While we up at Crystal Mountain, everything was geared around seeing our niece and nephew in The Music Man at Interlochen, after all that is what the whole trip was about.  Three out of five sisters made it up for the event.  While it sounded like all we did was drink wine that is not true, but the bias or the conceit of this blog tends to emphasize the beverages and there was four of us that really enjoy our wines.  We were scheduling dinner times a bit early, so that everyone could be dressed and ready to make the drive to Interlochen for the show.  One of the evenings we were going to have salmon and my Bride found an enormous side of salmon for the dinner.  I had brought some wood planks in anticipation of doing the salmon that way, but there was so many to feed and no one was quite sure, so we ended up doing them on the grill with a Bourbon sauce that my Bride has discovered and put to good use.  We figured that white wines would be better with the marinade of Bourbon, instead of our usual choice of Pinot Noir.

We started off with a very crisp wine for the season with a very light white wine, from a winery that I have enjoyed and still have a bottle or two in the cellar. The Taft Street Winery Russian River Valley Sauvignon Blanc 2016 was a good choice. Originally the winery was known as Taft Street Garage, and they were what is now termed a “garagiste” and in 1979 they were making wines in a garage, and they gradually moved into an old apple processing plant in Sebastopol. Here was a wine where the fruit came from two estates, Bob Dempel Vineyards and the Giaquinta Valley Vineyard. The wine as would be expected for a Sauvignon Blanc was done in Stainless Steel to maintain the crispness and for the fruit forward taste. As much as I try to avoid descriptors the wine was a very pale and soft color, with good aromatics and the tartness that I enjoy from this grape.  There is just something wonderful about a Sauvignon Blanc when it is done perfectly and this is one wine that I think where this is true.

The other bottle was from a new winery that was established in 2015 by a band of artists, craftspeople, and lovers of life brought their wandering imaginations to a piece of land in Carmel, California. They named this location Folktale Winery and Vineyards. The Folktale Arroyo Seco Chardonnay 2015 has a whimsical label truthful to the image of the winery. The wine began in a vat and then was aged for six months in French Oak of which twenty percent was new. The wine was described as creamy with mineral notes drawing from the Le Mistral Vineyard on their estate when I first received this wine and I would agree with their description. This wine had a production of just under a thousand cases, and the aging potential is claimed for five to six years, though it didn’t stay in our cellar for that long, and that is the problem when you only get one bottle from your wine club.  It was a perfect Chardonnay, too bad that I only had the one bottle, but there were other wines and nobody wanted to be tired in the auditorium.