Monday, June 13, 2011

The Perfect Saturday Morning? A Wine Tasting at the Farmer’s Market

And yes, I realize that the title of this post makes me sound like a total drunk. But hey, I love going to farmer’s markets, I love wine tasting, I love good food, and I love supporting good local causes, so basically, I had no choice. And don’t worry, my husband who doesn’t like wine drove me.

This great Saturday was courtesy of the South Anchorage Farmer’s Market, which runs from 9:00 am – 2:00 pm at Old Seward Highway and O’Malley Road, next to the Alaska Club South. This is a good market for seafood, including one of my all-time favorite foods, Alaskan side-stripe shrimp. They also occasionally host fundraisers like this wine tasting. The tasting was put on by WineStyles; the local branch of this franchise is one of my top two places to buy wine in Anchorage. But I digress- I’ll do a more in-depth post on that subject later. For $10, you got very generous tastes of three delicious wines, some tasty little appetizers, a coupon for 10% at the wine store, and a polycarbonate wine glass to take home (and use on camping trips later on in the summer).

The proceeds benefited the Alaska Farmland Trust, a great organization that supports Alaskan farmers by ensuring that suitable farmland is actually available for agriculture. Supporting Alaskan farmers is a really important subject. If you don’t live in Alaska you might think that farming in the Arctic is a futile task or even laughable, but because so much of our food is imported, however much we can eat locally has a huge impact: on the freshness of our food, on our health, on the environmental impact of not shipping so much food up here, and on the local economy. The Alaska Farmland Trust ensures that land is available for production, which is an issue because the most suitable farmland is also near the largest population centers in the state. I have lived in other states in which what little farmland there was was being bought up and turned into tract housing, so all over this country we need to make owning and working a small-scale farm a viable option.

As far as the tasting itself, you got to choose any three wines they had on offer. To start with the whites, they had a Blonde Bombshell white blend from Rutherford, CA (near Napa and Sonoma), and a Sextant Chardonnay from Paso Robles, California. I tried the chardonnay, which was great, especially because I was basically drinking it at lunch time- I generally think that a cold glass of a crisp white wine is the best choice if you actually go in for drinking at lunch. For the reds, they had several choices: Sensual Malbec from Mendoza, Argentina, a Chateau Faire le Pont red blend called Tre Amore from Washington state that blended cabernet, San Giovese, and Nebbiolo grapes, a Sextant Zinfandel from Paso Robles, and a Sea Glass Pinot Noir from Santa Barbara, California. I went to WineStyles later that afternoon to use my coupon, and all the wines they had at the tasting were under $25. The Tre Amore was $25, but the rest were under $20, generally around $15.

The wine was definitely reason enough to go, but they had a couple little appetizers, too, to eat with your wine. They had puff pastry with fruit in port wine and bleu cheese, and crackers with a carrot chili puree, pulled pork, and farmhouse cheddar. I definitely preferred the puff pastry one the best- the fruit and bleu cheese went very well together.

So, that is the story of how I got drunk on a Saturday morning in South Anchorage. I also paid an extra $20 and bought a Farmland Trust t-shirt made of organic fair trade pima cotton, so I can proclaim my support of Alaskan farmers every day.

1 comment:

  1. Good one, hope they do it again this year. "Alaska" Mary

    ReplyDelete