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This year 7 of us piled into 2 cars and hit the open road for NW MN. Well actually the open road didn't come right away since the first stop was in St Louis Park! About 6 miles away from our brunch stop at Victor's 1959 Cafe (where "wine trip 2010" is now penned on the walls), was our first stop: Warehouse Winery. By appointment only, we were able to schedule a tour of these new winery and enjoy all the rich bodied wines they are creating. My favorite was #3, the Sangiovese blend, it was nice and peppery.
Second stop (and second time Google map failed us) finally brought us to Millner Heritage Vineyard and Winery in Kimball. Opening the tasting doors in May of 2009 (but in operation since 2006) - Millner is one of the newest in MN and they have a strong tie to their heritage (hence the name!). Our host was dressed in a traditional German outfit that was pretty adorable. :) All the wines have a German/Austrian name. My favorite here? Freizeit. Great patio wine for those warm summer evenings! There website is helpful to know how long you can continue to age the wine (if people can actually wait around to drink it!).
We then drove to our rest stop for the night: Brophy Lake Resort. So... who else knew it was fishing opener this wine trip weekend?? The stir that 7 girls made traveling to a resort lake was pretty impressive! And then when the guys realized we couldn't get our fire pit started, oh boy. Finally we had a hero come to our rescue. Although I still claim that we couldn't get the fire started cuz once we realized we needed paper we got distracted and started to read the magazines instead. This resort was so fantastic, I highly recommend it and if you go fishing opener, you get to experience a very interesting subculture!
The next day started with the first of our 6 theme stops....
Then we continued on to the real business at hand, drinking wine! We traveled to Carlos Creek Winery and stayed for much too short of a time. The grounds here are so nice and they had all sorts of activities that we couldn't just stick around for. We did go on a tour here and then quickly slammed some wines. Recently Carlos was taken over by new management, and I think they are still working out their recipes. I had a hard time finding a wine I could name my favorite, but finally sampled Trinity and I really liked it!!
It was then off to a surprisingly wonderful stop: Leatherwood Vinegary. I say surprising because I left with 2 bottles of vinegar and I have never used vinegar in my recipes or meals before! I thought I didn't like it. One man's hobby has turned into a exciting new adventure! Set up in a humble workshop connected to him home, there are endless containers of vinegar of all stages of fermentation. I left with a tangy combo of rosemary and apple and a plain apple cider. Yum.
We had the luxury of not having to stay in a hotel or resort the second night, someone in the group had a cabin right along the travel path! We visited the best Mexican joint in the Northwoods: Companeros. We were all wishing we were wearing stretchy pants by the time we left there!! Once back for the evening, we watched loons dive for endless minutes and ran from june bugs.
The next morning was lazy and wonderful. We only had 1 winery left: Forestedge Winery. I have to admit, I was a bit hesitant. All their wines are fruit wines and well, the thought of drinking sweet fruit wines was not appealing after a weekend of wine tasting. But before we were were going to see if we could handle it, we had theme stop #2!
Ok! Now we could drink down some syrup...however, we were in a treat for a treat - these wines were dry, not syrupy sweet! The black currant and rhubarb raspberry were both my favorite. Great stop!
We then had the long drive home from Laporte to Minneapolis, thankfully we had 4 kodak moments to stop at!!
Ok! Now we could drink down some syrup...however, we were in a treat for a treat - these wines were dry, not syrupy sweet! The black currant and rhubarb raspberry were both my favorite. Great stop!
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