This is What Happens when my Family goes Wine Tasting.

Some people cringe when they think about the prospect of a family reunion, and come up with excuses like "I drank a foamy latte and now I'm all farty and bloated," to get out of going. Not I. I have three siblings and they're the greatest in the world. We never fight. We don't have drama. And I'm not just saying that. We've always had each others' backs completely, despite being four entirely unique individuals with differing values, beliefs, and opinions. So I was really happy to have my oldest sister come stay with me for a week during her two sons' spring breaks. And in the true tradition of spring breaks, she and I drove to Tijuana and sold ourselves to a Drug Lord.

That version would probably make for a more exciting blog post. But settle in while I pour myself a glass of Riesling--the real version is that we wrangled up my brother and my sister's 16-year old son and headed into nearby wine country for the day. Shout out to our other sister who wasn't able to join up on this trip, you're dead to us now. Just kidding, we still love you and missed you greatly.

We take wine tasting seriously in my family. I used to work for a winery in a tasting room, so even though I don't drink the red kool-aid due to headaches, I still know my grapes. And my brother is so serious I witnessed him on this trip pay $10 for a sip of wine that a specialty shop was offering. That's dedication. His verdict?-- "I've had better." He also records his tasting notes as he goes winery to winery on a little voice recorder, telling it things like, "This Pinot smells like a dark, German forest,"  and "It's like drinking a bacony, chocolate-covered orgasm." So needless to say, we roll up to a tasting room and people get a little uncomfortable. We're that good.

We stopped for lunch in Solvang, before we got our sip on. My nephew came along because he'd taken a recent interest in Sideways, and wanted to see some of the spots from that movie, so we stopped into Kalyra first, where he and I made a new best friend while my brother and sister were tasting inside.

Somehow (probably having to do with owning a hybrid and being a notorious lightweight) I got roped into driving on this trip, so my other two siblings were free to go buckwild and them some. Sadly, the only bottle of anything I bought on this trip was a bottle of truffle oil from a specialty shop. Did I say sadly? I meant awesomely. Oh me. Always the responsible one (unless I'm in Vegas, it's a holiday, I'm on an awkward date, I'm wearing a taco costume, or someone else is buying).

When my nephew commented on how beautiful the vineyards and rolling green hills were in the Santa Ynez Valley and stated that he would like to retire here, I felt I spoke for the entire family when I reminded him that he could live here a lot sooner than retirement if he just got a job working at a winery out here, plus he'd have a steady stream of hookup-seeking family visitors at any given time and would never go lonely. I'm going to keep working that angle.

Our next spot was a favorite of mine, Beckmen, where the grounds are beautiful and the Grenache is bangin. Then we made our way over to Gainey where the guy working the tasting counter told us how he just went full-blown ghostbusters on Firestone's alleged poltergeist's ass. The stories he told were spooky, and since I'm apparently a magnet for pervy ghosts, we opted out of that one and made our way to the Andrew Murray tasting room, our father's favorite wines. While we were bellying up to that bar, we waxed so emotional about Dad we got our tastings comped. He'd be very proud. <3

 And somewhere along the way, after tasting at several wineries, wine did as wine does and alcohol was clearly pumping through veins in the car. After my brother swore off the plastic bottle of water in the car, declaring, "I bet that water has already become cancerous by now!" our conversations got racy in a major family way, and my sister dropped this bomb:

"Did I ever tell you guys about the time Mom took me to Solvang by myself when I was 14 and ordered me a glass of wine in a restaurant and then tried to tell me about sex?"

Sista say what?!

"Yeah, she ordered two glasses of wine at the restaurant, gave me one of them, and then awkwardly tried to warn me about what some guys may try to do to me one day." 

Um, go on. No wait. Stop. Okay fine, keep going.

"I basically shut her down right there and let her know that I already knew about that stuff, to which she seemed both surprised and relieved."

Oh Mother. Way to always be a few years fashionably late on things. And way to get you and your first-born, teenage daughter liquored up just to be able to break the ice with her about the art of mating. At that moment I realized that I never experienced this talk--my best guess is because I started dressing like an overt slut at a really early age and I think my mom just kind of assumed the worst. In hindsight, I'm sad I missed that rite of parent-child passage, partly because the only story I had to contribute to this conversation involved admitting that I was a child who dressed like a streetwalker, but also because if suffering through an incredibly awkward talk with a parent as a minor had been lubed up by a chance to guzzle a full serving of alcohol, I'd have found it worthwhile back then to grin and bear it.

Then my sister reminded her son in the backseat that she broached the subject with him on a camping trip when he was 9, and a look of disgust came across his face and he ran off into the woods, probably in hopes of finding a wolf family that would take him in as one of their own and continue to raise him sans horrific talks of p-sticks and v-holes. My nephew suffers from the worst long-term memory ever. He doesn't remember entire trips to Hawaii, Yellowstone, even the majority of a trip to Thailand he took just a couple years ago. So I would assume the fact that he has not even a shred of memory about this conversation is finally a blessing instead of a curse. However, he let us know that he does remember learning about "hot dogs and donuts at school" when he was in 5th grade. We may or may not have slipped my nephew some sips of wine while people's backs were turned.

This is what happens when my family goes wine tasting.
 
So what is the takeaway from all this?  That it's never too early to have "the talk" with your child, or that if you drink enough, you'll start talking about it? Or maybe it's don't go wine tasting with my family unless you're a badass.

On that note, I think my Riesling is ready for a refill.