I’ve been back in Tampa a couple days now and I’m starting to miss mom’s cooking. But it’s good to be in the city that raised me, checking out the old stomping grounds and living in the house I was in before we started this crazy vineyard thing. For those who don’t know, I’m from Tampa so this is where the wine’s marketing and distribution is headquartered for the time being.

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Home, Sweet-Mother-of-@#*!, Home.

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The video isn’t working entirely right… I’ll have to get my mom to reupload it. Regardless, that’s a glimpse of the house my parents built before going into wine. They made the houses like they make wines WAY BIGGER THAN MOST PEOPLE WOULD EVER EXPECT.

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Anyway, I’m in Tampa and I’m ready to start selling wine. A lot of new contacts from the Sarasota Wine Festival. I met David and Deb Hunt from Hunt Cellars, several of the family member at Stanley Lambert including (Jim Lambert, self-proclaimed wannabe winemaker), the lovely family behind Silkwood Wines, and the Michael half of Michael-David Winery (who make Earthquake, Incognito, Pride, 7 Deadly Zins and many many more). They were all fantastic people and I will be keeping in touch with each of them.

I also got to snoop a little behind the scenes, sneaking around the service corridors of the Ritz Carlton, salvaging floral arrangements from the hotel’s trash, and pouring more than a thousand samples in three days. I even got invited to an after-party thrown by one of the bigger distributors and it was fun drinking behind (what some refer to as) enemy lines. At the end of so much good wine, everybody can be good friends.