Mohegan Sun WineFest ’12

Ashley and I are back in NYC, and our fun weekend is over.

AND IT WAS FUN. I’ll share you with the pictures I can share and still keep my job, but let’s just say we had a really good time.

The wine festival was held in Mohegan Sun’s convention center, and it was just a bit more fun than any other convention I’ve been to before.

We picked up our wine glasses and got to work.

Why do they not come pre-filled?

Bobby Flay!

It was really crowded, but we never had to wait in line more than a few seconds for a pour.

I tried to stop for snacks wherever I saw them so that I didn’t pass out mid-wine fest. These Wicked Natural dips were really good. (Or, you know, wicked good.) The guy tried to tell us that this was the only caramel mustard dip in the world, but we saw another one today at The Black Dog. Fail, buddy.

Hydration. (In all seriousness, we took a few water breaks over the course of the day so that we didn’t die.)

As I said yesterday, there were more than 1,000 different vendors there–so there were some that I’d heard of but plenty that I hadn’t. There were also wines I’d heard of that were distributed by a larger distributor that had other lines of wine in their portfolios. For example, Bronco Wine Company owns approximately a million wines.

This White Wedding wasn’t fabulous, but it’s a cute name.

Important things I learned from Cabot. Their tomato basil cheese was AMAZING.

Um, I mostly just took pictures of wines and wineries whose names I really liked.

This Gloria Ferrer was one of my favorite sparkling wines that I tried. At one point, Anne and I got separated from the others, and Ashley thought to look for me at the booths where they had bubbly. That’s how much I love my bubbly.

The Serres wines were also really good. I enjoyed them because these Spanish wines were a little different from the California, South American and French wines we tried. I also enjoyed them because after quite a few tastes of wine, I kept trying to roll my Rs as I pronounced them. No, really. I swear I minored in Spanish.

After trying our million wines, we made a beeline for the beer rooms upstairs.

I don’t know if it was because it was late in the day and everyone had a lot to drink by then, or if the beer people were just more fun than the wine people, but we had a blast up here talking with all kinds of random people.

I thought of my college bestie, Lindsay, who lives in Hawaii, when I saw this one. I drank my weight in Longboard when I visited her in ’10.

Lagunitas Maximus.

Shockingly, after an entire afternoon of drinking, we were exhausted. We headed back to the room for a bit to recharge our batteries before dinner…

…but dinner ended up being room service pizza because we were all so exhausted. We totally did not make our 10pm reservations at Bar Americain. Ashley and Tina fell asleep hard, but Anne and I snuck out for just a little more wine.

Thanks again to Mohegan Sun for comping our room and wine festival tickets, and thanks to my lovely friends for an awesome weekend!

What’s your favorite wine? I love sauvignon blanc and anything dry and bubbly the best. Wine’s I’m not a huge fan of: moscatos and rieslings–they’re too sweet for me.