I won’t lie to you.  I am considering pulling up stakes in Dorchester and moving to the Los Angeles suburbs.  After the winter we had in Boston, California looks oh so inviting.  From it’s blue skies, warm temperatures, and ample parking, I can’t help but to picture what life would be like out here.

To be honest, though, it hasn’t been helped by my friends the Creeds.  Auggie and I spent this past weekend with them down with Chadd & Heather (with their pups Bailey & Lola) in Winchester, CA – a distant commute sitting about half way between Los Angeles and San Diego in the Inland Empire – and are adjacent to the Temcula Valley wineries.    They’ve been pressing me to move out there for some time, and only with this job I have now did the option come up.  Of course … I opted for Boston, for some reason.

So what did we do?  Well, what else do you do in wine country .. you drink wine.  Good zinfendels from Napa on Friday.  Chilled whites on the hot Saturday afternoon.  Then a Syrah from Callaway Vineyards that ranks up there with the best bottles of wine I can remember. We ate meals over wine.  We listened to music with wine.  A highlight of the wine tasting was a real nice Riesling — which for you non-wine drinkers, is a very lightly fruity white wine that when chilled is as perfect for a summer day as you can get.  We were at the Lorenzi Cellars, a vineyard started by a successful entrepreneur who keeps the Temecula vineyard open for a hobby. While a tasting is fun to get the flavor of what a winery is selling, if you like something you obviously buy a bottle or two to take with you.  This particular Riesling was nice enough to ask if they had a case of 12 – they in fact had only two remaining.  Now, for a price point, an individual bottle of this wine wouldn’t be available in a liquor store – but if it did, it would run for about $30.  The case they were selling at the end of a season for $99 – but the Creeds happened to have a membership to this winery, meaning they get a 2 for 1 deal.  In other words, these impressive Rieslings were just $4.13 per bottle pre-tax.    That, my friends, is a good find.

But it wasn’t just about buying wine.  Or really about drinking wine.  We drank wine and talked about Boston, about Alaska, about California, about friends, about days gone by, about times just past.  Most of all, like a good wine will do, we talked about wine.  We let it tell us a story, and in turn allowed us to create a few more stories of our own.  I like to think that wine is kept in such big bottles to implore you to share it with others.  When I get to share these wines, I get to share the story about a $4 wine.

And many many stories more.