Cheers to my little rural town

Back when we lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, we would more than occasionally find ourselves at a friendly little wine store in a town on the other side of the earthquake fault. We got to know the owner and his dog. And we were semi-regulars at the Friday night wine tastings upstairs. For about the price of a movie, it was a great way to learn about wine, try new stuff, and expand our “wine cellar” which was actually a set of racks in the coat closet. We would sip and try to come up with descriptions (“Slim Jim” and “two-mile away skunk” are two I still remember) and wander about the store reading wine labels from around the world. The crowd was just like us: techy professionals in khakis and leather jackets with just enough disposable income to consider a wine hobby.

But now here we are. At Woodhaven. With our closest town about 15 minutes away along windy rural roads. And where hops are much more popular than grapes. Nevertheless, Rob and I are slowly becoming semi-regulars at a weekly wine tasting in town. Whoo hoo for progress!

And so last night, we met a friend at the tasting room at 5:00. By 6:00, we had run into two other friends and had a newly acquired bottle of Sauvignon Blanc in the trunk of our car. For the price of a free lunch, we had smushed ourselves around Loren and his serving table to sample four wines – one from New Zealand, one from California, and two from Washington. We had snacked on cheese, crackers, and salami, and had ogled the fresh filets in the meat case. Our friends had purchased some pepper bacon and we had noted the fresh rabbit meat for sale. We had wandered about the store, discussing the price of broccoli crowns and the availability of locally made honey. We had been joined by a mixture of raincoats and muck boots and Wrangler jeans and spiky red heels and 20-somethings eyeing the microbrew fridge and young kids eating too many crackers. Yes, in the spirit of our delightfully cozy rural town, the place to go wine tasting on a Friday night is the local produce stand.

The stand seems to be doing very well. The building it is in started out as a truck barn/repair garage (the huge roll-up metal door is still the back wall). When we moved here, the building housed the gym I attended. Then it was a bicycle shop. Since I wasn’t the only one who never went in there to shop for a bike, about two years ago it transformed into a produce stand featuring as local an array of fruits and veggies as Loren can find and approve of. Since produce here is much more seasonal than in California, the stand soon expanded into wine and a meat counter to stretch the business during the rainy season. The area where I used to do free weights is now the wine room and the meat counter is where the treadmills were.

While it certainly doesn’t have that sophisticated, oenophile, swirl-your-glass-to-release-the-bouquet groove that our California haunt did, I gotta say I love standing on the uneven cement floor between the rib eye and the bell peppers sipping wine while chatting with friends about the farm store getting baby chicks in this week. Whoo hoo for progress!