Since Mat and Beth’s wedding wasn’t until 6:30pm on Saturday, I had the whole day free. Of course since I drank too much the night before, I wasn’t able to sleep well and ended up waking at 8:30am for no good reason. I met up with Goose and Sonia for the complimentary “healthy start” breakfast in the hotel, but just had a few glasses of grapefruit juice because alas, the healthy start was too healthy for me- no goddamn bacon or sausage for crying out loud! So after that, I convinced Goose and Sonia to join me for a real breakfast at Hobee’s. Not that Hobee’s isn’t a “healthy” style place too, because it is, but at least I could get some sausage there. Even better, it was chorizo! I had the “Chorizo Ommie” which was basically an omelet with chorizo, onions, peppers, and mushrooms. I asked for hot sauce but didn’t really need it because the chorizo in the omelet had plenty of fire. Awesome.

After that real breakfast, Goose and Sonia went off shopping and I met up with my cousins again, minus Charlie who couldn’t make it. Of course Lily is a late riser, so guess where we ended up going first? That’s right, to breakfast. Our plan was to hit Testarossa winery for some wine tasting, but Lily needed food, so we stopped for brunch at a place up the road from the winery. I wasn’t even hungry, but I ordered some corned beef hash and a side of bacon with a large OJ (as in orange juice, not “you think you can steal my shit and sell it?!”). And speaking of OJ, the corned beef hash was killer, all perfectly crisped on the edges but still soft and moist on the inside. Yum.

After breakfast (again), we finally made it to Testarossa and met up with my cousins’ friends Derrick and Anna. By this point I was feeling pretty under-dressed as both my girl cousins and the lovely Anna were all wearing summery dresses while I was dressed like, well, the tourist that I was. No matter, this was a winery and I was in my element. We went on in and began sampling their wines. Interestingly, I found that my taste was in exact contrast to everyone else’s. I preferred the second of two Chardonnays, the Sanford & Benedict, while everyone else preferred the lighter and more citrusy Castello. Both were drinking particularly well I thought, but the Sanford had a lot more structure and depth. But who knows, maybe I just needed a little more oomph in my wine after chowing down on all that corned beef hash. But similarly, as we shifted to the new release pinot noirs, I was again the lone dissenter in my preference of the bigger Fritschen Vineyard Pinot over the La Cruz. The Fritschen just hit more interesting notes on my palate, with big cherry flavors offset by just enough spice. The Fritschen was actually my favorite wine of the day. But since it was warm outside, we decided to just buy a few bottles of chilled Chardonnay to enjoy out at the picnic tables. That made for an extremely pleasant afternoon. I felt like I could just chill there and drink wine all day and all night, but I did have to get back in time for the wedding.

The ceremony was in a lovely semi-casual backyard setting. And what a perfect setting it was. With the help of some expertly arranged Christmas lights, the whole backyard was transformed into a nifty romantic little space. They exchanged vows on one side of the pool while all the guests gathered round the other side. It was a short and sweet ceremony (really, the best kind, don’t you think?), and everything went off without a hitch. Then it was on to dinner…

The music they played had a very Jimmy Buffet-ish island theme sort of thing going, and the food was designed to match. A dish of fatty moist shredded pork was so delicious I could have been happy just eating that over rice all night. Equally good were the barbecued ribs which were all double-cut so that every piece was two ribs wide. How awesome is that? For a side dish, they served string beans with some sort of small unidentifiable flower petals (pretty to look at but actually flavorless). And as if that wasn’t enough, there was a tray of lovely roasted chicken as well. For dessert the island theme rolled on with a wedding cake with a mango pineapple filling. Excellent! And as for the wines, I was drinking the Napa Cellars cabernet all night long. It’s a very agreeable wine for drinking loads and loads of. It has spectacular deep dark cherry and chocolatey flavors which I absolutely adore.

After dinner I’m not sure how it happend, but somehow Sonia and I railroaded a group of guests into joining us for a drinking game we used to play in college called “one up, one down”. Normally the game should only take about an hour before everybody figures it out (the object of the game is in fact to figure out the rules of the game). Somehow though, it ended up lasting hours and hours because players kept jumping in and out of the game. But that’s what we did- played drinking games, drank wine, smoked cigars, and had a wonderful time just shooting the breeze with all the other wedding guests. Beth has a really wonderful close knit family and a great time was had by all. Hangovers of course followed the next morning, but we had some gin fizzes to provide some hair of the dog. For breakfast we had some bagels with smoked salmon and cream cheese. To round things out in style, I asked Mat if he had any leftover caviar from the previous night’s hors d’oeuvres and sure enough he did. I added the caviar to my bagel and suddenly I had quite a gourmet treat. I’m not usually a breakfast person (I know, you couldn’t tell that from my having had 3 breakfasts the previous day), but there was no way I could possibly resist a bagel with salmon, cream cheese and caviar. And that, appropriately indulgent, was the way I ended my weekend before catching my flight back to NY.