Arrington Vineyards

When we were together last, we shared our experiences going to Arrington Vineyards.  We are wine club members there and -- although it is located in Tennessee (about 20 minutes west of Nashville), the wine is surprisingly good!  This is the vineyard that has been combining locally grown grapes with grapes brought in from California.

The vineyard is owned by several people.  One of the major owners is Kix Brooks of the country duo, Brooks and Dunn.  (for the country music lovers...)

The atmosphere is similar to what we have experienced when visiting wineries in Napa and Sonoma.  The main building is set back from the road, through the iron gates, and sits up on a hill.  It is surrounded by the vineyards and allows for picnickers to bring baskets, enjoy wine, and listen to jazz, blues, and even some country music!

Visitors can taste every wine available by standing at a large tasting counter--complete with cherry wood, brass foot rails, and granite.  The winery offers a wide selection including a chardonnay, merlot, cab, and dessert wine.  Our favorite is the KB collection.  This is the reserve cabernet that is bottled each year.  We have a KB each year since the winery opened.  Here's our current bottle, signed by Kix!

This past December, Arrington had a wine tasting and "meeting" for wine club members.  We brought our winter picnic of savory bacon and onion tart, mixed green salad, chocolates, and apple galette with cheddar cheese.  Paul's parents -- also wine lovers -- met us there.  We ate dinner on the large covered porch and then went into the reception area to pick up our quarterly wine club selections and to meet Kix.

Paul and Floyd after dinner.  The wine club selections are on the table.

 

Paul and Kix

We haven't been back to AV since December, but can't wait to pick up our upcoming wine club selections...more to come! ;-)

Check Arrington Vineyards at:  http://www.arringtonvineyards.com/

...until next time, Paul & Dorothy

Pinot Noir

The wine of the day is a delicious Pinot Noir from Germany.  The winery is called Hex Vom Dasewstein and the bottle we enjoyed was a vintage 2008.  We choose this wine because of it's neat bottle and because we were in the mood to try a new pinot noir.  The hand-painted Witch bottle we have learned commemorates the story of the Witch Dasenstein, from which the winery takes its name.  This particular wine we picked up at our local favorite Cellar Spirits and it priced at $18.99.

The color of this wine can be compared to the color of garnet, a brick red crimson.  The wine in general has a bouquet of black cherry, minerals, and a floral quality that was very pleasant.  The combination was a perfect mix, not weak but also not too explosive.  This light bodied wine has a light taste of plums and we specifically enjoyed the cherry taste we both could pick up.  This is definitely one of our favorites we have had yet.  It was very smooth and did not create much of a mouth watering feel just a perfect "I want more" feeling.  This particular wine would be a great sipping wine or paired with lean meats like grilled chicken or pork,  mushrooms, sausage, or cinnamon even.


The pinot noir varietal in general is a red wine grape.  This grape received it's name from the French words for "Pine" and "Black" that coincides with the gapes while they are on the vine.  This particular type of grape is bundled very tightly and have a dark purple pine cone-shape bunch.  Pinot noir was first grown in France and is particularly popular in the Burgundy region.  In Germany pinot noir is called Spätburgunder and is now the most popular grape planted in the country.  The German pinot noir is generally pale in color but in more recent years it has become a darker richer red color.  They are typically barrel aged and not typically exported.


We personally think this is a great deal and we enjoyed this wine very much! We hope you have the opportunity to try this one because it is not one to miss!




Hope everyone is having a good week and we cant wait to hear about what you thought about this one!



Cheers,
Kylie and Jacob

Free Sterling Cab

Dorothy and I got home from the Freedom of the Seas just hours before 5 inches of snow arrived in Tennessee. Yesterday a UPS brown truck plowed through the snow and stopped in front of our house. We didn't remember ordering anything, so the delivery was a mystery. Inside the package was a bottle of the 2006 Sterling Vineyards Cabernet! The simple note said only "enjoy!" 

Then I remembered the back-story that landed us this free bottle of wine. I have been writing a food blog. Its just for fun really - I only have a handful of 'followers.' I started it a year ago on January 1, 2010 and I grilled a Bobby Flay recipe everyday for 100 days straight. After 100 days I slowed down - making entries only a couple time a month. Before we left on the Cruise, I made an entry for a dinner that Dorothy and I put together that we called The Winter Solstice Supper. With dinner that night we had a Sterling Cab and I reported on it. The folks at Sterling saw it and sent me a bottle! You can check out the site at www.bobbyflayeveryday.blogspot.com.

This was not the first time I got free wine stuff by way of the blog. Cline Cellars once sent me a bottle of Red Truck and a bottle of White Truck together with a Red Truck stocking cap, wine opener and a matchbox replica of the actual Red Truck.

