LaGayle is the love of my life and my best friend. She and I have been married 42 years, which is almost 99% of the time we have known each other. Wine has been an increasingly important part of our lives as the years have gone on. How else could she have put up with me this long?

Actually our move to the state of Washington almost 13 years ago was the catalyst for our joint love affair with wine. While I had my first glass of wine over 50 years ago, our daughter, Kori, who had come to school at the University of Washington, was the one who really introduced us to wine country and wine as an everyday part of life. When we could easily visit the wineries, meet the winemakers, and kick the dirt in the vineyards, our interest in and passion for wine increased exponentially.

Regular Wine Peeps readers know that our monthly wine tasting dinners started as a result of some of those early trips to wine country where we made terrible buying mistakes. Our solution to this problem was to just buy a bottle or two, not a case, at the winery, bring it home, and taste it blind against similar wines. Then we could confidently buy more once a wine was a proven favorite. We’ve been having our regular monthly dinners ever since.

As our wine dinners went on for years and years as well as our trips to wine country, and not just in Washington but around the world, our circle of friends who looked to us as their “wine experts” expanded as well. Being a mathematician and engineer by education, I was not only interested in finding great wine, but great wine at a bargain price, thus the development of our signature QPR rating for wines we review. Starting the Wine Peeps family wine blog was a natural extension of sharing our growing wine expertise with our friends.

Since I sold my investment management business and LaGayle retired from her full–time volunteer job in the Athletics Department at the University of Washington, we have more time to spend together exploring the world of wine. LaGayle’s fascination with new and/or unusual recipes has led to many what I call “guinea pig” meals with possible candidates for our Challenging Wine Pairing series. We typically have a glass of wine with every meal, and often have blind tastings of two wines at family dinners for fun and as a learning experience. These tastings also give us many of the candidates for our A Wine for Tonight series.

After dinner each evening, unless we are babysitting our 3 ½ year old granddaughter, we typically read or watch a ballgame on TV while sipping a glass of wine. LaGayle’s favorite after-dinner sipper is a New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc. My glass is usually from a bottle of red wine that we had previously opened for dinner, to see how it has evolved after 24 or 48 hours.

Love and a glass of wine are a hard combination to beat.

Cheers!

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