This is our favorite wine country weekend of the year: pre-spring barrel tasting in the Yakima Valley. Next weekend is the official weekend, with wineries open longer hours, live music, food, and barrel samples of wines. It's fun, and hectic, and mobbed with people. Buses of wine tasters crowd the narrow lanes of the valley and choke the small parking areas.
For me, barrel tasting weekend is all about the wine, so the crowds and bustle just get in the way of the reason we love to come here. So we choose to go the weekend before the festival, when it's more relaxed. We can talk with the owners & winemakers, sample unreleased wines, and really enjoy the whole tasting room experience as we try new wines, and see how older wines are maturing.
We also love to add two more of our passions to a wine-tasting weekend: driving our MX-5 Miata through the vineyards and up to the door of each winery, and finding as many geocaches as possible along the way. These three ingredients, plus spending the weekend together, are the mix that makes it a perfect getaway.
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