Last year, Val helped organize a friend's bachelorette party, which took place in October and consisted of a bunch of women being chauffeured around the Finger Lakes region in a limousine, stopping for various tastings at wineries in the area. They had so much fun that Val decided she needed to do a redux of the day with another group of people sometime soon. Well, soon turned out to be less than three months later and that lucky group of people ended up being fellow Florida, New Yorkers. The following is a recap of what transpired during this day.
7:15AM: I exit Dunkin Donuts and walk up to the car and let Val know that once again they do not have salt bagels. "Mother effer!" That was her response. If you want to get on Val's good side, bring her a salt bagel the next time you see her.
9:15AM: We're making some fantastic time driving up route 17 near Binghamton and I get a call from Mariana. She wants to know what mile marker we're at and as it turns out, her and Mickey are exactly three miles behind us. The most significant result of learning this information is that it led Val to repeatedly say, "They're coming in hot" or "We got one coming in hot" every time a car zoomed up behind us.
10:00AM: I exchange the following text messages with Kolin:
Me: Where r u
Kolin: Rte 26? You aren't going to whitney pt and taking rte 79?
Me: No. Following gps.
Kolin: Oh have no idea the way you are going
Me: Google does. Are you smarter than Google? Doubt it.
Kolin: Definitely. Did Google go to school in ithaca?
Me: Good point. You win.
11:00AM: We arrive in Ithaca. Leading up to this three-day MLK Jr. weekend, I questioned whether or not we were paying tribute to Dr. King in the correct manner. Well, as we drove into Ithaca, I found that one of the biggest routes that runs through the city (Route 79) is also named Martin Luther King Blvd. This is a fact that is completely unrelated to the fact that we were not paying any sort of tribute to Dr. King this weekend.
12:00PM Our limo shows up and we're ready to roll!
12:15PM: As we pass Lake Cayuga, Kolin and Ray recall the triathalon they did in Ithaca a couple summers ago. In short, Kolin almost drowned and it seems like Ray might be harboring a little anger about waiting for Kolin to finish not drowning, so they could continue the triathalon together. I announce that I will be entering this triathalon this year and stick my hand out for Ray to join with me. He puts his hand in his pocket, looks away and acts like I'm a stranger on a bus instead of a friend in a limo. Damn you Ray...you did the right thing.
12:25AM: The limo pulls up at the first winery, Americana. As we walk in, a group is on their way out and one of them says, "Our limo is better than yours." It was. They had an SUV limo. I wasn't quick enough to mention that we had to skimp on the limo since some of us will be in Punta Cana in 8 weeks.
Our wine tasting pourer at Americana, Brendan, welcomed us and then he proceeded to have an Ithac-off with Kolin. Who was more Ithaca than the other guy? They threw around fancy dorm building and lecture hall names, rattled off professors and their teaching nuances and finally when Kolin couldn't hang with Brendan anymore he shouted, "Just pour me some wine damnit!" (I'm paraphrasing). I argued a lot with Brendan about the pronunciation of Baco Noir. Guess which one of us pronounced Baco like "bacon" without the "n"? We capped off the tasting with a wine/fudge/wine/fudge pairing. This made Ray happy.
We went back out to the limo and I asked our driver John if we could do some donuts in the empty, snow covered parking lot. He laughed. Then I told him about the group that said they had the better limo and said, "John, please tell me our limo shoots missiles." I tell ya, a guy will laugh at anything if you're paying him $100 an hour.
1:15AM: The second winery, Sheldrake Point, felt like an overcrowded gift shop, but I was introduced to a great treat called ice wine, which is a very sweet, potent wine that is made from grapes that are harvested when they are frozen. I might've had it before, but on this day I became very, very familiar with it. So familiar that I might've been doing shots of ice wine with Mickey at the end of the Sheldrake Point bar. The wine tasting pourers (is there a better name for these people?) weren't so nice at Sheldrake and we had two girls who alternated like a pair of running backs sharing carries. We began buying bottles of wine in bulk as everyone puts there bottles on the counter and one person paid to get a discount. Well, Mariana paid for the first case of wine and since we were a little tipsy, we decided that when she got back to the office on Tuesday, Mariana could have her intern figure out how much money people owed each other. We left Sheldrake in a happy state and headed to our third winery for some lunch plus more wine.
