Yakima Valley trip Easter 2007: Day 1

Cheryl had Friday and Monday off work for the Easter weekend, so I took some time off, and we went out to the Yakima Valley to do a winery tour on our bikes. We stayed at a place called "Cedars Inn and Suites" which at $60 CDN/night was a great deal. That price included continental breakfast, wifi, and free nighttime cookies... The cookies weren't that bad either.

Anyhow, since we went to so many places on this trip I will split this post up into a few separate posts. This is "Day 1".

Cheryl and I woke up at a reasonable time Friday morning to head towards the Yakima Valley which is about 150 miles South East from Seattle. Here's a map of their wineries. Our plan was to bike between a few close wineries and meet up with Shawn and Megan for dinner when they arrived later in the day.

Our trip to Yakima was very quick, and after checking in we went to our first winery: Sagelands Vinyard. Sagenlands is a brand easy to recognize because some of their wines are sold in the local supermarkets (Safeway included). The wine spectator recently snubbed Sagelands, but I'm glad we went by to check it out. The views were great, and we both really liked one of their Cabs (2004 Cabernet Sauvignon Doval Vineyard).

Here's the view from the patio at Sagelands:

Here's the Doval Vinyard out on the patio:

From there we continued on. Cheryl and I next went to Wineglass Cellars where we both agreed we liked their Cabernet Sauvignon. We had a great discussion with the attendant who warned us of the dreaded goat's head (puncture vine) on the roads which can easily poke holes in mountain bike tires. Little did we know how many of those things we'd run over by the end of the weekend...  Anyhow.

On from there we started towards the Two Mountain Winery. It became apparent pretty quickly that Cheryl wasn't hydrated enough to make it to our next destination, so to make a long story short we took the gracious help from a local farmer back to the car and finished our winery tour for Day 1 in the car.

Given it was getting later in the day we decided to head on to Portteus which came highly recommended by Jeff - a friend of mine. We didn't want to miss it. Portteus had a large selection for tasting - I think 10 or so in total. We ended up buying their Zin, as well as their Bistro Red which both were well worth the trip for us.

Moving on from there we went to the Two Mountain Winery (which seems to have the only other site on the Internet other than mine using DXTransforms). I think by this time in the day my senses were overwhelmed because none of the wines from Two Mountain were sticking out to me. My taste buds had been on a long spin, so it was time to call it a day for wine tasting. We bought their house red which was reasonably priced, and will be a good drinking wine.

Catch of the day:

We headed back to our hotel to meet up with Shawn and Megan, and after dinner and a night on the town we were ready to sleep and go out for our second day at the wineries. On day 2 we decided to hit the Red Mountain region of the Valley, and we were certainly not disappointed.

More on that soon.