NOTE TO SELF: Wine "tasting," not "guzzling"

So my friend and I head on into the wine country, to execute enological edification (done herein only aliteratively, of course).

According to my father, wine came from two places: Sonoma County and France, and the latter only sometimes. As he put it,"If you want car parts, you go to Napa. If you want wine, you come to Sonoma." I don't know that my dad even knew they grew grapes in the Central Valley prior to his relocation here in 2001.

And me? Gah. Growing up an avid beer drinker in a wine-snob household, you think I'd have picked up something other than "Pink is not wine" knowledge. But I didn't. I learned more from working at the Watergate Hotel and befriending the sommelier than I did growing up in the greatest county in California. Unfortunately, the sommelier knowledge amounted to, "Professional wine tasters have stinky breath." (He was a close-talker. And a smoker. Gah.)

My wine-tasting experience-- which was only the second or third in my lifetime, and the first time not with my parents-- was wonderful and silly and filled with ignorance and lots of wine.

My summation: Wine tasting is like golf. In golf, you got the duffers, the guys who look like they've just walked out of one of those obnoxious dentist-office paintings, with the radio-controlled bags stuffed with Callaways and TaylorMades, and you just cringe thinking you're going to get stuck in their foursome because gotDAMN they look good. And then they tee-off and you are reminded yet again that everyone sucks at golf.

Wine tasting is the exact same thing. Everyone swirls the glass and sniffs the wine and makes, "mmm"ing and "ahhh"ing noises, and tries to come up with pretentious sounding statements about its delicate tannin earthiness and full-bodied bouquet and in the end, they're just as s**t-faced as everyone else, having quaffed what should have been sipped. For every Tiger Woods of Wine tasting, there are a hundred dorks trying not to look as drunk as they feel and wondering if it's okay to admit they liked what they just drank, or hated what is supposed to be loved.

My experience: Liked some, disliked others, will not ever hit six wineries in one day again.

The only thing sexier than me declaring I was going to get sick was the actual sound of me retching on the side of the road. As cyclists rode by, no less. Cyclists from the event. The one I was supposed to be in.

I am such a badass.

It was cold. Those are foothills, with snow. We're talking an elevation of like 500 to 700 feet or something.