Weekend Escapade - Week 40

This past weekend started on Friday when Dennis and I went to Abbeville to go to a play at the Abbeville Opera House and we stayed at the Belmont Inn. Both of these buildings are very quaint and hold a LOT of history. We love staying at the Belmont and can’t wait to return in April to see another play. 

The play we saw was Everybody Loves Opal. If you ever get the chance, go see this play! It is funny, cute and in the end has a sweet message for all ages. The cast was amazing! Maryanne Campbell played the title character and did an amazing job! Bradford Winter was played by D. C. Moody. We had seen both of them in Arsenic and Old Lace over a year ago. I have to wonder if D C likes playing the bad boy. J Sydney Wells played Gloria Gurlock,, Dave DiGeronimo played Solomon Bozo, the Doctor was played by Bruce Johnston and Office Joe Jankie by Taylor McNair. The entire cast was amazing! We also got to chat with most of the cast at Tinkers Alley Bar which is the bar/restaurant at the Belmont. I so appreciate them letting me invade their group for a little bit!

The remainder of the winter season consists of the following plays and I hope I get to see some of the actors from Everybody Loves Opal in JB (the one Dennis have decided to attend in April).

Coney Island Christmas Dec 1,2,8,9,15 & 16

Vanya, Sonia, Masha & Spike Feb 2,3,9 &10 (We’ve seen this show at another venue & it’s great!)

The Wind in the Willows Mar 9, 10, 11, 16 & 17

J.B Apr 6, 7, 8, 13 & 14

We got up Saturday morning, had breakfast at the hotel and then rambled around downtown Abbeville for a bit. We found a fun little moonshine distillery called Red Barn Likker, and can’t wait to go back & get some of the apple spice mixer and his 70 proof moonshine.

We left there and headed for GA. Our first stop was CeNitaVineyard. Very quaint winery with a great story. The winery used to be a dairy farm. They have a lovely red barn in the back for events. There was a wedding Saturday. They were taking pictures while we were there. Beautiful scenery for a wedding. They had literally just finished harvesting the Chambourcin grapes that morning and we got to sample some of the fresh juice. That was a real treat. All the wines were very nice, but the Buckie Estate Wine and the Rouge Estate Wine were my favorites.

We left there and headed to Yonah Mountain Vineyards. The venue is lovely and again, there was a wedding going on in their event space. Other than wedding attendees, the winery was very busy on Saturday. They have 17 acres of vine that consist of Sauvignon Blanc, Chardonnay, Petit Manseng, Cab Sav, Merlot, Cab Franc, Malbec and Petit Verdot.

From there we headed to The Cottage Vineyard. Nathan, the son of the owner did our tasting. This 7’ tall man made my 6’3” husband look short! The bear cub on their logo was an actual bear that was on the property at one time. Again, they had several really nice wines, but Dennis & I decided on a bottle of the Baby Doll Legs Rose. We also enjoyed the Southern Sass which is a peach wine and is named for one of the employees that has worked at the winery from the beginning. We sat outside and met some extremely nice people.

Sunday we stayed close to home and went to see Andre at Russian Chapel Hills and enjoyed a bottle of his very nice Mosaic. It was a tad rainy but the porch is covered and wide enough that we got to sit outside and play with the dogs (as usual!). 

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NOTE: above blog was actually written by Jenni Turner, only posted by Dennis.

Weekend Escapade - week 39 of 2017

Thursday night Jenni and I decided to go to  Mountain Brook Vineyards in Tryon for trivia night. Oops! Turns out trivia night is Thursday the following week. We found the winery closed. Luckily for us, we found Owners Dennis and Miriam still at the tasting room shipping wine to out of state customers. After a laugh, We were allowed to purchase a bottle of thier Rosè. We sat and chatted with Dennis and Miriam as we enjoyed our wine. I’ll soon have a new blog post up with a full review of Mountain Brook. It was just wonderful to  talk local wineries with them.

Check out these views

Yes, there are horses on site and Jenni can’t leave without showing the horses some love.

