Delaplane Cellars

It was a long, cold, and cashflow negative winter that has kept us from visiting our friends who own wineries. It's been so long since we had visited Jim and Betsy at Delaplane that we had two quarterly wine pick ups waiting for us. Because Carter would be out of school for the summer and would be out of town, we would have the day to ourselves with no worrying about what kind of trouble the teenager was into. So we promised ourselves last weekend that we would go out to Delaplane on Sunday. Besides needing to pick up wine, I also had some restaurant business to discuss with Betsy, but mainly, we just needed to get away for a few hours and have some adult time.

Cobbler Mountains from Delaplane's Tasting Room

After a morning of relocating shrubs from our flower beds to a new hedgerow between our house and our neighbor's, we sat in the shade of the pergola drinking our coffee and chatting as we are inclined to do of a Sunday morning. And about 12:30 or so, we headed over to Delaplane, where we tasted the latest wines and then settled in on the patio with a bottle of Left Bank 2012 and lunch.

Unfortunately, the breeze was so strong that putting the umbrellas up was not feasible and it was so bright without the umbrella that we decided to head back inside. With the great breeze coming up the hillside and all the doors to the tasting room open, it felt nearly like being outside.

Our Usual Lunch

As we were finishing up lunch, Jim came down the hill from the house and settled in with us. He disappeared and came back with a bottle of Duet 2014, bottled mostly from Mark Malick's grapes and then at some point later while I was busy talking to somebody else who was looking for a job at the restaurant and as I was chatting with Betsy about our mutual business, Jim handed me a glass of the 2014 Sauvignon Blanc from John Everson's grapes. Both were good wines, but the SB was pretty awesome. Jim only made 16 cases and that will probably be my only taste of it.

Speaking of SB, from the tasting room, we could see Jim's new SB vines up on the hill by the house and they are really growing fast, being in their second leaf now. I noticed that there are new end posts at the ends of the new rows, but there don't seem to be any line posts and no fruiting wires yet. Jim says the guys will install the lower fruiting wires this week.

A great day out at Delaplane. The view never sucks and the wine is delicious.