This weekend was the Cayuga (Lake) Wine Trail Wine & Herb Event.

The 17 wineries on the trail (All alongside and many within view of Cauyga Lake) participate.

You start at one winery, where you get a map and a glass, and at each winery along the way, you get a tasting (2-6 types of wine or, in one case, cider), a potted herb (or tomato, or lettuce, or pepper) plant, a recipe using that plant, and a sample of that recipe, cooked (or prepared), usually with a wine pairing.

Seventeen wineries. 2 to 6 tastings at each. /falls over/

Okay, really, we did it over two days. We tasted seven wineries up the West side of the lake, spent an hour at the outlet mall, had Dim Sum and tea for lunch, and hit the much-more-spaced-out 3 wineries on the East side; Sunday we picked up the seven we’d missed on the west, stopping for lunch at Knapp Winery in the middle.

There was a lot of really good wine. Even wineries I’d blown off before as being not complex enough, too tannic, or just too boring, were in good form this weekend. Everyone had out their best wines, the food tastings were very good, and I have seventeen little plants to put in the ground or pots as soon as Last Frost is past. Even the food tastings were good.

If I have a disappointment with the event – and I’d say this is the only one – it’s that I ended up with three basils, and I really would have liked one of them to be a mint instead.

But all in all, it was an immensely fun weekend of wine-ing. Will definitely do again.

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