Friday night Jenni and I enjoyed a bottle of Barn Owl Red from Owls Eye Vineyard in Shelby, N.C.  while relaxing at home on our patio. The weather was perfect for sitting outside. Fall has arrived.

Saturday we headed to Germanton Vineyard and Winery , up above Winston-Salem.  Named after the community in which it is located, owners David and Judy Simpson opened way back in 1981. Both David and Judy are cancer survivors by the way. The winery shares a building with their art gallery. David joked that even beyond the fine works of art in the gallery, he and Judy are serious junk collectors.

They have a small organic vineyard on their property just behind the winery, and buy all local grapes and fruit to supplement. Many of their wines have won medals at competitions not only in North Carolina, but also in New York and California. My favorite was the Suana Red which recently won bronze in the Fingers Lakes wine competition. There are many fine works of art to peruse, many with North Carolina themes and several are available for offers. In the gallery are fine art paintings, sculptures, and photographs from some eighty plus different artist. We each had a glass and enjoyed browsing the gallery.  The first picture below is a priceless drawing by the owners granddaughter.

Upon leaving, we consulted the Vino Wine app and decided we’d venture further North to Autumn Creek Vineyards.

Autumn Creek Vineyards, located on incredibly beautiful property with thirteen total acres of vines. Planted in the Vineyards are eight varieties, Merlot, Viognier, Chardonnay, Pinot Gris, Cab Franc, Chambourchin, Petit Manseng, and Riesling. The tasting room, pavilion, and cabins all have a modern rustic look. The tasting room is surrounded by a beautiful deck overlooking the lake and surrounding Vineyards.

Autumn Creek offers a large rustic pavilion,  and a gazebo by the lake perfect for weddings or other events. Rustic cabins nestled in the vineyards are available for overnight stays. A bottle of their wine is included with each nights stay.

As our Sundays are normally reserved for visiting our local favorites, we drove up to Parker-Binns Vineyards. We love Roberto, Karen, and Dee at Parker-Binns. Our joke is, a bottle of wine, dinner, and entertainment for about $20. Each Sunday, the winery has a local musician playing and bakes pizza in their outdoor brick oven. The pizzas are not sold, just cut in small slices and brought around for everyone to share. Just for information, the pizza is really, really good. We ran into some friends, and met a few new ones, all sat around and discussed wine, real estate, and whatever other subjects came up. The people are just fantastic, the environment just relaxing, the views fantastic, music good,  the pizza superb, and the wine is the star of the show.  Sundays at Parker-Binns make for a really fun afternoon.

These pictures taken as we were leaving were just a perfect way to close out our weekend.

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Think Local: Discover Local Wineries and Purchase Their Wines in the VinoWine App

As the creators of VinoWine, we’re honored and thrilled to have been asked to write as guest bloggers on Winery Escapades! Dennis recently reached out to us asking if we could outline some of VinoWine’s app features and share how we got started on this venture. We were very humbled to learn that Dennis and his wife Jenni use the VinoWine app to discover and track nearby wineries and we hope that, as you learn more about us, you will as well!

When it comes to VinoWine there's really something for everybody. You can discover nearby wineries, keep track of the ones you've visited, see which wineries are having events around you, and track the upcoming wine festivals that will be in your area.
     
In addition to being a winery finder, we're proud to announce that we just launched our newest feature; the VinoWine Marketplace. VinoWine now gives small to medium sized wineries the ability to advertise and sell their wine directly to our users. We created the marketplace so wine lovers can discover and purchase those hard to find wines which are made from wineries who don’t distribute them. Many of you will be happy to hear that as of last week, we just started shipping wines to fifteen different states which include North Carolina, one of Dennis and Jenni's frequented areas! With every passing month, we add more wineries and their wines for sale, allowing us to build a diverse marketplace capable of meeting any wine lover’s needs.

