Crush 2008!

This past weekend was the fourth annual Crush Festival over in Chelan, which I celebrated with some of the members of my wine club. We had a fantastic time as usual - this year we had Rachel, Misty, Kate, Lindley, McKenzie and me! It was a great group and a good time was had by all. The Crush Festival is really the first two weekends of October but after last year when we had some scheduling issues that kept us from going during the official time we decided we much preferred to be on our own rather than have to deal with crowds.

This year we skipped the limo since we only had five girls and I wasn't doing any tasting... just a lot of smelling of wine. We started our day with a personal yoga class in the park - thanks to Yoga Chelan! It was so beautiful and relaxing to be out in the sunshine and to have the leaves falling all around us.


After yoga we headed back to my parents to get cleaned up and then we headed out on our wine tour. We made it to six wineries this year - not our personal best which was seven but still a good showing. We went to three new ones and three old favorites. Here's the ones we visited:

Rio Vista Wines: Just opened this year, located 10 minutes east of the town of Chelan. It has a beautiful tasting room overlooking the river with great atmosphere and really down to earth owners who were serving the wine. We're looking forward to seeing what's new there next year. Here's a picture of us on their back deck.



Four Lakes Wines: Another new winery since our visit last year. They are also a family affair complete with a set of dogs - one boxer and the biggest friendliest rottweiler any of us had ever seen. Their current tasting room was designed for production only and they are working on building out a tasting room at a new location for next year. They will have a view of all four lakes in the area from their tasting room. In the meantime our group always enjoys seeing the process of wine making so we love a tasting room / production facility. Here we are at at Four Lakes.


Karma Vineyard: Our next stop was one we discovered last year, Karma Vineyard - one of our favorite for their great atmosphere, fun owners and great wine and cheese! We did the tour again with owner Julie because it's always a good show and we learned a little more than last year. They have released their champagne this year which was quite impressive to those who tried it! Here are the girls at Karma with a picture of an old lady with a cat - I'm not a cat lady so I got to take the picture!


Chelan Estates: The fact that I didn't find an actual website for this winery and had to put a link to a Washington State wine guide sums up this winery. The girls said their wine was fine but they lacked the things we love - great atmosphere and people to share their wine story with us. We will mark this off our list for a revisit.

Vin du Luc: Another old favorite, this is the only winery we have visited all four years. It almost didn't make the cut year two after our first year experience left something to be desired. We felt the staff on the first year was rude and the appetizer plates we ordered were lacking - not in taste or quality but in actual food. We only returned the second year for the wines and great labels - that's another of our weaknesses - we love good labels on the bottles. Our second year experience and the two years since have been great and will keep us heading back year after year.

Lake Chelan Winery: Another favorite that we have been to the past three years, they boast not only great wine, great staff but a fantastic gift shop and a fantastic BBQ! This year they have added Hard Cider to their list of beverages so bottles of that were purchased to take home to the boys. No report yet on how they liked it!

The last two years we have done the BBQ but this year we opted to try the new Thai restaurant in town and we weren't disappointed. Nothing is better than family style thai food after a long day!

As usual on Sunday morning we did a photo shoot with our bottles of wine here are a couple of shots from that.






You're probably wondering what the star of this blog - McKenzie - was doing this whole time that we were running around from winery to winery. She was entertaining Grandma and Grandpa C. They had a great time together and wore each other out going for walks, looking at bunnies and climbing up and down the stairs. Grandma and Grandpa had fun strolling McKenzie around downtown showing her off to their friends.



Here's McKenzie at lunch on Sunday - this just proves that she eats most anything. I'm not sure pickles are on the list of foods typically enjoyed by babies but that doesn't stop McKenzie!



And here she is jumping in that pile of fall leaves as promised in an earlier post.