Wrap-up: Santa Cruz Mountains

Qualifying appellations tasted: 2 (Santa Cruz Mountains at nearly every winery and Central Coast at Regale).

Lessons learned:

1. Bring a notebook. We both realized we had nothing to write on when we were halfway to the wineries. I took notes on my trusty Android, but Mike had nothing to take notes with (which is why he’s been so uncharacteristically silent in these posts).
2. Write down people’s names. We got great photos with so many tasting staffers and a few fellow wine tasters, but we don’t have anyone’s name! We were both disappointed. We’ll do better next time.
3. Have business cards to hand out. We ordered personality-packed MOO cards that will soon be winging their way to us. If you want to order your own ultra-cool MOO cards,  get a 30% discount between now and 1/31/11 by using the code FZVUD7. (Full disclosure: we’ll get a MOO card case if you do this, but we’re not doing it just for that; we wish we could’ve gotten a deal like this when we ordered ours!)
4. Talk to people. This is something we had forgotten we enjoyed so much about wine tasting. When we talked to people and told them about our project, they were by and large really interested and enthusiastic. Everyone had recommendations on where we should go (not that we were able to write many of them down; see point #1 in this list).
5. Winery limit: 4 per day. Both of us found we were hitting palate fatigue hard at Poetic Cellars (and it would have been worse if Loma Prieta Winery hadn’t had a nice little spread of cheese and crackers laid out). Perhaps if we do two before lunch and three after, we could do five, but that’s truly our limit.