Wine & Wow Weekend
Most of my posts lately have been Internet: Serious Business(tm). Lest my reader think that all I do is sit in my darkened spire all day contemplating biochemistry and Open Access, I wanted to mix it up a bit and talk about a couple of hobbies I was able to enjoy this weekend: drinking wine and playing computer games.
The southeastern PA region is home to a small selection of wineries, and this month they are holding a special event called Barrels on the Brandywine. For a flat fee, you get a tasting at 6 wineries in the area, and many of them also hold special events (typically a barrel tasting of a 2007 wine) as well. Saturday was the second weekend of the event, and Mrs. PA and I went to wineries 3 and 4 on our list. Last weekend we got to visit a new one (Twin Brook Winery), as well as an old favorite (Va La Vineyard). Twin Brook is housed in an old barn, with wood so weathered it’s difficult to tell where the door is. The wines weren’t absolutely amazing, but they were decent for such a small producer, especially considering that they grow all of their own grapes. The highlight was a barrel tasting (from the only two barrels made) of the 2007 Merlot. The different ages of the barrels was a great demonstration of the different levels of oak flavor that come from using older versus newer barrels. After Twin Brook we went to Va La, now probably the second largest winery in the area. Our first trip to Va La was about 4 years ago, and back then we might have the entire tasting room (and the owners who were serving the wine) to ourselves. Their popularity has exploded over the past few years (with good reason), and this time we were parking on the grass, with tastings spread over two floors. As usual their wines were quite good, although it seems like their prices have grown in accordance with their popularity. It was fine, but impersonal.
Now that I’ve covered last weekend, let’s move on to current events. This weekend we once again went to a new place (Folly Hill Vineyard) and one we’d visited before (Chaddsford Winery). Folly Hill was quite nice, once again set in a restored farm building. This establishment doubles as a bed & breakfast, and as such they served very nice pairings with their wine tasting, including a bit of duck with one of the reds. For the most part their wines were decent but not amazing. The exception may be their chardonnay (oak aged please), which I enjoyed quite a bit even though I tend to prefer reds. We picked up a couple of bottles, because it was a steal at $10 apiece. Chaddsford is the largest winery in the area, and it shows in their very retail-like tasting facility. We’d been once before and come away thoroughly unimpressed. This time, with a bit more wine experience under our belts, we can safely say that these are not good wines. Their whites in particular are quite bad, tending to be steel-aged and therefore tasteless. The reds are unbalanced and unfinished, and their dessert wines are just sickeningly sweet with nothing to balance it. It really boggles my mind that they are the largest in the area (and that the other tasters that were there with us spent most of their time gushing over the wines). I guess different people have different ideas of what tastes good, and that is fine: more of the others for me then :)
Sunday was World of Warcraft day. I took up WoW about two months ago, coming to it from my first MMO, EVE Online. I really like EVE, but unfortunately I seem to be unique among my friends who all tried it and hated it. On the contrary they all seem to love WoW. I guess I can sort of see where they are coming from, in that it’s much easier to play and less frustrating than EVE. To me this also makes it a bit dull, but that’s how it goes I guess.
This weekend we made our first attempt at the Blackrock Depths dungeon, and died many times. After about 3 hours in the instance, we had made it to the 3rd boss of about 20. Needless to say we weren’t up to the task. We’ll try it again later in the week with a more appropriate group.
I got my main character, Alchux, to level 60. This is sort of a major level, and is the beginning of the end-game. It’s been a lot of fun leveling him up, but I’m sort of sad that the end (level 70) is in sight. I’m not ever happy unless I’m actively advancing a character, and I don’t do well with the idea of hanging around and just running raids over and over again once I’m at the max level. I also explored the Outlands for the first time. This is the region that was added as part of the Burning Crusade expansion, and is full of nice gear and seriously tough bad guys.
It also seems like every time I log in, I’m a higher rank in my guild. As of now I’m the 3rd in command, although in a guild of 18 players (almost all of whom are below level 20), I’m not sure how significant that is. Our two original leaders have taken a break from the game, and this seems to be sort of a positive thing as the new heads are much more active. We’ll see where it goes I guess.
I also spent some time running around on my alt, Sorinn. It’s a nice change of pace to go from an ugly melee damage character to a slightly more attractive ranged healer. Leveling her seems to be a bit harder than it was for Alchux. I think I’ve been spoiled by running around at a higher level than the critters in a given area.
All right, that was my weekend :) Back to our regularly scheduled programming.
