Oftentimes, pairings that sound curiously strange are actually quite phenomenal if you give them a chance.  Case in point: chocolate and peanut butter, bananas and (you guessed it!) peanut butter, or my personal favorite (trust me on this one)peanut butter on a burger-mmmmm.  There are not many things I like as much as I like peanut butter enough to try them with just about anything else, but luckily for me there is one—wine.  I’ve tried wine in movie theaters with great success, wine whilst sailing also works as long as its your own boat and you own a pressure washer, and dare I say I’ve also ventured a glass in planes, trains and automobiles (the last only as a passenger and under the sneaky handle “road soda”).  Given my penchant for wine during transport, it’s a wonder I hadn’t stumbled upon wine-drinking while horseback riding before, but you can bet I signed up the second I made the discovery.

Pepper and Terry Fewel know a bit about marriage from personal experience, so when they decided to marry horses and wine, they must have had intuition that it would work well.  They operate a working farm as a Bed and Breakfast called Cherry Wood complete with luxury teepees and decked out retro trailers as lodging options, so it’s no wonder they thought up as unconventional a concept as wine riding to add to the mix.   For the more delicate among us, they can arrange for a horse-drawn carriage, but we were feeling feisty and so opted for the true cowboys and wine approach.  The ride itself winds through vineyards and orchards, comes complete with lunch, and of course makes a point to hit up tasting rooms along the way.  Read more

In recent years, there has been a frenzied scramble to convert once-lucrative but now too-costly-to-maintain fruit orchards into money-making vineyards in Washington State.  Because economics was the driving factor behind many of these conversions, we saw a lot of behemoth production facilities churning out “approachable” wines (read: sweet, white cheap stuff) from immature vines in order to cash in on the wine craze perpetuated by films such as Sideways.  Touring wine country has never been easier, with the Napa Valley adopting the Disneyland for Oenophiles approach charging upwards of $20 per tasting at movie star-owned estate vineyards reachable by stretch limo, train, and I’m sure eventually hovercraft.  I imagine plans for a wine-themed park complete with a floating river of red called the Merlot Meander.  States beyond California are quickly following suit, and Washington is no exception.  I see the fundamental difference between the vineyards in the U.S. and those of the great winemaking regions in France, Italy, and Spain as time.  There is simply no way to rival the old world in terms of established character, which is not to say we cannot produce world-caliber wines, which we certainly do.  We simply need to be mindful not to turn the experience into a soulless affair more about pumping out bottles of two buck chuck than great Brunello. Read more