the weather in the twin cities and a-maz-ing today. we have had the windows open since about 10:30am. the breeze is cool, the sun is bright. it’s awesome. i totally should’ve planned for a visit to a winery today, but, since i’m supposed to be taking it easy this weekend (i had a tooth pulled on thursday for my second — and final — tooth implant), i will relive the memories of a recent visit to a couple wineries with a few good girlfriends.

winehaven, in chisago city, is the second oldest winery in minnesota. it is also the fourth winery that we crossed off of our three rivers wine trail passports.

the tasting was free and pretty delicious! i enjoyed their deer garden blush quite a bit.

i’m a sucker for a cool label!

i wanted to buy more, but i resisted for now and just brought home a bottle of mead to enjoy sometime with jason.

kristi, bertine, vani, and i were heading to one more winery for our winery adventure day. we stopped at romayne’s on main in taylors falls for lunch — and there was a chili cook off (and tasting) going on. we all felt a little overwhelmed and distracted by the chaos here, but the bloody marys and burgers were pretty delicious.

they had a really lovely-looking patio out front that would be awesome to visit in the summer, by the way.

the gals and i headed across the river to chateau st. croix (in wisconsin!) to spend a crowd cut coupon i had purchased (tour/cheese/tastings).

jason and i have visited before, so kristi and vani took the tour (and were in charge of getting the cheese) while bertine and i started tasting wine.

we were actually a little bit late for the tour reservation i had made, so it turned out that vani and kristi had snuck into a completely different tour organized through living social. and they almost had them fooled until it was discovered that there two more people than there were chairs for their reception.

this reminded me of a christmas gift i got from jason’s aunt, renee — a diy wine cork trivet. i am currently saving every wine cork (including the plastic ones) for it, since it could maybe be something decorative for the house instead of just something on which we put hot things. (the majority of the corks i have so far are from apothic red. have you tried that wine? i love it. looking forward to trying the recently released apothic white, too.)

good girlfriends + good wine + mini road trip = an excellent day