Santa Barbara Wine Tasting

This Days Inn boasts that it was the setting of some of “Sideways”! As you might imagine, tourist traffic to the region has increased significantly since the popularity of that indie comedy that relaunched the career of Lowell from “Wings.”

Anyhow, this is the hotel with the big windmill thing and I stayed there. It’s perfectly nice, cheap, next door to pancakes and actually the site of the only bar in Buellton, so it’s a pretty good deal, I would say.

The family that owns the Firestone vineyard and winery and the family that owns the tired company are one and the same. But fret not, their wine does not taste like rubber. It’s large tasting room is all dark wood and stone and feel like a secluded cabin amongst grapevines. The cool thing about stopping in here is that they make their own wine and actually offer tours of the winery so that you can have some idea as to how the fruit goes from being innocent grape to lets get drunk wine. My favorite part of the tour was the giant vat where they make the wine that they said had to be cleaned out by their interns once the wine is drained out. The apocryphal tale is that after a few hours in this tank, the interns are completely wasted just from inhaling the alcohol fumes. Oh wait, this reminds me of an alcohol inhaled thing I heard about being for sale a little while back. Sounds like calorie free drunk. I bet the FDA is holding that up for some ridiculous reason…

This is a miniature horse farm. I don’t know why our wine tasting bus stopped here and it totally harshed my buzz. Except for when the mini-horses started chasing each other around, which was totally hilarious. Those little guys can run FAST!

The morning after wine tasting, what could be better than a plate full of Scandanavian pancakes? I would venture to guess not much. The world famous Ellen’s serves up these international pancakes that are unlike the dense monstrosities you find in most pancakes or house thereof. Instead, they are much more akin to crepes: thin, light, wide, floppy, slightly crisp but mostly just melt in your mouth delicious. Other unique offerings are Danish sausages, and Danish sausages with Danish pancakes.

Aside from the yum factor, Ellen’s is quaint with friendly service and a colorful clientele. For instance, there was a woman at the counter who pulled a gold bib out of her purse and wore it during her meal. It even had a little gold carrying case. WTF, why didn’t I think of that?

Though I actually had no knowledge of this place before I went there on my trip, apparently Andersen’s Pea Soup is quite famous. You can even buy their soup at the grocery store, I guess.

The restaurant itself is far from fancy with bright harsh lighting and diner vibe. Before you get to the dining room there is one of those stores with tons of kitschy knick knacks, you know, like a Cracker Barrel. I’m not really sure what the point of this is, but it’s kind of quaint, so I like it.

I tried the famous soup in a bread bowl and wasn’t disappointed. Personally, I think more food should come served in dishes made of other food.

This was my least favorite of the wineries I visited. It wasn’t at a vineyard; instead it was a fairly small tasting room in a Buellton storefront. All style, the room and their logo had a casino theme and their wine has highly stylized drawings of pin up girls on the label. Besides that the wine wasn’t that great and the decor was focused on scenes from famous movies with bottles of their wine badly photoshopped into the foreground. Um, classy.

I really enjoyed the tasting at Kalyra. The atmosphere was very laid back and the wine was quite good. Since this winery was started by an Australian, the tasting room was very “down under” and their logo is a surfboard, which I think is really adorable.