We have not opened the free bottle of Sterling yet - but when we do, we will report in. In addition to attending all the wine tastings / seminars while on the cruise, Dorothy and I also attended the Chefmakers Cooking Academy at sea. I report on what we did there on the other website: www.bobbyflayeveryday.blogspot.com.


Drink the Wine! Paul

The Gang's all here!

Hi, everyone!

I am signing on for Paul and Dorothy Craig.  We are founding members of the Freedom Wine Club and want to thank Kylie for setting up our blog.  Our club formed on the Freedom of the Seas and we are excited that our "love of wine" and wine discussions will continue!

Paul and I are professors at Middle Tennessee State University--which is located about 20 miles southeast of Nashville.  We live in Murfreesboro, Tennessee during the week and spend most weekends in our loft in downtown Nashville.

We began our "wine education" with an online class that we took several years ago during the winter semester.  The class consisted of in-depth lessons which required us to hook up with a local wine store to purchase and then taste the wines suggested by the instructor.  Although it might not sound like it was informative--it truly was!

From there, we joined a wine tasting group sponsored by a fellow professor who has his doctorate in viticulture.  We met on a regular basis for about a year.  We still occasionally meet, however, most of those tastings are tied to the professor's research.

We attend local wine tastings sponsored by restaurants, Salude! (cooking school at Whole Foods, Nashville), and local wine stores.  We also visit Arrington Vineyards on a regular basis.  One of the owners of AV is Kix Brooks.  Kix and other partners started the vineyard a few years ago and use a combination of California and locally grown grapes to make a variety of surprisingly great wines.

We look forward to our continued exploration of vino!

Paul & Dorothy Craig
Nashville TN
2011

P.S. We just heard from Bob yesterday.  Hopefully he will sign on soon!  Hope you are having a great weekend!

Our first post

Welcome to the Freedom Wine Club!

I would like to introduce ourselves to you! My name is Kylie and my husbands name is Jacob and we are two of the five founding members of this club! This is our first post and we are so happy to be sharing our experiences with you! I want to start out by telling the story of how this club got its start.  It was January 3rd 2011 and Jacob and myself were on our honeymoon on a royal caribbean cruise called Freedom of the Seas.  We had read in the daily activities that there would be a wine tasting on the ship in a bar called Vintages.  We thought it would be a fun little thing to do and so we went knowing little about where this wine tasting will lead us.  Seven days and eight wine tastings later we had made some amazing friends and learned some fascinating information about wine.  We had created a group of five to six people that all became wine crazy by day seven.  I personally did not even know there was that much extra information about wine.  It is amazing how much we really got into learning about something (I just graduated from the University of Oklahoma and I really thought I was in the mind frame that I did not ever want to learn anything else ever again) but none the less we had such a blast at those tastings that it made us think about how we can learn more and experience more about wine at home! All of us in this wine club really just enjoy wine and everything it has to offer so we decided that we should write back and forth about what wine we try or what we had learned about wine in general.  I then thought it would be a nice idea to share all of the things we planned to share with each other with all of you! So the plan is whenever we try a new wine and really take it in we all plan on coming and writing about it!

Although this is my first blog for our wine club I haven't had any wine since we have been back home so I thought I would tell you a little bit about ourselves.  I was born in 1987 in a small town in Texas and soon after my parents moved to Norman Oklahoma.  I have lived here for a total of 22 years of my life and I absolutely love it! I went to high school at Norman North High School where my sophomore year I met Jacob.  We have been together ever since and we were married on December 18th 2010.  I attended the University of Oklahoma and graduated with my BS in Multiple Disciplinary Studies in Medical Health and Science.  It is the equivalent to a zoology degree with a longer name :) I started a company with my dad last year in video production, it used to be a hobby but is now my full time job! The website is khstuidos.net, tell your friends.  I am a fun loving person who is almost always in a good mood and I surround my self with great family and friends to keep that spirit alive.

Jacob was born right here in Norman Oklahoma on October 16th 1986 and has lived here his entire life.  He went to Norman North High School.  Right out of high school he got a great job opportunity at YORK and started a full time job with them.   He stayed with YORK until about a year ago when he got a job at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma City.  He is now a sheet metal mechanic for them and loves his job.

As we just started our family we are enjoying our new life in our new house that we bought in November and we are now looking for a dog :) A daschund preferably!

Our love of wine has mostly been influenced by my dad.  He has been a big influence on us to trying different things and learning the basics of wine! It was really the cruise that opened our eyes to what can come from drinking wine and how much fun learning about it can be! We are so excited to share what we find out about the different wines we will be trying over the year and we hope that our information will be interesting and educational for those that drink and do not drink the wonderful thing called wine.


That is pretty much us in a nut shell.  I am excited to be starting this journey with all of you and I hope you come back and read often and get to know us and our other Freedom Wine Club founding members!


Cheers!
Kylie and Jacob