1:45PM: Our third winery, The Thirsty Owl, was one of Val's favorites from her first tour of duty in the Finger Lakes. Aside from the great wines, she had a delicious lunch there. We ran into a bit of a problem though, when we found that The Thirsty Owl did not serve food in the off-season. Well, it's a damned good thing that this winery had the best oyster crackers that I've ever tasted. I think that Mickey and I went through about 7 bowls of them and we asked if they sold them. They said no, so we settled for shots of ice wine instead. The Thirsty Owl was either my first or second favorite winery. The red wines Lot 99 and Cabernet Sauvignon/Syrah/Malbec were amazing.
2:30PM: By this time we were very hungry and pretty drunk since we continued to fill our stomachs with more wine. I believe there was talk of pulling up to an Arby's or a Wendy's in our limo, but there was no Arby's or Wendy's. If I'm ever out of a job for a long period of time, remind me about my idea to open an Arby's in Ithaca for drunk wine drinkers in the off-season.
3:20PM: My other favorite winery: Knapp. What I loved about this winery was that it wasn't well decorated like most of the other places. It looked like a warehouse. Based on that, I could tell that their sales pitch was: "We don't care what this place looks like. We're busy making good wines that you will love." It reminded me a Duff's (buffalo wings) in Buffalo. Knapp offered some excellent wines, but most memorable was a limoncello and a lime-cello that they made. My Ithaca memories get a little hazy when it comes to Knapp, but I am pretty sure that Val and I had a shopping cart that we were filling with wine. We paid and handed the receipt to Mariana to add to her intern's mounting stack of Microsoft Excel work for the week.
4:15PM: Last but not least was one of the most popular wineries in Ithaca--Lucas. As we entered we were handed a cup of goodness. It was their house red, warmed up with spices. It was ridiculous. Our wine tasting pourer came off as a little snooty, especially when he found that we were from NYC. He told us about a line of their wines called "Naughtie" that was started by the winery founders' two daughters, who currently run the winery. This prompted me to ask the pourer if they were promiscuous and Mickey responded, "Rog, you just asked him if his bosses were promiscuous." On our way out, we had a pleasant conversation with a different guy who made the spiced wine. We talked Jets-Pats with him and he explained that he was rooting for the Jets because he was an anti-douche bag fan. I am a fan of that too.
5:30PM: After we returned to the hotel, we used the luggage carts to transport about seven boxes of wine up to our rooms. Pandemonium ensued as we were all trying to figure out what wine we each had purchased and whom owed whom what. This ended with me shouting, "Does anyone owe you WINE or MONEY?" to each person and when I received no response from anyone, we were squared away.
6:45PM: After we got settled, we went out and tried to find a restaurant that Kolin was looking for, but unfortunately, nothing is open in Ithaca when students aren't around. We passed a building and Kolin said, "That's where I auditioned for The Real World." The fact that he didn't get the part made me regret that I haven't been boycotting MTV since the early 2000's.
We ended up at the hotel and ate at a pub in the lobby to eat and watch the Ravens-Steelers playoff game. The food was pretty good and after most of us had finished eating, Ray was the only one who ordered dessert to pay tribute to his dad (Paraphrasing quote by Ray's dad: "Look, I think that you should get dessert. And since I don't want to let you eat dessert alone, so I guess I'll get a dessert too."). So Ray ordered a gigantic piece of chocolate cake and the worst waiter in Ithaca (and maybe worst salesman in the Northeast) says, "Are you sure you want that!?! It's HUGE and it costs $10!?!" Well, that would deter 99.97% of the population from getting that large, too pricey piece of chocolate cake, but not Ray. Just by saying that the cake was too big, the waiter might as well have spit in Ray's face and told him that he could no longer call himself a Met fan if he didn't attempt to devour the cake.
A frail attempt to keep the party going into the night was thwarted by Ithaca's off-season bar hours and some old people who woke up very early and bounced around from winery to winery all day. And that is pretty much how the day ended. We'd explored the Ithaca wineries and had a blast. And best of all, when we were done, we had lots of bottles of wine and we didn't owe anybody wine or money.
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