ~115-ish bottles. Since we've moved out west, the number of WA and CA wines has grown past half of our collection. This is surprising to me since nearly all of our wines were from Italy and France prior to the move. But my pivot table says we have 56 US bottles, followed by 21 Italian, and 16 French. The rest are from Germany, Australia, Portugal, Spain, Chile, and Canada, in descending order.
We came home with just over 2 cases total of:
All in all, a great addition to our collection. Isenhower and K were my absolute favorites by quite a distance. I'd recommend getting your hands on the latest vintages for these folks--Isenhower sold out completely while we were down there and K sold out on most of their selections, so I'm assuming a bunch of local wine shops purchased 'em up. Good luck on the search! By the way, if you see the House Wine by the Magnificent Wine Co., buy it up. These puppies are roughly $10/bottle, are hand crafted by the same guy who does the other K wines, and have a great full mouth feel with amazing rich body, something you typically don't find in such an inexpensive wine. It's a steal.
Anybody out there big grape-heads like myself?