Tag Archives: wine

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.

I Went to L’Accademia di Vino and Learned Nothing About Wine

So I’m going to do one of those year-end posts, too, but for now, I think we can all agree food is more interesting, yes?

Yes.

Yesterday I got out of work at 3 (yes!) for the holiday weekend, and I skedaddled home and got into my running clothes before I could get comfortable on my couch. It was pretty cold outside walking back and forth to work, but once I got into some running tights and my favorite long-sleeved tee and a headband and got back outside, I was just fine. I’d planned on running about 3-4 miles, but felt good and had all the time in the world and ended up running 5. Score.

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I was supposed to meet up with Lacey to go shopping for New Year’s dresses, but our texts totally crossed wires, and instead I met up with her and her boyfriend for some food and drinks.

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You should totally carb-load when you’re planning on looking for the little-est little black dress you can find for New Year’s, right? No? Oh…

We went to L’Accademia di Vino, but all I learned about wine there was that the two I had (both red and white) were wonderful. In all seriousness, I do want to take a wine class one day.

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Everything on the menu looked amazing, so we decided to go splitsies and share this arugula and prosciutto pizza.

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And do their tasting of three pastas. This was actually the perfect amount of food. We got to taste the pastas, but i didn’t feel too full on them.

We had:

  • whole wheat penne alla norma, marinara, eggplant, mozzarella and basil. This is the one I was probably going to get on my own, mostly just because it was whole wheat penne, but it was the most underwhelming of the three. There was just too much going on here.
  • RAVIOLI WITH DUCK. This was every bit as amazing as it sounds.
  • Orecchiette with pork sausage, broccoli rabe and parmesan. My parents like to judge restaurants by their carbonara; I like to judge restaurants by their orecchiette with broccoli rabe and sausage, and this orecchiette got an A+++. I think I liked it so much because it was pretty cheesy.

I haven’t gained any weight over the holidays/since the marathon and my pants aren’t any tighter, but I definitely see the carbs showing up in my belly. I regret nothing, but one of my New Year’s resolutions/goals is definitely going to be to cut back some on the carbs.

I’m also going to have a fun half-marathon training challenge coming up in the new year for those of you training for a spring half with some special incentives thrown in for NYC readers. We’re still putting it together, but is there anything you’d be looking for in a half-marathon training challenge? And tell me about your spring races!