Successful Experiment?

When last we left our intrepid diners, they were about to embark on an experiment in dining -- a Dinner Lab, if you will. And now it's a couple weeks later and I'm sure you're waiting breathlessly to find out how the experiment went.

In a word (or two), pretty well...

I suppose the Twitter version would go:  Cool place, excellent food, decent drinks, meh service, fun experience.

But let's get into a more detailed write up.

Downstate Weekend -- Saturday Touring

Showing the love at Cardinal Point

I'll be honest -- we covered a lot of ground and as the day wore on, my notes got less and less. But we hit some good places and had some good beer and wine. Here's the rundown:

Downstate Weekend -- the Ride Down

Half the fun of a trip is the journey, and that's especially true when you're stopping at wineries along the way, right? After a burger in old town Warrenton at the Iron Bridge Wine Company, we started southwest and hit three wineries on our way to Nelson County:

Headed to the Blue Ridge

Been a couple weeks since the last post, but a business trip, a heavy workload and a (much needed) slow weekend will cramp the Gastonomical adventures. This weekend, on the other hand, we've got a little getaway going down. We found a Living Social (Or was it Groupon?) deal for a dog-friendly B&B down in Nelson County, VA, just southwest of Charlottesville.

Fermentation Friday: Melting in the New Year

"Fermentation Friday":  An semi-regular look at the holy fermented trinity:  beer, wine and cheese.

This year, with New Year's Eve/Day being in the middle of the work week and returning from our weekend in Philly, we hadn't given a lot of thought or effort to what we'd do for New Year's. But as we were spending our last day in Philly standing in DiBruno Brothers' Rittenhouse Square outpost with Patti asking, "What are you going to do with all of that cured meat you always buy here but never finish?" we had our answer:  Raclette.

The Accidental Wine Collection, Part Deux: Stat-Geek Edition

After going through the organizational exercise I described in my previous post, I was reminded that one of the interesting (dare I say fun?) things about having a collection of any kind is being able to analyze what you have and draw conclusions. Sorta reminds me of when I collected baseball cards as a kid -- I'd organize them and analyze them to figure out what gems I had (like my 1971 Johnny Bench or my 1978 Eddie Murray rookie card) and how close I was to my annual goal of collecting every member of the Reds and the Yankees (my two favorite teams at the time). I could spend hours messing around with that. I did.
 

The Accidental Wine Collection

Yep -- 178 bottles. How'd that happen?

I don't think either one of us ever set out to be wine collectors. Sure, we like wine, and we've purchased and consumed our share. But there was never one epiphany where one of us woke up, turned to the other and said, "Honey, I think we should start a wine collection."

Wine collections are for rich people. They seem decadent, and maybe you should be spending your money on something else. Once upon a time we bought plenty of wine, but most of it was from Trader Joe's or Planet Wine's $15 and under rack. And we didn't collect it. We drank it. In many cases, it went straight from the shop to our bellies without spending much time in a rack. I used to use our lone 16 bottle wine rack to store other things, like large format beer bottles and cider, and there was usually plenty of room.

But somewhere around the mid- to late-2000's something started to change.

October 6-12 is Regional Wine Week -- Support Your Local Grape!

Dave McIntyre, in his WineLine blog, posted about October 6-12 being Regional Wine Week. It's the sixth annual celebration of wine made throughout the country and not just on the West Coast, according to McIntyre, who actually started the recognition as part of the drinklocalwine.com blog and along with Jeff Siegel, The Wine Crumudgeon. The focus was to encourage wine writers, bloggers and tweeters to focus on their local wine, wherever that happened to be.