This week, Woodinville Wine Blog turns three years old! Over the past three years of wine tasting adventures, we’ve been learning so much, making incredibly cool new friends, meeting amazing people, and having a blast bringing you tips, news and photos from our explorations.
We would normally be throwing a big huge Rosé wine drinking party for our wine industry friends right about now, but we’re staying home in quarantine. Instead of spending time and money buying fancy food to throw a big party to celebrate our blogversary, we’ve created the Woodinville Wine Industry Food Pantry, with lots of help from Chef Anne Marie, Tinte Cellars and Goose Ridge Vineyards Woodinville Tasting Room.
You’ll have to wait a while to see all the wine-related blog posts, photo shoots, tasting room visits, wine travel and winery road trips we’ll post for your enjoyment. Meanwhile, we’ll help you figure out ways to support local Woodinville restaurants, Woodinville and Washington wineries and tasting rooms, recommend interesting bottles of wine, and share what we’re learning around our wine journey.
Let’s take a peek back at our last three years of blogging!
Our very first post was about our lovely lunch at The Commons. We were a bit nervous to take a bunch of pics of the restaurant and our food, being newcomers to the scene. It was important to us to try not to be obnoxious or entitled bloggers. Our server was so kind and welcoming, it put us at ease.
We planned to not spend much time writing about Chateau Ste. Michelle – our city’s largest, most beloved and most famous winery. Everybody already knows about them, we figured, and we should spend our time finding smaller, lesser-known wineries to share with you. But we couldn’t resist snooping around looking at their Spring preparations. Later, we found out the Chateau Ste. Michelle staff prefers that bloggers call and make an appointment and get permission for photos, rather than wander around photographing. Oops! We’re sorry!
We’ve occasionally taken detours from writing about local wine, to taste at distilleries including JP Trodden, Wildwood Spirits and Woodinville Whiskey Co. Jen’s favorite cocktail is an Old Fashioned made with rye, and Carrie’s is a Manhattan made with bourbon.
Over the last three years we’ve dragged our boyfriends along to various wine blog related activities. My boyfriend prefers beer, but is willing to go to excellent restaurants like Purple Cafe, especially after a long walk to get there down the Tolt Pipeline.
Jen’s boyfriend, James, has gotten hooked on Rosé wine! He’s always happy to take some off our hands when we’ve accidentally overpurchased out of pure greed for delicious Rosé. I took this picture of them at a Lauren Ashton Cellars Rosé release party.
When Woodinville Wine Blog started out, our friend Serret, an artist and photographer, helped us out a lot with the blog, at parties and on photo shoots. She’s since moved away to Nashville, and we miss her a lot. Here she is with me on our way to a wonderful lunch at Barking Frog.
Besides restaurants, tasting rooms and distilleries, we’ve occasionally written about fabulous shops in Woodinville, including the renowned Molbak’s Garden & Home, the 21 Acres Farm Market, and the Proper & Ernest specialty liquor store.
We’ve toured gardens and farms including the exquisite landscaping at Willows Lodge, Tonnemaker’s Farm and the farm at 21 Acres.
One of the very first wineries that welcomed us, despite us being utterly unknown nobody bloggers, was Sky River Meadery & WilRidge wines. We appreciated their kindness and willingness to let us run around photographing their tasting room and the beautiful view from their lawn.
We’ve had the pleasure of taking many of our friends out wine tasting – often during the week for friends with flexible schedules. Here I am with Jen’s friend Zoe, exploring the gorgeous Bramble Bump trails at JM Cellars. We were all entranced with the beautiful property and the phenomenal wines, and Jen promptly joined the JM Cellars wine club soon after our visit.
During our first year of blogging, Chateau Ste. Michelle celebrated their fiftieth anniversary! We happily joined in the celebrations with what seemed like half of Woodinville.
We toured several wineries with barrel rooms and businesses with dedicated event spaces, researching future spots for parties, events for Carrie’s social club, weddings and festivities. Above is the event space at Woodinville Whiskey Co. Carrie ended up hosting her fiftieth birthday party at The Woodhouse Wine Estates.
One of our most rewarding tasting room experiences was meeting Bill Collins at Lauren Ashton Cellars. When he realized how very little we knew about wine, he sat us down immediately and kindly, unpretentiously walked us through a valuable lesson for an hour or more. He’s moved on from the wine industry and we miss him so much!
In Summer 2018, Jen and I got up the confidence to do a few wine road trips to wineries related to Woodinville tasting rooms. She visited Tsillan Cellars in Lake Chelan (it took us a year to decide to develop Lake Chelan Wine Blog in 2019). We’ve since done wine road trips to vineyards, to Cave B Inn and Spa Resort at The Gorge, Prosser, and Walla Walla. We’re so looking forward to more Washington wine exploration trips in the future!
After a year of working really hard on the blog and our Facebook and Instagram feeds to promote local wineries, we finally started getting invited to cover wine events: Barrel tastings, live music, wine walks, the wonderful Sisters of the Vinifera Revolution women winemakers event, wine releases and industry parties! Here we were at a DeLille Cellars barrel tasting.
We’ve enjoyed throwing parties for our friends, Carrie’s Meetup social club and our new wine industry friends. We always celebrate National Rosé Day in a big way, and hope to again this 2020. We love revisiting our memories of the fabulous day we threw a party in Summer 2018 at the Zen Lakes property in Woodinville.
We have gone to lots of “continuing education” events in the past three years, including the Wine Bloggers Conference in Walla Walla in 2018 and Social Media Marketing World which takes place in March in San Diego every year. We love bringing back tips and info from these conferences and sharing what we’ve learned with our wine industry social media friends.
We’re looking forward to the day when Woodinville tasting room patios can open up again – perhaps the easiest way to apply social distancing measures to our winery experiences. We’re dreaming of the day everything opens back up again, and we can safely continue exploring all of Woodinville’s 120+ wine tasting rooms (even after three years of blogging, there are still a few we haven’t yet visited!)
We want to do a better job of bringing you timely news and pics of Woodinville wine events, tasting room visits, winery and restaurant openings, and recommendations of amazing Washington wines. We are going to do a better job of making appointments at wineries, not just popping in when we can find the time; sharing our blog posts a lot sooner after we visit your tasting rooms; doing a lot more videos and interviews with Woodinville wine industry folks; and continuing to help you find great local wine experiences to enjoy with your friends!
Thanks again to the winemakers, tasting room staff, restaurant folks, social media compatriots and everyone in the Washington wine industry who has been so helpful over our last three years of our wine adventures! We’ve made so many new wonderful friends, and can’t wait to see you all and host parties again.
Want to help? Subscribe to our YouTube channel, Like and comment on our posts on Facebook and Instagram, sign up for our email newsletter, and shop at our affiliate Shop!
-Carrie and Jen, April 2020
Woodinville Wine Blog on Facebook
Woodinville Wine Blog on Instagram
Woodinville Wine Blog on Twitter
Woodinville Wine Blog on YouTube
