Day Trip to Duplin Winery
A couple weekends ago, AM and I took a quick trip to Duplin Winery for her birthday. It was a first time trip for both of us, so we really didn’t know what to expect, though we were looking forward to the wine tasting.
We go there just in time for a tour of the processing facility. It was pretty cool and the guide explained the process of taking Muscadine grapes and making wine. It’s pretty cool, actually. They smash the grapes with ginormous balloons inside big steel tanks. Then they pump the juices over to fermentation tanks and let the juice think about what it’s done. They filter the wine through all kinds of paper filters and then there’s the finished wine. (There may be some chemistry and bottling details left out, but that’s pretty much the way it’s done).
Then there was the tasting. At 11:30 in the morning. On empty stomachs. Good times. I was about into the 5th half-shot of wine (about all you got from each particular flavor) when I started feeling a little tipsy. So I slowed my sipping. There were some good wines (Scuppernong Blush, Carlos) and some absolutely horrible wines (Burgundy, Blackberry). The frozen drink mixes were all pretty good, though.
Then we had lunch at the Bistro. I had the best steak and cheese sandwich ever. The steak was thin and tender and yumtastic and the cheese was melted just right…AM had a BBQ chicken sandwich made with Duplin’s own Muscadine BBQ sauce. She says it was “yummy…very very good.” To share experiences, we shared halves of our sandwiches. The BBQ sandwich was good…But it wasn’t quite as awesome-tastic as the steak sandwich.
The best thing about the whole trip was how cheap it was. The tour and tasting is free and lunch cost about $40.
And then we drove home (We were sober, just really tired).
And that was the trip to Duplin Winery. We’ll probably go again, preferably when they’re actually making wine (they only process 5 days a week from something like October to January or February).
October 12th, 2009 at 3:00 pm
>>They smash the grapes with ginormous balloons inside big steel tanks.<<
Wine making has come a long way since the days of "I Love Lucy."