WBW #12: Drink Local
Since we here at Belly-Timber are all about cheap wines on a cheap budget (Mmm, Gato Negro, baby…), we’ve yet to participate in Wine Blogging Wednesday. It’s not that we don’t like good wine — we love it and cherish it and wish we could take it home and show it a good time more often — it’s just that, well, to be blunt, we’re cheap. If we’ve got thirty bucks to blow on a nice meal at home, twenty of it’s going into Ahi steaks and the ten bucks we’ve left is getting us the largest amount of wine we can find this side of a box. We do not do boxes.
This month, we make an exception.
It’s Local Challenge month and the assignment for Wine Blogging Wednesday is “Drink Local. Real Local. … Drink a wine from the winery nearest to your apartment/house/shack/bungalow/flat/tent.” Lenn from Lenndevours has even threatened to get out the atlas and fact check, just to be sure we’re not cheating. I figured we’d save him the trouble, so I did a little checking of our own with Yahoo Maps’ handy driving directions function and came up with this short list:
1) San Juan Cellars. At 5.3 miles from our home, they’re definitely the closest, but there’s a catch. The location isn’t so much a winery as a gift shop wherein they sell their wines, all of which are made with grapes grown in Eastern Washington, at least 150 miles away. Not exactly what I had in mind for drinking local.
2) Westcott Bay Orchards. A bit too far away for our purposes at 15.9 miles, but they’re worth mention as a unique winery that produces a tasty hard cider from “vintage” European cider apples. They’re on our list to check out in the near future.
3) Lopez Island Vineyards. Yahoo Maps failed me on this one, but I’d say 6 miles as the gull flies. Or as the orca swims. You get the picture. They feature several estate-grown wines and are a perfect choice for a visit … if the visit didn’t involve a full day off and a battle with tourists over space on the inter-island ferry. We’ll be saving that one for later as well.
4) San Juan Vineyards. Ah, here we are, just 8.9 miles from the house, and they grow their own! Time for a quick road trip!
The winery, established in 1996, is located three miles northwest of Friday Harbor on Roche Harbor road. B. of Culinary Fool visited last month and wrote about a camel she spied amongst the cows across the road. We missed the camel, but discovered instead this rather charming cat in the parking lot. A cat who fell deeply in love with the bumper of our Caravan and refused to leave without serious coaxing.
To the right of the parking lot sits the gift shop and tasting room. A century ago, this same building was San Juan Island’s one-room school house. Up the gentle, south-facing slope from the shop’s deck are outbuildings for the wine’s manufacture, a tiny chapel (available for weddings, of course), and beyond that, eight acres of cool-climate varietal grapes, designated for the production of the winery’s two Estate grown wines, Madeleine Angevine and Siegerrebe.
The first of the two Estate grown wines wasn’t available for tasting, so we zeroed in on the second, eager to discover what a truly local wine could offer us — and we were not disappointed.
The Siegerrebe has a citrus bouquet but with hints of spice, and the flavor — spice, honey, grapefruit — was delicate, not overpowering, but sweet enough that we both thought this wine would be best served as an aperitif or with a single, subtle dish (steamed butter clams or crab would be my local choices).
It might seem surprising that island-grown grapes could produce such a sweet wine, except that the San Juans have the geographical fortune of resting in the rain shadow of the Olympic Mountains. With its own collection of microclimates, our island gets just 18 to 28 inches of rainfall a year, compared to a whopping 120 in the little town of Forks on the peninsula’s western edge. Seattle, a part-time rain shadow beneficiary, gets 37. East of us, the Cascade rain shadow provides the Yakima and Columbia Valleys with one of the best grape-growing (and apple-growing) climates in the Northwest, and this is where many Puget Sound wineries get all but a select few of their varietals.
San Juan Vineyards ships regionally; their website lists a number of restaurants, grocers, and specialty shops in the Islands and in other parts of Washington that carry their wines. Where Chopper and I work, we carry the Chardonnay by the bottle, and their 2002 Syrah (a three time gold medal winner) is our house syrah.
We left the vineyard with a bottle of the Siegarrebe for $13.75 and a bargain: a three-for-twenty sale on their Semillon Chardonnay. There’s not a chance those four bottles will last us the month, but we’ve just scratched the surface of drinking locally. We’ve got Lopez Island and some hard cider ahead of us, and, come to think of it, it’s been far too long since we’ve headed down to the pub for a pint of locally-brewed Moggy Mild.
For more food blogging and photos from San Juan Vineyards, check out B’s post at Culinary Fool!
