6th Wedding Anniversary

Yup, 6 years ago this weekend L and I were married in a lovely ceremony in NJ. Since then we've moved to two different cities, survived grad school, L finished his PhD and I'm close(ish), started post-grad school life, and adopted one fuzzy, crazy, talkative, and lovely cat.

We planned to go camping and so had our  fancy Syrah with bacon-wrapped steak, asparagus and homemade hollandaise at home.

For our anniversary we went to the Sonoita and Elgin wine regions of AZ. Wine? Az? No freakin' way. Surely you jest. Well jest I do not (and don't call me Shirely!).

Vines at Callagan Vineyards. You can see the
3 storm systems in the background

In all seriousness, south of Tuscon at about a 5,000 ft elevation are quite good grape growing conditions. The region is arid, but quite fertile in the summer due to the monsoon season. We were expecting something better than our wine-tasting adventure in Cannon Falls, MN, and were really surprised by how good the wines were. Most of the wines are in a CA-style, using Spanish (Tempranillo), Rhone (Granache and Mouvedre), and Italian grapes. We started at Callagan Vineyards (the Los Padres and Buena Suerte were two of our favorites), and then on to Dos Cabezas (all good, none were great), Lighting Ridge (our fav by far - every wine was really excellent), and Kief-Joshua (The Chenin and Sav Blanc were really unique, the zin was a bit boring but the Tempranillo and Syrah were excellent). Overall, many of the wines had a bit of a tang in the finish, but compare solidly with the mid-level, (so good to very good) wines of the CA wine regions. Of all of the, Lightening Ridge was far and away the best. So if you are even in Tucson, it's worth the hour long drive to check out the wines.

From there we headed further south to Patagonia Lake. After some initial concern that it might be closed due to the fires, it fortunately was not. We trucked down some chicken wings and planned on doing some grillin'.. .only to be met with a "no wood, no charcoal" sign. Shit. Raw chicken, no stove = no dinner. We high tailed it back to the nearest town market (10 min away, tiny, tiny little town) and picked up some ice berg lettuce, an apple, pepperoni and some cheese. Not our planned bbq, but not bad nonetheless.

6 good years, nearly 11 "time served", a few more wrinkles,
but not too bad all together

The lake was beautiful and we headed down to the beach with our picnic and our beer. As with campsites in CA, we can't seem to go camping w/o being next to a RV blasting Mexican-techno-dance-music, but fortunately the party next to use turned the tunes down pretty soon after sunset.





The next day we drained the tent (recall those three storm systems? yeah, they dumped right on us), and spent the morning kayaking around the lake. We'll definitely go back, and next time we're going to see if we can 1) make friends to bring with us, 2) get one of the island boat-in campsites, and 3) bring said friends.

It was a great way to spend our anniversary and we got to see some really neat parts of the state. It's strange to drive south and hit "comfortable" temps of the mid-90s (compared to 110 at home), but a great discovery for beating the heat of the summer.