So here’s a little about us. Our names are Mike Barefoot (no relation to the wine) and Mike Lawler. We’re commonly known as “the Mikes.” Both of us are military veterans (Marine Corps and Army infantrymen) who decided to switch career paths from defense contracting to being our own bosses. In late 2009, we met each other while working for a tech company in Northern Virginia doing geo-spatial work (mapping out people and places). Within a few years of us meeting there was a need for both of us to regularly fly over to London, England to conduct business alongside our two bosses. At the end of each day we felt it necessary to explore and soak up the local history and culture that surrounded us. We found all those things at the local pubs. When word of the upcoming 2012 London Olympics reached us, an idea dawned on VinoWine's CEO, Mike Lawler. Being the head of technology for our company, specifically focusing on geo-spatial mapping, it was a no-brainer for him; we were going to create an app that located every London pub that surrounded the Olympic stadiums. Within a short amount of time, we created an app that allowed people from any country to “check in” to any pub within the app, showing other users which countries were represented at these pubs. We lovingly gave the app the name, BRU. Following the Olympics, we were then asked by friends to create a similar app that provided locational information on all wineries in the commonwealth of Virginia. We both liked the idea so we sat down and planned out how we wanted the app to look and function. Over time, that idea spawned the beginnings of the VinoWine app and today we now cover the entire U.S. We loved the idea of getting out of the confines of our brick-and-mortar office and working with folks who, like us, are passionate about wine and getting their wines into the homes of consumers. Needless to say, it’s thirty work.

What originally started as a hobby for us in our spare time quickly became a fulltime job. Since our founding, we’ve been tirelessly working on partnering with wineries across the U.S. getting them to add their upcoming events and wine lists into our app for our users to view and rate. We developed interactive tasting menus that allow our users to rate the wines as they taste them at the wineries. That way you’ll always remember where you were and what you liked. As our partnerships with wineries grew we then decided to have our app and website also feature a direct-to-consumer marketplace so we could sell wines that are hard to locate and purchase. With VinoWine, every winery and vineyard that can ship to consumers can now advertise and sell their wines directly to our users like never before.

You might be amazed at this fact because we sure were: 60% of U.S. wineries don’t distribute their wine! The reason; they just can’t afford it. So this means you won’t find their wines sold in grocery stores or readily available online. Knowing that, we decided to partner with local wineries and create a marketplace that allows them to sell their wine to people like all of us. In the end, we not only wanted to create an awesome app and website that helps everyone enjoy the sophistication of wine tasting, we also wanted to give our users a customer service experience that feels more like a friendship than a business.

We gotta say, the best part of our job (other than tasting a LOT of great wines) is meeting or emailing back and forth with the people who use VinoWine. We receive emails every day from our users that inform us of wineries that have either opened or closed, helping us keep our interactive winery map up-to-date. We love to email everyone back to thank them and from there a dialogue or two will begin. We feel very strongly that every one of our users or social media followers is also a part of our company and we strive to make everyone as happy as we can by providing the best service possible.

The VinoWine app is available for download on iOS and Android devices (Wine sales coming soon to Android devices). We invite you to learn more about what we do by checking out our website, or even better, downloading the VinoWine app and trying it for yourself! We’re selling some really great wines from wineries across Virginia and in the month of October we’ll be opening up our marketplace to the rest of the country’s wineries. Feel free to shoot us an email with any questions or just to say hello!

Mike and Mike

Co-founders of VinoWine

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Douglas Vineyards, Kannapolis NC

Finishing up this past Saturday, August 12th, 2017, we all headed over to Douglas Vineyards   We'll really fond of Douglas Vineyards, a true family owned small farm vineyard.  This was our second time visiting, we were glad to see that they were very busy. The first time we visited, it was late and not as busy. The owners have a beautiful lab, and he was jumping up with his front paws on the bar as if to say, "hey what about me?"  We were able to find a really good groupon, to include tastings, souvenir glass, and one bottle of wine, so look for it.  Douglas is growing muscadine on site, and are also making some good fruit wines.  My favorites were the Blush, which is semi-dry, the Apple Sauce, the Starting Point (Strawberry), and the Just Peachy.  A bottle of the Apple Sauce came home with us.  The winery has a beautiful porch with tables, and some nice adirondack chairs scattered about under some shade trees. A very relaxing place to sit and enjoy a bottle with friends.  Loved this note from their website, "when you visit the “D” you are not just indulging in some delicious wine, you are becoming a member of our family."

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