today at adelsheim, the consumer direct department hosted a futures event, in which consumers can taste wine from last year's harvest right out of the barrel. the owner (david adelsheim), winemaker (dave paige) and associate winemaker (erik kramer) were all there sharing their knowledge with the masses... and sarah king was there pouring in the most amazing red coat i've ever seen!
for this event, i rented a 50mm 1.4 lens and a flash. i have to say that, after friday evening, i kind of gave up on the lens. i didn't like it's extremely shallow depth of field (which frankly ended up making most of my photos show up out of focus... due to operator error, i know). i decided that, until i figure out exactly what type of photography i'd like to focus on, i'm sticking with the kit lens. i'm very partial to wide angle shots, so i'm thinking about going in that direction perhaps. i'm not really a portrait photographer, so i'm now not convinced that i need a portrait lens. at least i rented it first without just buying it outright!
but i digress...
back to today's event! (disclaimer: the image quality looks fairly poor on this blog posting, but they are much better on flickr)
since i am taking pictures of the futures event at adelsheim tomorrow, i wanted to test out some things today... namely the flash i rented for the weekend. chad offered to model for me, what a sport!
thankfully, i got a couple of decent shots of the space. hopefully i know what i'm doing tomorrow when there is more than one person milling around.
after we finished in the caves, we took fife out into the calkins lane vineyard next to the winery to get some energy out.
chad and i had a GREAT day in sonoma county! we visited seven wineries today: seghesio, rochioli, copain (I ♥), j vineyards, ridge, bella, and sbragia.
it was a little bit hit-and-miss, but our favorites by far were copain and sbragia. ridge was a very close third. the guy pouring at j vineyards wins the style award, though.
tonight we're going out for a vietnamese dinner! having so much fun and loving my husband! i'm a lucky girl. :)
i'm sure all my friends in the midwest are going to laugh at this, but i had a pretty slow commute this morning after snow fell overnight last night. unlike the midwest, we do not have many snow plows, nor do they use salt here, so the roads (especially the country roads going to the winery) were very much covered in snow this morning and fairly slick. add to that a 700 foot decline down a mountain and i was very glad to have had anti-lock brakes this morning that worked!
the benefit of all of this was getting to the winery before anyone else and taking pristine photos without car tracks in the driveway or footprints in the snow. here is a selection for your viewing pleasure (these are unedited and i am still learning to meter for snow, so forgive me!):
if i tip my head in just the right direction, this is the view out of my office window. nice, huh?
i am really digging the desaturated vintage action i downloaded for photoshop. if i actually knew how to use photoshop, i probably wouldn't use it as much. however, i like how it came out here, and also in the rogue brewery photos in my last post.
what do you think?
this morning, our winemaking team pressed frozen pinot noir grapes to begin the process of making a dessert wine we call deglace. these are grapes that we grew in our vineyards last year (harvested in october 2010) and they were sent to a commercial freezer until the winemaking team was ready to make the wine. once it's made, it needs to be bottled right away (i.e. this style of wine doesn't take too well to sitting in a tank), so they are preparing it for a bottling run we have scheduled in april.
if you click on the deglace link above, you can read about why we freeze the grapes and how the wine is made.
in the meantime, here are a few shots from this morning. it was a frosty, but very sunny and clear day!
66mm, f5.3, 1/3200 sec.
18mm, f/3.5, 1/40 sec
18mm, f/3.5, 1/6400 sec
18mm, f/3.5, 1/3200 sec
28mm, f/4.0, 1/30 sec
40mm, f/4.5, 1/15 sec
