Since my weekend was totally awesome, I am going to break it down into two parts. Friday night Ryan and I went out to Snapper's in Mechanicsburg, PA to hang out with his parents. It was great. I did take some photos, however, my camera phone was acting like a jerk and didn't save the pictures. (Boo)
Saturday morning, after a sneaky hangover, we headed over to the West Shore Farmer's Market in Lemoyne, PA. It's always a great time walking up and down the isle, eating random goodies. Our first stop of course was the ATM. We forgot to pick up cash. We headed upstairs to get some cash, Ryan was accosted by some lady trying to get us to buy her book of poems. Umm...no thank you. She actually shoved the book in Ryan's hand. Luckily, Ryan was swift with his response, "We don't read, sorry." We quickly retreated downstairs to find another ATM. We don't read? That was the best response he could muster? Yikes. We laughed about it. Hi, I'm Ryan, we don't read.
We found some cash and headed right over to our favorite place,
Casero Pizza. I did a little write up about them a couple weeks ago. This is where we first learned about the awesomeness of their pizza.
Ryan got a delicious pepperoni roll and a slice. I got a pepperoni slice of Sicilian pizza. It was really tasty. I couldn't even finish my slice. Ryan helped me out of course.
Next up we hit the bread stand. Mussoline's has the softest fresh rolls. Great for sandwich making. We got four wheat seeded rolls.
You can't have a soft delicious roll with out something to eat in the middle of it. We stopped by S. Clyde Weaver's Specialty Meat and Cheese stand. This place is always busy. So busy, they have multiple people helping out to make sure you get your order fast. We ended up getting a pound of thick sliced bacon, a pound of rare London broil, and three quarter of a pound of Colby cheese.
Our final stop at the Farmer's Market was for pretzels. Yummy, yummy pretzels by Zook's. I felt kind of odd taking a picture of this one. The stand is run by Mennonites, or some time of Amish people, and I know they are funny about getting their picture taken.
We ended up getting these little mini wiener pretzel rolls. I had never had these treats before. They were ultra yummy. Who knew you could wrap a mini hot dog in a pretzel and it would rock? We got home and dipped them in spicy mustard. Nom Nom bitches.
Next up, we headed to two different wineries. The
Mason Dixon Wine Trail has tickets for $15.00 per person; you get to visit 14 different wineries over a two weekend period. The majority of wineries are out by our way.
Now, originally we were going to go with a bunch of people. I'm really bad at gathering people up. We had some couples to go with, but they all couldn't make it. With my mini-hangover in the morning, I wasn't sure I was even going to bother going. After chowing down at the Farmer's Market we felt good enough to go to try some new wines.
First winery up was
Moon Dancer Vineyards and Winery. This was in Wrightsville, PA. It took us a little over a half hour to get there. In fact, when we pulled up to the place I actually thought we were walking into someone's house. It did not look like a business; just an awesome house overlooking the Susquehanna River.
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So, the place looks really nice, and the view is really nice, but the worker's there were kind of shitty. This is the part of my blog that I hate writing. I love telling the masses about a great place, but always feel like a dick telling peeps when I didn't have a good experience. I don't want to totally trash a place, but if I didn't have good service, I think I should tell the truth about that as well. We start trying a couple wines and it seemed like the pourers had better things to do. Like standing around? Every time we asked for a different sample I felt like I was inconveniencing them. Sorry I showed up and you have to work. If you don't enjoy your job, that's cool, but can you just pretend that you want to take my money? Pretty pretty please with a freakin cherry on top. Thanks.
I believe we tried a couple of their wines. They were mostly dry to semi-dry wines. Ryan and I are not really big fans of the dry wines. My unsophisticated palette hasn't gotten their yet. Plus, the wines at Moon Dancer were kind of expensive. I truly believe you do NOT need to spend more than $15.00 for a good bottle of wine. Most of the prices here were over $20.00. We didn't even ask that many questions because the woman "helping" us looked like she ate a pile of shit. We did try a blueberry wine that is good to mix with whipped cream vodka. We bought two bottles, one a Riesling and the blueberry stuff.
They were giving tours of the cellars, but we were so over it, we just wanted to get out of there.
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Next up was
Allegro Vineyards. This winery is in Brogue, PA. It is about twenty minutes from Moon Dancer. It was a very scenic and beautiful drive. However, I realized while driving that I was low on gas. Shit! Why did I not notice this before? The rest of the drive over to Allegro was extremely stressful because I was so worried that we were going to run out of gas in the middle of no-man's land. We made it there thank goodness and Ryan found a gas station close by through the GPS thing.
When we arrived at Allegro the building was very unassuming. It just looked like a regular building, nothing fancy. But what the building lacked on the outside it made up for with it's excellent service on the inside. We walked in and there was several tables of snacks. Yes, I will help myself to your delicious goodies, thanks! After a bunch of people showed up, one of the staff took us to another room, the storage room, to give us a presentation about their winery. I didn't get the man's name, but he gave a great presentation. He told us about a couple different wines and about how PA's ever changing seasons give the wines a different taste each year. We tried two different wines during the presentation, Rose Nouveau and 2010 Chambourcin. They were both too dry for our liking, but it did pair well with the sample turkey stuffing morsel they gave us.
Next we were free to try more samples in the next room over. This room had a chocolate fountain! Holla! They had two stations where there were sweet wines and dry wines. The gentleman pouring the sweet wines was extremely knowledgeable and talked to us about the flavors of the wines we tried. We tried the Susquehanna-White a semi-dry wine. It was good. But we really liked the Vidal Blanc ($12), it tastes like a German Riesling and the Fusion ($12). We ended up buying two bottles of the Vidal. The pourer told us he has a stand over at the Giant store in Enola and if we like he can give us a dollar off of the Fusion on Sundays. Umm...yes thank you! We really liked the Fusion it's more of a spicier wine, but a dollar off is a dollar off.
After we were done with trying the sweeter wines we moved over to the dry wine table. And older gentleman helped us try the 2009 Merlot ($17) and the 2008 Cabernet Sauvignon ($19). Like I said before, we aren't really into dry wines. But what better way to learn about dry wines than to go to a wine tasting! The Merlot again was a bit too dry for our liking, but we did buy the Cabernet. It is supposed to go well with steak and pasta. We ended up chatting with the two pourers for about twenty minutes about different kinds of and why they like working at Allegro. We learned that chilling wine is not something that they recommend. Huh!?! The woman pourer told us that chilling a wine typical hides the taste of the wine and they usually do that to hide a bad wine. Did not know that. Both pourers told us they drink wine at room temperature or slightly cooler. This goes for white and red wines.
This place was freaking awesome. I totally recommend it for anyone that wants to get good information and great tasting wine that isn't going to kill your wallet. Ryan and I were both so impressed by the attitudes of the people that worked there. They love wine and it shows. I would go back to this place again in a heartbeat. They also have a stand at the West Shore Farmer's Market if you don't want to take the trip down to Brogue.
