Lucky 7th cork: August 6, 2011

It is rather advantageous for our wine tour adventure that my sister, Wendy, lives in Nebraska City. The majority of the stops are within an hour’s driving distance from either Lincoln or Nebraska City so we have somewhere to stay while hitting multiple places.

When my weekend plans fell through, I planned a trip to Lincoln and Nebraska City… well, I planned on driving the two hours to Lincoln, Jessi had the rest of the weekend plotted out…. Potentially seven places in two days!

Random Bit of Advice: If you are doing the wine tour with a friend, make sure one of you is really good about planning stops, getting business hours, and finding out awesome events going on at potential stops to enhance your experiences. I would not have had half the amount of the fun on this trip if Jessi hadn’t been awesome at all of the above.

Our first stop of the whirlwind weekend was going to be back out to Glacial Till for the Blessing of the Harvest Festival… until we found out that it was $25 and an all day affair. It is something that we would love to go to some year but with all the stops we had to do, there was no way we could fit that and everything else in. So, we hit the road to Nebraska City to hook up with my sister and venture to the real first stop, the tasting room at Arbor Day Farm.

The poor lady behind the counter was just getting slammed with people wanting tastings so we didn’t get a real chance to talk to her about the wines, but we did get to try some new ones. The surprise one for me was the de Chaunac. It is a dryer red but they had accidentally chilled it so it was much more palatable to us than the de Chaunac we tried later that was room temperature. They had some great fruit wines (not a surprise since Nebraska City is the birthplace of Arbor Day and it is all about trees) but my favorite for the stop was the Morton’s Reserve.

When we finished with our tastings, we got to try some awesome sangria that they made with their apple wine and cherry cider (I’ll put the recipe up later).

We did not take advantage of the tour of the orchards and other offerings of Arbor Day Farm, but while we were there, we found out about a festival that was happening that day at our next stop so we were more than ready to move on.

Arbor Day Farm Specs:

      4 tastings for $5

      Apple and other fruit products for sale

      Tree and orchard tour

      Souvenir wine glass included with tasting