The First Crush

  No, not the first crush like that girl in first grade. The first crush like the first pressing of grapes in a new season after the harvest. This blog is going to be a journal of sorts. I have recently found myself with the time to pursue a lifelong interest: wine.
  I've had a sort of peripheral association with wine for many years. God knows I've consumed enough. I've also served a lot as a bartender and waiter, and I've cooked my share of it into recipes as a chef many years ago and as the family cook at home. What I've never really had the time to do is just explore and learn about it. Being in the middle of a region literally exploding with grapes and wineries and tasting rooms and having finally the time, I figured it's now or never. Many thanks to my pal John for pushing me into chronicling this venture on a blog. I decided in this first post that maybe I oughta let any readers out there know what they may and may not expect to see on this page. So here we go.

My intention here is to journalize a personal exploration into the growing wine business in the Verde Valley. Not all the wines I'll be talking about will be completely local wines. Most will be Arizona wines and wineries. Many of the wineries in the Verde Valley are using grapes grown in the Wilcox Arizona area, which produces 80% of the wine grapes grown in the state, and some are still using California grapes. As vineyards in the Verde continue to expand and mature, that percentage of grapes from someplace else will naturally go down.

I'll try to post daily, but no promises. When the muse leaves me I can't even remember how to type.

You can expect irreverence. Sorry, it's just me. Here, I'm guessing a lot of that irreverence will be directed towards wine snobs, who deserve to be derided and made fun of at every opportunity. Anyone who's ever described me as jaded and snarky wasn't entirely mistaken!

You'll see lots of opinions and reviews posted, but you'd be well advised to take them all with a large grain of salt. I'm no expert. If I tell you in some tipsy writing session to run out and buy a particular wine and it turns out to be swill, don't say I didn't warn you. Remember, you are taking advice from a palate heavily influenced for decades by cheap beer, chile peppers and chewing tobacco. Hey, it's Cornville!!

I'll be talking about pretty much anything that's remotely related to wines in the Verde, but might ramble off into left field at times. For example, I adore beer. Beer's  a food group. I'll make every effort to keep beer on the fringes of this blog, but it may sneak in from time to time.
Enough introductions, here we go. If anyone's actually reading this, thanks. Your feedback is welcome!