First festival of 2007 brings first big award!

This weekend marks the first big festival we've participated in for 2007. The Oregon Seafood & Wine Festival (OSWF) is in it's second year and held at the Oregon Convention Center (OCC) here in Portland, Oregon. We participated in the festival last year for their first year and did well. Having been with LaVelle full time since August 2006 I'm still in my first year with LaVelle Vineyards so I wasn't present at the OSWF last year.

This year is the first year the OSWF has held a wine competition. There are approximately 65 wineries at the show this year and although not all of them put wines in the competition there were lots of entries for this first annual OSWF wine competition. We entered three of our wines in the competition:

• 2005 Vintage Select Pinot Noir
• 2005 Vintage Select Pinot Gris
• 2005 Crow Valley Riesling

As manager of the festival I'm the one who brings all of the wine and festival supplies up from the winery just outside of Eugene, which ends up being a two and a hald hour drive. About two hours into my drive on Thursday afternoon I called the winery to speak with my Dad. In the middle of our conversation he stopped and told me to hold a minute. When he came back he said that Diana (our office manager) just got a call from the OSWF wine competition and that two of our wines had won awards! Our 2005 Vintage Select Pinot Noir won best of show! At first I asked if that meant it was the best Pinot Noir in the competition and Dad quickly replied, No! Best in show means that our Pinot Noir was the best wine overall entered in the competition! Our 2005 Crow Valley Rieslilng also won a Silver Medal in the competition.

So, the tiny piece of bad news in all of this was that I had to drive back to Eugene that night to pick up more wine for the weekend. A small price to pay for winning best of show!!