North Star Winery

Today, in the Zephyr, Taste Vacation, Washington Wine Tour, we had the breakfast buffet at the Marcus Whitman hotel. For such a high end hotel, I was hoping for more than a scrambled egg buffet. Then we left to go visit Delmas wines, a small producer  of extremely premium wine in the Rocks, Columbia Valley's newest AVA. Steve Robertson was very instructive and explained what they do to take advantage of their unique, 10 acre, Oregon AVA. He is completely sold out of the only wine he makes, so there is no tasting or tasting room.

After we left, we went to to Tranche cellars.  They were busy, the harvest is underway, but they still took the time to share their unique approach to winemaking. We ordered a case of A slice of Pape.

The highlight of the day was Northstar Winery. Oh my, that is quite an operation. We didn't really do a wine tasting, instead we took a course in wine mixing. That was incredible, if you ever get the chance to put a group of 14 together, this is not to be missed. You get to keep the bottle you create, I don't think we will age these two very long in case of contamination, but want to share it with someone special, maybe the Seattle conference.

We ordered a case of their Merlot, we plan to lay it down till 2018 and then we will try a bottle and decide what to do.