"...if anyone orders Merlot, I'm leaving. I am NOT drinking any fucking Merlot!"

That quote was from the movie, Sideways, which was quite a popular little film a few years ago. Having gone on my virgin winetasting tour, I can now say the movie perfectly captured the essence of the Santa Inez wine country near Santa Barbara. Tom Nowak (my non-blood uncle's brother), Jas and I visited five wineries on Friday: Sunstone, Lincourt, Firestone, Curtis and Artiste. Beautiful country - the poster close-up above from Curtis illustrates it fairly well.


"Hey Man, I'm drinking wine, eating cheese and catching some rays."
- Donald Sutherland as Oddball in Kelly's Heroes

Pinot. Chardonnay. Syrah. Viognier. So many wines; so little time. I wouldn't call myself a huge wine drinker. I prefer beer and a good mixer - brandy old-fashioned sweet. There are a TON of wineries in this area...and a ton of different wines. I thought we'd be tasting and spitting, but the spittoon was simply for pouring the wine out that you hadn't finished. After five wineries, I was pretty much full. Typically, you taste 5-6 different wines, going from driest to sweetest and ending with the winery's most recent, or featured vintage. I'm not a savvy winetaster so most of the time I stood there like a dope listening to the pourer go on about "subtleness", "palate" and "oakey taste". It was $10 per winery for the tasting privileges and you got to keep the glass (with the winery emblem - we didn't).

The wine urges me on, the bewitching wine, which sets even a wise man to singing and to laughing gently and rouses him up to dance and brings forth words which were better unspoken.
- Homer, The Odyssey, bk. XIV, l. 463

The vines are meticulously pruned, the air's a bit drier and it's warmer - such a welcome change from Los Angeles. People are picnicking - it made me think of what Tuscany might "feel" like. Below, Tom and Jason are imbibing (Jason's attempt-ing to "trill"). Tom knows quite a bit about wine - partly from living in Santa Barbara all his life and partly from the killer wine tasting party he throws every year during Fiesta.

Bacchus we thank who gave us wine Which warms the blood within our veins; That nectar is itself divine. The man who drinks not, yet attains By godly grace to human rank Would be an angel if he drank.
- Pierre Motin, drinking song

Tom's siblings - Greg and Laura - joined us at our last winery, Artiste. An artist was commissioned to paint a label for one of Artiste's wines. I will share the story with you on another blog. The other Nowak siblings - my uncle Bob, Chuck, Rick, Carol and Bev - were missed, as was the Ircink clan. Oh well, "more wine!" for us.

"Now, a clever man would put the poison into his own goblet, because he would know that only a great fool would reach for what he was given. I am not a great fool, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of you. But you must have known I was not a great fool, you would have counted on it, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of me..." - Vizzini in The Princess Bride