All posts by steve

Seafood Sundays at Teutonic Wines

2017, Food, good, On-Site, Whites

Teutonic Wines has been hosting Seafood Sunday — a different seafood, a different seafood dish every sunday through this summer.  A great way to get people like us to drop in!  We don’t usually take food photos, but we’ll make an exception this time around.  Seafood Sunday continues through the end of September.

Joyce demonstrates the BBQ combo

BBQ!

Here’s Joyce showing off the Ahi tuna

tuna!

Here’s Steve with the crab mac ‘n’ cheese

crab mac 'n' cheese!

Yes, we are lunching at a picnic table in the bed of a pickup truck with our feet cooling in a kiddie pool!

pickup

…and if it’s not Seafood Sunday, you can still order a frito pie!

frito pie

Skunk Brothers — Testing The Limits of What’s in a Name

2017, good, On-Site, Spirits

Skunk Brothers in Stevenson, WA. Boy, doesn’t that name make you want to pour some of their liquids down your throat…? I can’t say that the name works for me, but I guess in terms of a name, it is memorable.

Before we get there let’s start with a nice photo. Here’s Joyce representing her inner Viking Shield Maiden. She’s being nice about it here. Don’t make her kick your ass.

Skunk

Follow the signs, Neo.

Ok, they are so new that they suffer the challenge new whiskey distilleries have. It takes a few years to have aged product to offer customers. Their real product is at least a year off. So it goes.

What you can carry away today are fine things made from unaged white lightening. Our fav was the Apple Pie which has a delightful apple flavor and avoids the syrupy sweet flavor we’ve had elsewhere.

Their tasting room is attractively appointed and a nice cool place after the summer sun.

It’s a family affair there at Skunk Brothers. That day Jamie Donoho was wo-manning the tasting room. She favored us with a quick tour of their shiny facility and took excellent care of us. Two thumbs up for the tasting experience.

While their building is classic dull modern light-industrial park, across the parking lot is the glory of the Columbia Gorge.

…and right there is where an international kiteboarding competition is held. While we watched kiteboarder after kiteboarder launched themselves 30 feet in the air right in front of us.

Wine Crüe

2017

Well, Teutonic Wines is one of my personal favorite places to visit.  Well, it’s almost as close to my living room as my refrigerator is, and I enjoy the spirit of the place.  (and they have tasty drinkables.)

Here’s two pics from their last event:

wine

These fine folkes live so close to my place we’ve made plans to hang out at the Ship Ahoy.

If you know what that is, you are very Portland.

Lyle Wine Weekend 2017

2017, good, On-Site

Here’s the deal — Lyle, Washington, lovely place.  They got the local wineries together for a group event.  One $15 fee, you get a glass and a welcoming smile everywhere you go: http://www.wineriesoflyle.com/

Is the Columbia Gorge lovely?  Yes, yes indeed it is:

What mysteries await us?  Let’s just see…

Syncline.  An old favorite of ours.

See back there?  They’ve expanded their garden / picnic space.  Lovely, lovely place to visit.



Cor Cellars.  They have built a beautiful tasting room.  Spacious, airy, comfortable.  We like to focus  on what people are doing *right* vs. what people are doing wrong.  Some years ago we had a poor experience at Cor, this is the first time we’ve been back.  The location is absolutely lovely, but the people there aren’t doing more than  pouring juice in a glass.  Sorry gang, you’ve got some work to do on the experience.

Voted as Most Improved: Domaine Pouillon

Our first visit some years ago was quite lovely.  Down by the barn, with all the wine making machinery, a giant wheel of cheese, goats, chickens…. very informal.  Like hanging out with the family. Lovely.  We really enjoyed it.

On our second visit, they’d built an official tasting room up the hill.  The experience was cold, like visiting a museum gift shop. We didn’t want to go back.

This visit, however, was a pleasant switcheroo.  What was different?  We think two things.  The physically layout of the room was more welcoming.  By having the tasting bar to the right on the way in seems to open up the room in a way that wasn’t true before.  Also, Joyce believes the people behind the wine were behind the bar, and showed a lot more heart.  It’s more than just a job, eh?



