Frank and Dino and the boys

When we last left off the Lovely Girlfriend and I were braving the tough Scandinavian-esque Christmas Village of Solvang (the local street gang goes by The Evil Elves) looking for a parking space.  Behind their chubby cheeks, broad smiles and windmills the Danes are a vicious bunch that would just as soon snap your neck as hug you but it's nearly impossible to resist their hugs because they are all so cuddly.  Truth be told I know nothing of Danish stereotypes.  I don't think they are interesting enough to deserve a stereotype.  Anyway, we fought through the stop signs and foot traffic and found a parking spot on the outskirts of the downtown.  We avoided the back-alley Danish thugs with their white herring and open faced sandwiches and made our way to our final destination - Sort This Out Cellars Tasting Room!

Two plus years ago, the Lovely Girlfriend and I went on a wine tasting trip through the Santa Barbara area while she was up there for work.  We found the original Sort This Out Cellars Tasting Room in a tiny strip mall in Beullton.  My recollection is they were bookended by a couple of accountants offices but this did not keep them from being an extremely cool stopping point.  They have since moved from that tiny strip mall to a sweet little spot in the heart of Solvang.  I don't normally go for the whole "Vegas Rat Pack" thing as most places try too hard and instead it becomes some kind of sad Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin as done by female impersonators routine.  Sort This Out does not have this problem.  Somehow they nailed it.   The tasting room was damn near packed when we got there.  We were lucky enough to grab the last bit of bar space before an large wave of foot traffic filled the tables along the wall and then the whole room.  I've been to several dozen wineries of the last couple years and I don't think I've ever seen a tasting room as hopping as this one. 

Sort This Out has a couple of different categories of wine that they make with labels to match.  Their Black Label collection is a tribute to gambling with the wines named after gambling terms.  Their Viva Las Vegas line is a tribute to 50's and 60's Vegas advertising.  The Suited line comes complete with pin-up girl art, we got a bottle of their holiday merlot with mulling spices for Gourmet Biker and Dead Red.  Finally they have VinoNostra, a tribute to the California winemakers that survived Prohibition by going underground.  We tasted at least one from each and they were all exceptional.  The VinoNostra "Bootlegger" was out of this world.  An Oh My Gosh Grenache absolutely killed.  They had their Suited Holiday Merlot mulled wine cooking in the back and were nice enough to hand out seconds and thirds on it.  The ladies pouring the wine behind the bar were fantastic plus they threw in a "Congrats on beating cancer" bottle of their Viva Las Vegas Merlot with our purchase.  I really can't say enough things about this place.  We joined the wine club, an incredibly reasonable seventy bucks four times a year with as many as six bottles in a shipment.  Sort This Out is now on our must stop list whenever we are headed up to San Francisco.

After at least two hours tasting and chatting we reluctantly said our good-byes and stepped back out into the rough and tumble Hans Christian Anderson style streets of Solvang.  We hustled past the cutthroat Coo-Coo-Clock stores and bad to the bone bakeries to the safety of our car.  Vowing to return and hoping that one day the picturesque town of Solvang cleans up it streets of the Danish riff-raff of Rolf's and Rasmus's.  Allowing God Fearing American's to roam Santa's Shantytown streets without being harangued by pickled gherkin peddlers promising you a quick fix.  The first ones always free.  Seriously, are there any Danish stereotypes out there?  Throw me a bone here.

NFL Thursday Night

ATLANTA -12 over Jacksonville - Atlanta needs this to stay in the thick of things in the NFC playoff picture.  Jacksonville, despite their destruction of Tampa last Sunday, is terrible.   

Wine a little, you'll feel better

You don't expect to bite into the greatest roast beef sandwich you've ever tasted in a place like Morro Bay.  Those moments are reserved for big cities with large Italian, Jewish, possibly Polish, hopefully not Irish, populations.  You certainly don't expect it to be in a lily-white, high rent town on California's Central Coast.  But that is what the Morro Bay Hofbrau provides.  A massive, hand carved, roast beef sandwich so good I would have quite willingly paid two or three times the remarkably reasonable price of $8.50.  The Lovely Girlfriend couldn't finish the other half of hers.  She also couldn't even finish her sentence "do you want this" before I was devouring the tender juicy goodness.  I tried to talk her into going there for breakfast the next day, and no, they don't serve a breakfast menu. 

After a nice walk around downtown Morro Bay we headed to Solvang/Buellton.  This is the wine country area that was featured in Sideways and the prices reflect it.  We started with Mosby, an Italian style winery that was packed and pricey.  Their wine was only average so we gulped down our tasting and quickly left in hopes of greener and cheaper pastures. 

While perusing the handy wine map we spotted an interesting area titled The Lompoc Wine Ghetto.  Since Lompoc is best known for its prison and military base we figured this was a not to be missed tasting spot.  Like doing a scotch tasting at a Wal-mart in the middle of the Scottish Highlands.  We were only partially correct.  The Lompoc Wine Ghetto is located behind the Home Depot (honestly) but it is far more Ghetto Fabulous than just plain ghetto.  As someone that grew up surrounded by real life hillbillies, rednecks, hicks and all around poor-white-trash in Northern Maine I take offence to the trend of transforming the poor into the posh.  Making a camo trucker hat a must have fashion statement is insulting not just to the people that grew up wearing them but to those of us that grew up surrounded by them all the while telling ourselves "thank God I've got more sense than that!"  When we look back a old photos are we to think that somehow Jethro was an ahead of his time fashionistas?  I'm not saying I don't have a rather large soft spot for backwoods culture, I've been to my fair share of gravel pit and trailer park parties.  Those parties were free to attend and the booze was cheap.  Nobody was trying to sell plastic cups at ten bucks a pop throwing in a splash of keg beer then explaining to you the intricacies of the hops and barley.  If I'm going to be doing my drinking in a corrugated metal shed I expect the prices, pours and conversation to reflect it.  We hit two tasting rooms, Fiddleheads and The Flying Goat.  I won't lie, the wine at both places was absolutely excellent but holy shit was it pretentious.  I'd expect that at one of those giant phony french villas that's piping in orchestral music and brandishing a scenic overlook.  We were in a low-rent business park.  Our view was a shade-free parking lot and more corrugated metal.  There have been few times in my life where I've felt more mislead by a name. 

In an effort to save the day we headed back toward Solvang with one of our favorite tasting rooms Sort This Out Cellars in our sights.  I will be dedicating tomorrows entire posting to the good people at Sort This Out.  They deserve their own spot but if you are reading this while currently on a wine tasting adventure through Solvang/Buellton and you cannot wait for tomorrow I will tell you go there now!  1636 Copenhagen Drive Solvang, CA 93463.  Great time, great wine.  Full report tomorrow.

Before we made it to Sort This Out we stopped at Casa Cassara's tasting room.  I'd been there before on my own a few years back while the Lovely Girlfriend was working in Santa Barbara.  Last time I was there they had a tempranillo that was out of this world so we had to stop.  They weren't tasting the tempranillo that day but we did get a whole bunch of other very tasty wine to sample.  All at reasonable prices, tasting fee waved when we purchased a bottle.  The young girl doing the pouring was super personable and extremely informative.  We even joined the wine club.  Take that Lompoc Wine Ghetto!  We've got $$ to spend (well, the Lovely Girlfriend does anyway) but we don't want to feel like we're taking it in the shorts while we spend it. 

From Casa Cassara we headed to Sort This Out Cellars but since I've already stated that they will get their own posting I will leave you with this cliffhanger.  Did we find parking nearby?  Did we have to pay for it???  Were we  forced to walk several blocks?????  Tune in tomorrow to find out!