Thursday, August 8, 2019

La Esperanza Vineyard & Winery, Saturday, Aug. 3, 2019

I located a local winery that was having an event with live music, food and wine.  La Esperanza Vineyard and Winery was about 40 minutes on the other side of Silver City from where we were in Gila.

Once we got in, we bought a wine glass for each of us which entitled us to sample three wines and have a glass of wine.  We tried a couple of wines and had a glass of their Montepulciano - we liked it enough to buy two bottles of it later.  We went to one of the food carts, I got an Italian sub and Patty had a quinhoa salad with fried avacado.  We sat in the shade with our lunch and listened to the music.

One event they had was a grape stomping contest.  They started out with weighing five pounds of grapes for each contestant.



They had an area set up with large blue buckets for the contestants to stand in and stomp the grapes, and hand railings for the contestants to hold to keep their balance while stomping.  I was able to take these photos from where we were sitting in the shade.





Here is a short video of the first round of the grape stomping contest.



The contestants stomped for one minute, then grapes and juice were poured through a strainer and then the juice was measured.  The first woman did 1000 milliliters and was ahead of all the other contestants we watched - we left early before the rain started.


The crowd was good sized, probably a couple hundred people.






On the way to the vineyard, we passed by an overlook for the Santa Rita copper mine. Since the rain stopped, we stopped to take a quick  look - but we did not stay too long because there was a lot of lightening and thunder.



The mine is huge - several miles wide and several miles long.  Those truck tires used to hold the edge of the road are about eight feet in diameter.  The pit here is one of several pits, with this one being at least a mile across - it is hard to tell how big it is in the photos.








And then we stopped at Albertson's Grocery Store in Silver City for a few items before driving back to our rental cabin, the Gate House at Bear Paw Ranch in Gila, for our last weekend there before moving across town to the Rio Lobo Cabin at Double E Ranch.  More on that in a future post.



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