Memaloose.  Man, they have a lovely view of the Gorge.  Their wine was fine.  Go check it out.



And the big winner for the weekend is: Tetrahedron

Here’s Darren Michaels holding court in his tasting room in Lyle.  Why was Tetrahedron the best experience of the weekend?  Why is it the only place we bought a bottle to take with?  I’ll tell you:  Enthusiasm.  These people are excited by what they’re doing.

Oh, and we got to talk about Dungeons and Dragons.  That’s always fun for Steve.

Lovely hand painted bottles.  You know you need a couple of these for your gift-giving needs:

Instead of nothing, or a bowl of Costco crackers, Tetrahedron stepped up and showed the other wineries how it’s done.  That’s right.  Six wines to sample, and six snack-o-miendos to pair with each one.  But not just any snack — well picked to compliment the flavors of the wine.  Note: only two of the other wineries on this weekend’s even bothered to have Costco crackers.  Tetrahedron went above and beyond.    If you’re only going to stop in one tasting room in Lyle, this is the one.

Now, if you’re a regular reader, you know that this blog is about the experience of visiting and not so much about the actual wines.  Why?  Well, we are blessed in that almost every place you visit has good wine, so for our blog we concentrate on the experience and how it affects our ultimate purchasing decisions.

In this case, on top of the tasting room experience, Tetrahedron threw us for a loop with their wine.  Not only did Joyce enjoy their white wines, she even bought a bottle of white wine for later.  That never happens.  Joyce is not interested in white wines.  It’s not that white wines are bad, it’s just that they are mostly boring on the tongue. Tetrahedron’s whites are built with a more herbaceous quality.  We aren’t going to go into flavor detail here, like the old “notes of tobacco and broken dreams over BBQ and the souls of forgotten swamp children’s coffee” kinds of things you might hear elsewhere.  Probably the closest thing I can compare their three whites is to a cocktail of a regular white wine plus a bit of a European liquor.

Result?  Yummy!  Go get some for yourself.  You know you want to!

…and now some bonus shots of our heroes in action:

 

 

 

Heritage Distilling

2017, good, On-Site, Spirits

When in Gig Harbor, WA why not stop in and visit Heritage Distilling?

It’s a lovely place, this Gig Harbor:

water

If you look close, you’ll see a giant monster volcano decorating the sky and waiting to turn us snotty northwest types into volcanic ash or disaster refugees…

water

Should you need to settle your nerves, here’s Kelton, your friendly tasting room guide.

awesome

Then there’s this guy:

Welcome to the Pacific NorthWest.  We do things maybe a little different. In this case, you can get a growler of booze.  A GROWLER OF BOOZE.  Up here in the Portland area, growler stations for filling bottles to-go has gotten quite popular for our fine craft brews.  This is the first time I’ve seen it for spirits.

Joyce is fond of the brown spirits, so here’s a close-up of our tasting.  Overall we rate their offering as “dang fine” though it’s clear their offering will improve as they have more time to age their product.  They sell a wide variety of flavored vodkas.  We’re not fond of those — what’s the point of something that tastes like nothing, except this bit tastes like blueberries?  Whoop-de-do, can I just have some blueberries?  However, from a business perspective a distillery has to sell something today while they wait for their aged product to be ready for market.  The way to enjoy vodka is to go here: http://kachkapdx.com/

Anyhoo – their gin products are also worthy of attention.  Check out their “soft gin”.  You heard it here first!

yes

I generally like to post positive product reviews, but sometimes I’m forced to warn the reader.  In this case, their Brown Sugar Bourbon – http://heritagedistilling.com/product-tag/bsb-brown-sugar-bourbon/ is something they are pushing on customers.  I’ve even seen TV commercials for it.

Ok, maybe you’ll like it, in which case please enjoy.  However, if you’re interested in one spirit over another, you can save yourself the time and money by just buying a bunch of this: http://www.quakeroats.com/products/hot-cereals/instant-oatmeal/maple-and-brown-sugar.aspx cuz, that’s what it tastes like.  And if you include it in your tasting flight, don’t drink it last because the cloying sweet maple flavor will follow you for a long time.

