[Utah Bob]

Originally Posted by Richard

I was up in the Alexander, Dry Creek, and Russian River Valleys yesterday for the Winter Wineland open house of 140 wineries. Each winery was offering select tastings with food pairings and @ $40/person it was a great way to spend the day. Started at Ridge, then on to Murphy-Goode, LaCrema, Walker-Stevens, Armida, Twomey, VMT, Arista, DeLoach, and finished with Hook & Ladder (which is actually the DeLoach family's winery as they sold their label to a corp) where we did a barrel tasting of their to-be-released 2011 Zinfandel paired with two year aged cheddar and 60% dark chocolate.

This morning I watched the sun come up over the snow-capped Sierra Nevadas while drinking my morning coffee - it's 2 hrs to Tahoe and 2 hrs to SFO from the ranch, I have no mortgage and the property is a family trust grandfathered in under Prop 13 for tax purposes, no water or sewage bills (well and septic tank system), my electricity bill is about 1/2 what it was in Texas (SMUD community electrical co-op)), and I filled up today at Safeway @ $2.36/gal (we shop there and earn gas discount points).

I'm a retired contrarian - go poke somebody else.

Richard

Been there, drank that!i