Carpenter Creek Winery, located in Mount Vernon, Washington, was founded in 2001 by owner/winemaker Jeff Hammer and his wife Tara. They opened their tasting room in 2003 and did an extensive remodel in 2006. Their remodeled tasting room is very nice and quaintly situated off the road among fir and cedar trees. Currently, Carpenter Creek […]

As with most things in life, even those things we love, drinking wine can become routine, ho hum. Sure you may enjoy a good bottle here and there, have fun at a winery, or try a new varietal to keep things interesting. But then, out of nowhere, BAM!, a wine experience comes along that really […]

After spending Thanksgiving Day in Seattle, we loaded up the car and headed to Oregon’s Willamette Valley. The last time we visited wineries in the area, which was several years ago, we had not had a very pleasant experience. With the increasing notoriety that Oregon has received worldwide as a wine producing region, we decided […]

We could not have asked for more hospitable hosts for the first-ever North American Wine Bloggers Conference than the people of the Sonoma wine industry. They really stepped up to the plate with sponsorships and donations of wine to help make the conference possible. Sonoma County is located north of San Francisco between Napa County […]

The last thing the world needs is another article or blog post on traditional Thanksgiving meal/wine pairings where the bottom line is usually a recommendation of Riesling and Pinot Noir as the white and red wine selections. However, the Wine Peeps are having a slightly different Thanksgiving spread this year, and we think it deserves […]

The November edition of Wine Blogging Wednesday, the blogosphere’s monthly virtual wine tasting event, is hosted by Joe Roberts of 1WineDude. Joe selected Baked Goods as this month’s theme in which he asks us to select a wine that has been deliberately heated, or Madeirized. Since he also left the door open for us to […]

Last month, I posted on Super Bargain Wines for Tough Times, which by our definition are wines with a price less than or equal to $10, of excellent quality (4-star quality or higher), and its price is less than or equal to one-half of wines of the same varietal and the same quality level (5 […]

As our road trip took us to Spokane, Washington, we tried to visit a representative sampling of wineries in the Spokane area. Our first stop was at Latah Creek Winery. Latah Creek, owned by Mike Conway and his wife, has been in business 26 years and produces about 15,000 cases per year. Our friendly hostess, […]

On our second day in Walla Walla, Washington, during our cross-country road trip, we visited five wineries. All of them were new to us, but they had come highly recommended and we were not disappointed. The tasting room personnel were very friendly and the wines were generally very good, although some were a bit pricey. […]

As we continued our cross-country road trip, we stopped in Milton-Freewater, Oregon, at a couple of eastern Oregon wineries. What a contrast it was between the western Oregon wineries we have visited in the past and these two eastern Oregon wineries. We didn’t have to pay any tasting fees, the attitude of the winery tasting […]