Tag Archives: mohegan sun

Mohegan Sun WineFest ’12

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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.

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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.

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We picked up our wine glasses and got to work.

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Why do they not come pre-filled?

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Bobby Flay!

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

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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.

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

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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.

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

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

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

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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.

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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.

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

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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.

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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.

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Lagunitas Maximus.

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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…

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…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.

Greetings from Mohegan Sun

Greetings from Mohegan Sun!

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Ashley and I hopped a train last night to meet Anne and Tina at Mohegan Sun for the Sun Winefest. (A big thanks to Mohegan Sun for comping our room and passes to the wine festival.) Cait, who will also be here tomorrow, wrote an awesome post describing the winefest (which is my new favorite word), but basically, it features 1,000 beer, wine and spirit brands in their convention center. And yes, I intend to try them all.

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We got into New London around 9 and had a little time to kill before Anne and Tina picked us up, so we made a beeline for the nearest bar, obviously. We ended up at the Y Knot Cafe, a little townie bar with FOUR DOLLAR LONG TRAILS. Love.

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We got to the hotel, dropped our stuff off and made a beeline for dinner at Ballo.

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To you, this is just a ramekin of butter. To me, this is a ramekin of butter in olive oil with herbs and amazingness. I put it on bread, but I really could have just eaten it straight out of the ramekin and been happy. (Is that gross?)

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Since we were basically going to eat and go right to sleep (we’re wild like that), we split a pizza and some sides. These are meatballs with pomodoro and ricotta salata.

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Because anything is wonderful when fried, we had some crispy artichokes with arugula and lemon.

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Pizza with sweet sausage and caramelized onions.

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But the stars of last night were the Brussels sprouts with pancetta and honey. These came out first, and we almost ended a few friendships fighting over them. Sweet, savory and wonderful.

After a long week, we were all beat and went to bed immediately after dinner so we could wake up early to run this morning.

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(Some were more excited than others.)

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Pretty, right?

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Well, we actually ran around a landfill. There’s no running paths around here, so we had to do some improvising.

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Insert cliche yoga poses here.

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And buff Crossfit-ers. She’s going to do a WOD with us in the hotel gym tomorrow. I’m a little nervous.

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After 5.6 miles, we headed back for breakfast, which was also included in our media pass. (Dinners are on our own dime.)

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I got way too hungry to take pictures of my food before I ate it, but I got an omelette and had some bacon and toast on the side.

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Time to drink some wine. High fives for that.

I will most definitely not be posting again today, but feel free to follow me on Twitter for some amusing tweets.