I am not much of a drinker and I know very little about wine, yet I somehow ended up on a wine tasting tour early Saturday afternoon! Betty and I met up with Samantha and her friend to try some of the local wine shops. We really thought we were going to a vineyard and hoped to take photos, but instead we visited two shops and one actual winery. Samantha and her friend are well-experienced wine drinkers and Betty and I are complete amateurs, which is fine because we had fun. We first went to a place and tried six different wines (none of which tasted good or appealed to me or Betty!).
Next we went to Water 2 Wine, a local winery where you can make your own custom wine! They import fruit juices from 13 different countries and you can literally make your own batch of wine, which is about 28 bottles. You can custom name your wine and design your own labels, which could be a very cool gift for people who enjoy wine. The owners of the shop are very knowledgeable and very nice, walking through the wine-making process and letting us try up to five different wines. I tried five fruity wines and I liked each of them (Green Apple Riesling, Pomegranate Zinfindel, Exotic Fruits White Zinfindel, Wildberry Shiraz, and Blueberry Pinot Noir). Here are me and Betty with the wines we liked the most.
I thought the wall of wines was really cool!
Here are several batches of wine that are in somewhere within the 45-day fermentation process
After the wine is fermented, it goes through a filtration process 2-3 times. Once it has been filtered, it is bottled.....
......then corked
It was cool too see the process of making wine. Too bad we don't have a place like this in MN, I have a few girlfriends (including my SIL Michelle) who would absolutely love this place!
Next we went to another wine shop, which Betty and I stayed at for about 5 minutes just to take some more photos.....
And that concludes my wine-tasting tour of Austin ;)
I too am not a wine person, but I would like to someday take a tour of a winery - mostly just to say I did. Glad you had a good time and love the pictures - as always!
Posted by: Nicole | July 20, 2009 at 09:21 PM
That looks like fun to me. Anytime M and I are on vacation we look for vineyards and wineries in the area to visit.
Posted by: Dana Leigh | July 21, 2009 at 01:09 PM
Wow, Kristi. It's looks like you're having fun, seeing a lot and blogging a lot, too! I'm behind on reading this, but I just scrolled through the photos of your three most recent posts. Will catch up with reading the details soon. Looks like you got a bunch of great photos.
Posted by: Samara | July 23, 2009 at 09:42 AM
Check out Vine Park Brewing Co. in St. Paul. It has make your own wine.
http://www.vinepark.com/wines.html
Posted by: KD | July 28, 2009 at 01:01 AM