We were inspired to travel to one of the islands on Saturday. We have fond memories of Whidbey Island. There was a time many years ago when we visited the island as young, newly committed bf/gf. We broke into private beaches, ate ice cream cones on the shore, and stumbled across an impromptu island fireworks display.
This time around, I had the brilliant idea to visit the Whidbey Winery. Ever since ripping it up several years ago at the Red Hook Brewery, I’ve been really interested in visiting the local Washington wineries (beer really isn’t my thing). We paid our fair, took the short ferry ride across the water, and BOOM it began to rain buckets. Whidbey Island was a soggy mess. We found the winery, despite our intentions of eating before sampling, we ended up drinking on empty stomachs.
Now that the movie Sideways has become part of pop culture, you can’t imagine how stupid people get when sampling wine. Just the mere act of swirling your wine in the glass for oxidation invokes someone to launch into a diatribe about the movie. I can only imagine how painful it is for the lady behind the counter who’s pouring the wine and trying to describe the ’smoky undertones.’ Granted, we had a nice time–we cleaned out an entire bowl of soda crackers–despite being hungry the whole time. The hipster pouring our samples came off too snooty for Josh. She bemoaned how big her wine budget has become–her tastes are so expensive! So refined! “There are only a handful of restaurants we can go to now…” An inexperienced couple next to us stole our laminated wine list, dumped most of their samples in the spittoon-like bucket, and didn’t end up buying anything. If Sideways has personally taught me anything it’s to take a good hearty sniff of each sample…and to drink up. We bought the infamous rhubarb wine, a really fantastic pink wine, and a red.
This is a picture of me in the tasting room. If you look next to the flower vase you’ll see a big bunch of fur…that’s Pinot, the vineyard cat.

After a belly full of wine, we sat in this nice little bar waiting for a table by the window:

Note the dark, rainy, sky…we still enjoyed the window table. Outside, cranes picked through the water with their long legs, seagulls competed for scraps, and the blue strip on the horizon grew smaller and smaller. I told Josh this picture is going on the back cover of his future book.