Memorial Day Weekend - Newport, Oregon - Part 1

We spent Memorial Day weekend in Newport, Oregon with Kyle's parents and grandparents. We left at 12:30pm and didn't get into the condo until 9pm! With bumper to bumper traffic from Downtown Seattle through South Portland, we arrived in Newport famished and exhausted. Lucky for us, Kyle's amazing grandmother had an amazing hot meal of beef stew prepared for us....ahh, it's good to be a kid again.

We started the next day with a big breakfast, but I found one last spot of empty space in my tummy for some grilled pizza at the local Farmer's Market. For you frequent readers, you know my favorite pizza is Serious Pie, but this pizza made its way to second place in my food lovin' heart.

Thank you husband for this fabulous close up of me gorging myself. This is the wild mushroom pizza that used mushrooms from the stand that was located a couple tents away from the pizza tent. Can't get much more "local" than that!

After the Farmer's Market, we dropped the grandparents off at the Casino (the trusty adult babysitter) and headed off for some wine tasting in the famous Willamette Valley with Kyle's parents. We went to McMinnville and stopped at Coleman Vineyards first. The whole valley was having special wine tasting events for the weekend, and since we arrived relatively early (It was 5pm somewhere at this point...), the place was empty and we had first dibs on the amazing food and wine at this "boutique," small, family-owned vineyard. Above is the 10 wines we tasted. Good thing Kyle and I were not the designated drivers, so we happily and greedily tasted all 10, plus one more taste of our favorite, a 2006 Pinot Noir, "just to be sure" that it was really good and worth buying.

The winery had some wonderful Oregon cheeses and crackers out to munch on along with the wine.

This is a specially designed Riedel glass made for Oregon Pinot Noirs. The Willamette Valley is famous for their Pinots, and I can confirm that this glass helped to bring out the flavors and scents of Coleman's amazing wines.

The vineyard's mascot and resident pooch. He apparently comes from a very well known and respected line of chocolate labs, and will be studding his last litter soon. He was the most well behaved and friendly dog; I told them that if our dogs Buster and Mia were allowed to roam a vineyard, they would probably have toxic shock from eating the grapes, get an intestinal blockage because they would eat a cork, and when they weren't getting into trouble, would scare away potential customers because of their incessant barking (i.e. screaming). But I still love them.

One of the owners, Randy Coleman, taking us around the room for some barrel tasting.

Coleman's was a beautiful vineyard...definitely could put up a fight against Napa.

Next we were off to Yamhill Valley Vineyards. A little tipsy and ready for more delicious Oregon vino, we expected nothing but the best from this well known vineyard.

They had a big koi pond outside the entrance.

Although this winery is better known than Coleman, we ended up loving Coleman more. Yamhill was a larger winery, so there wasn't that homey feeling you get when you walk into Coleman. The wines were OK, but without the Riedel glasses, it couldn't compare to our new favorite.

There was a lot of food in this weekend trip, so we will continue this food fest post in part II.

Happy Eating,
Emi