A Wonderfully Excessive Harvest Festival Weekend

I must admit that there have been moments of slimy doubt slithering in between the sheets with me during the darkest hours of the night; bouts of doubt that rattled my slumber while questioning & re-examining every aspect of winery design while we were building the new place. Try stacking & restacking in varied configurations 600 barrels in your mind at 2 in the morning to see if they will fit in the limited space provided, & you will get a sense of the level of obsessed angst at work.

Then, as construction progressed & the peculiar vision emerged from the cavern cut into our hillside, a suspicion grew that madness had perhaps taken hold of the dangling ganglia, & wasn’t there an old auntie that they had to shut away some years back? Genetics. Surely this sort of thing runs deep through the bone, & not a few people nodded agreement saying “the old fart’s surely gone & done it this time!” So you can vouchsafe me a touch of trepidation as we approached the day when we would finally have visitors visiting the New Place.

Thus it was that I approached last weekend, Harvest Festival Weekend, with a mixture of anticipated fear & squirming pleasure, an effect not unlike watching a very good horror film. What would our Elliptical Society think; how would our club members react?  Would they truly miss all of the twisted, rusted & broken hulks scattered about the old rented property, & would they really pine for that glow-in-the-dark toilet we left behind? And too, expecting around 300 Elliptical members & their guests, there was an added level of hysteria in the air as we attempted to get the new tasting room & kitchen ready for the BIG weekend.

So here is the sequence:

• On Friday the 21^st, we received our 2^nd Certificate of Occupancy for the new winery, this one being particular to the tasting room & kitchen level. To be exact, we received our Certificate a 10 AM on Friday, with the tasting room area still filled with all kinds of construction rubble, & with all of the furniture, etc., stacked outside. A bit tight, the timing, but still doable.

• So we continued to do our wine tasting down in the wine library area on Friday where we were also dealing with incoming grapes.

• At the same time, between tasters & grapes, everyone was running back & forth up & down the hill attempting to pull the tasting room & kitchen together for a grand opening on Saturday.  

• Saturday morning & a whole mess of stuff still to do. Indeed, we were still installing toilets at 10 AM. 

• At 11 AM the floodgates opened. We were wrong on our estimate of visitors. Instead of 300 we ended up with well over 400 people checking out the new place over the three-day weekend.

• And of course on Saturday night we had our Harvest Festival Wine Dinner in our home, adding a new level to our frenetic dance. To complete the cycle of madness, Robin & I were up early on Sunday pressing off a tank of grapes before the Sunday crowd started rolling in.

All in all, a most enjoyable weekend, & though the jury remains out on the question of inbred madness, there did appear to be generalized joy & pleasure exhibited by everyone, staff & guests. So here are a whole slew of photos from Saturday alone, starting with the opening which somehow seems appropriate:

 

Next, chef Laurent Grangien with staff in our new kitchen getting the production of hors d’oeuvres started:

A different hors d’oeuvre for each wine:

 

Mary ready to greet:

 

Our first guests to the new tasting room, & a reaction that warms my heart:

 

Then the crowd, but never overwhelming, just wonderful:

 

The view will be grand once the straw bales are replaced with boulders, seating under the trees, & a few bits & tufts of green things growing:

 

Mo claiming bragging rights for selling the last two bottles of Syrah:

 

Robin leading one of many tours down into the production area:

 

The stairs down to the barrel room on tour:

 

And then the barrel room itself:

 

But of course the day continued late into the night with our wine dinner at our house which itself lies a grand distant fifteen feet away from the new winery. Here is the sequence for the dinner . . .

Two of tables set:

 

Glasses ready on the patio for passed hors d’oeuvres:

 

The patio by night:

 

Bourbon while waiting for the guests:

 

Chef Laurent Grangien bouncing pans on the stove:

 

Dining:

 

The chef answering questions at dinner’s end:

 

Chortling:

 

And finally to bed, perhaps to dream, & hopefully not to dream of mathematically impossible barrels.

Comments

[ruletti]

On todella hienoa, että olet julkaissut tällaista aihe tästä ja mukava kuva kiitos jakaminen tämän meille.

[ruletti]

On todella hienoa, että olet julkaissut tällaista aihe tästä ja mukava kuva kiitos jakaminen tämän meille.