Vinny's Winery!

So, we had an impromptu trip to a winery last night. The leader of the site decided to take us to his friend's winery, which was about 20 miles outside of Brno. It was great! I have never visited a winery [but always wanted to], and this one was awesome! It was owned by a guy named Vinny whose great, great, great grandfather starting making wine. He has what he called a 'real job' by day, but then does this in his spare time. It was awesome! So much smaller than the big wineries, and Justin said if you do a wine tasting at winery, you maybe taste 5-8 samples of wine. We tasted all 16 varieties of his wine. By taste 4, I knew things were going to be crazy!

Anyways, it was a lot of fun. The downfall of my night was drinking port wine; for those unfamiliar with port wine, they add 90% distilled alcohol to the barrels while it is fermenting. Regular wine ferments into alcohol due to the sugars, but they add alcohol to port wine to give it a little kick. I have had port wine before in the States, but it tasted like it had alcohol in it, kind of like Mad Dog. This, however, tasted like caramel candy. (Un)Fortunately, it is very strong and has given me a headache today! But, it was great. All in all, a ton of fun. We were at the winery for about 4.5 hours.

Two great occurrences on the visit: 1. Vinny used what looked like giant glass straws to withdraw the wine from the barrels for us to taste. There was one that we have a picture of that he specifically gives to women. Very funny....2. We bought 9 bottles of wine [5 Rieslings, 1 Agreva - kind of like a Pinot Grigio, and 3 Reds], because of the price, which was 50 CZK per bottle [about $2-$2.50 USD per bottle]. It is some of the best wine I have ever had, probably because it is straight from the winery and not from some crazy chain! If I can figure a way to get this back to the States, some of you can definitely enjoy it with me! However, I am pretty sure you can usually only take 2 bottles back to the US, but Justin said that he managed a way to get 12 bottles back from Argentina. I will see what I can do...