Hiatus?!?! What hiatus?!?!

If you'd have told me when I made my previous post (Super Bowl weekend) that my next post wouldn't be until after the All Star Break, I'd be more than a little disappointed in myself, and terribly embarrassed. But here we are.

Clearly I didn't intend to take a hiatus from the blog -- it's not like we haven't been doing anything (more on that in a minute) and I didn't have anything to say. But sometimes when your day job is sitting down and typing words into a computer, you find that's *not* what you want to do during your spare time. And then one week of no posts turns into another, pretty soon it's been a month, you get busy with other stuff and you find yourself staring at the Fourth of July.

So why am I back? Well, I do like the concept of blogging (even if I'm flawed when it comes to execution) and I keep seeing/doing/eating/drinking things that make me think "This would make a good blog post." We'll see if I can keep this up, but I thought it might be worth another try. If only I could find a way to quit my day job, or maybe spend a little less time trying to get some of my posts absolutely perfect...

Anyway, the stoppage in blog posts has definitely not been an indicator of a stoppage in Gastonomical adventures. Quite the contrary. Here's a couple of high points from the first half of 2014:

February -- Richmond, VA
In late February, we headed to Richmond for our annual trip to Virginia Wine Expo. This is the third year we've done the Expo -- it's always a good time, and it gives us an excuse to spend a weekend in Richmond (which we'd never done until we started going Expo). Every time we visit, I get more and more impressed with Richmond's dining scene. In fact, I'm not sure we had a bad bite the entire time we were there this trip. The highlight for me was the Roosevelt, which is located in a turn-of-the-last-century building in the Church Hill neighborhood. I'm not recalling what we ate specifically, and didn't take notes, but I remember that the menu is very Southern-influenced for sure, and I had a great meal. I also remember the killer cocktails and the all Virginia wine list. We also made another visit to Rappahannock Restaurant, big sister to the Rappahannock Oyster Bar in DC's Union Market, and hit some great craft breweries there, including Legend, Hardywood and Strangeways.

The Virginia Wine Expo itself was its usual fun, slightly drunken wine tasting/shopping spree. The whole thing is a little bit of a drunken brawl (not that there's anything wrong with that) as you go up and down the rows of booths featuring wineries, gourmet food and gadgets and the random exhibitors selling non sequiter items that seem to show up at every conference like siding or vacation property. 

It can be a little tedious moving in and out of the crowds clustered around the booths holding up your glass and hoping someone will pour something good in it. The crowd is...um, interesting. While there are certainly some wine enthusiasts in attendance, many of the folks there are treating the Expo like an all-you-can-drink buffet and are trying to gulp down as much vino as they can as fast as they can. These are the people who invariably you find later in the day losing their lunch (if they bothered to get anything to eat) or generally making a stumbling fool of themselves. Apparently we didn't come across that way (which is good!) -- at the booth for Glass House Winery down near Charlottesville (a winery we've visited a few times) we were tasting some of their (very good) wine and I mentioned that I'd recalled they actually do a Barbera, though it wasn't on the tasting list that day. The gentleman pouring for us (who turned out to be the winemaker) said, "Well, since you guys actually seem to be *tasting* the wine, I do have some Barbera back there that I can let you taste." We ended up buying two bottles.

All that said, it's a great way to visit a bunch of good wineries in one place and maybe taste the work of some wineries that are not in parts of the state we routinely visit. We also go with another couple usually, and we have a good time drinking our way through. I think we showed some remarkable restraint this year by only coming home with two cases. They have this nefarious system whereby you go through the grand tasting, sloshing from booth to booth trying and buying wine and acquiring claim checks from each booth that represent the wine you bought. By not having to carry the wine, you quickly become oblivious to how much wine you've purchased until that moment of dismay when you go turn in your wine claim checks at the pick up booth and see the forklift bringing a palate full of all the wine you bought. I guess this is how you end up with an overstuffed wine cellar. 

We also did a nice Virginia vs. France taste off (dubbed "The Judgement of Richmond")where Jay Youmans from Capital Wine School took us through a head to head blind comparison of Virginia wines and their French counterparts. I was impressed with both how favorably the better Virginia wines compare with their French counterparts, and with myself for being able to tell the difference the vast majority of the time.

The whole weekend made for a fun little mid-winter escape, and provides an excuse to visit Virginia's state capitol. If you're interested in checking it out, they just released the dates for next year -- the weekend of February 21-22.

March -- New Orleans, LA
After several years of threatening to do it, we finally made our first *real* pilgrimage to the food mecca -- New Orleans. I say *real* because I was there once on business, but outside of getting shitfaced on Bourbon Street (as you do), I didn't really experience much else. Patti had never been there and we were far overdue for a visit. So, armed with dozens and dozens of restaurant and bar recommendations from our various food and drink loving friends (everyone has an opinion about NoLA), we went.

It's impossible to summarize our whole visit here -- it's probably worth at least half a dozen blog posts on its own to do it justice. To get the full chronicle you're better off checking out my Twitter feed from late March. But suffice it to say that it lived up to its billing. We did a lot of the check-the-box things (Hurricanes at Pat O'Brien's, coffee and beignets at Café du Monde and a muffaletta at Central Grocery), drank a LOT of cocktails (in addition to the aforementioned Hurricane, we also did a Ramos gin fizz at the Roosevelt Hotel's Sazerac Bar, as well as the eponymous drink, Pimm's Cup at Napoleon House, several different cocktails at the Carousel Bar at the Hotel Monteleone, and numerous others -- it's a cocktail kind of town), had some great fine dining experiences at John Besh's August and Commander's Palace and some more casual meals at Cochon, Sylvain and Coop's. 

What can I say? When we planned the trip down there, I thought that we'd be one-and-done with the place. But now it's hard to imagine that we won't be back. I still don't think we did the po' boy scene justice, and we barely touched the music scene.

Soooo...those are just a couple of highlights from the past few months. We've got a lot more in store as we wind our way through the summer, so stay tuned and I'll see about trying to blog about them here.