Also, be sure to double-check your receipt before making your way out.  They charged us incorrectly and we didn’t notice until later.  I’m sure they would have fixed it had we been willing to drag my malfunctioning hip back to their location to discuss.

Nehalem Bay Winery

2017, On-Site

Here we are at the Nehalem Bay Winery.

The best part about this place is the building.  It’s a quaint Bavarian-style structure originally built as a creamery around 1907.

winery

The staff was friendly, though harried.  I’m afraid the wine itself was a letdown.  Most of the places we go, the wine is fine.  If we’re not fond of it, it’s because it’s just not the style we find most pleasing.  Here I’m afraid we just didn’t find the wine to be very good.  In fact, I’m trying to be nice here.  A couple of them I found to be downright unpleasant.  However, maybe you’ll like their product better, so go check ‘m out.

They have a wide variety of fruit wines. Cranberry, plum, apple, blackberry, concord grape, peach…  Probably best off as an ingredient in something else, but definitely not dull.

We scooted back to Nehalem Bay State Park.

Shafer Vineyard Cellars

2017, good, On-Site, Reds, Whites

Well the photo on their web site is so much better than our attempts you’ll just have to go look at it here: http://www.shafervineyards.com/

Just west of Forest Grove Shafer Vineyards is worth the trip just for the view itself. Something we noticed right away is they’ve been doing the do since 1978 and you can see it in the size of the vines they’ve got growing out of the ground there.

…and they are friendly. Here’s myself and Ryan, our man behind the bottles:

Shafer puts an unusual twist on the winery tasting room experience by also having an extensive collection of Christmas decorations available for sale … nearly every possible item the mind can conceive is available as a Christmas tree ornament, including St. Louis. You might as, “why, god, why?” And I would have to agree with you. However, there it is. Once you’ve figured out how to stay away from the Christmas stuff, you’ll find they have some very nice picnic tables just begging you to stay awhile and enjoy yourself, and I think you should!

The big winner in today’s wine lineup is clear, and it’s a white! (Frequent readers will know we’re more tickled by phat reds generally) Their 2014 Müller-Thurgau has an unusual and very pleasant flavor. Well, we like it at least, and maybe you will too.

wine

Oysters and Saké One

2017, Food, good, Rice Wine

Hey kids! Join the club, you know you want to! Joyce joined the club at Saké One and as a result we were there today and this happened:

oysters

Take a look at the menu.  “Stinging Nettle Oil” — ok, who the heck thinks up these things?  Truth or Bullshit?  Our server told us this story: “They make it themselves.  You have to be really careful as the stems are poisonous.”  This much I know is true — that oyster was the best of the six very fine oysters.

Here’s Joyce making the face of sadness:

Hats off to Saké One for a stunning lineup of shellfish!  We enjoyed the saké as well.  My personal fav:  http://sakeone.com/g-sake  Has a particular taste and mouthfeel, honestly demands more study on my part.

Hip Chicks Do Wine (and Yoga)

2017, On-Site

Why has the rent and property costs in Portland gotten so bloody high?  Well, since I moved to the Creston-Kenilworth neighborhood in SE Portland about six years ago, many tasty places have popped up.  My place lies equidistant between Hopworks Brewing and Gigantic Brewing.  Recently not one, not two, but three new breweries have popped up: Baerlic Brewing Company, Ross Island Brewing and Ground Breaker Brewing and Gastropub.  All a short bike ride away.

And there’s also Teutonic Wine Company around the corner and the oldest winery in the city of Portland: Hip Chicks Do Wine.  Yeah, Portland’s got a lot of what people like.

But we’re not here to talk about that, we’re here to talk about yoga:

yoga sign

That’s right.  Yoga and wine tasting.  Submitted for your amusement:

pose

They squeezed 27 of us into the winery and ran us through an hour of gentle yoga poses, then a round of tasting their wines.  An innovative event, we like that!

pose

Keep up the good work, Hip Chicks!