Small freakin world

Five plus years ago, my husband and I got married. We went on a marvelous honeymoon in Napa and had big fun with wine. Along the way, we also got interested in visiting distilleries.

Which is how we found Charbay.

You had to make an appointment to come up and see the facility, then brave a rather tortuous mountain road. At the end of the road lay a small, barnlike structure that, on initial viewing, was completely unimpressive.

Then we met Marko, and everything changed.

He told us of the twelve generations of distillers that came before him. He told us of his father who made a fabulous dessert wine using fortified Chardonnay - and how he was evolving as the thirteenth generation distiller.

At the time, Charbay was a small operation. He took fruit essence - Key Lime, Meyer Lemon, Blood Orange and Ruby Red Grapefruit - and infused small batch Midwestern vodka with the flavors.

Ohmigod.

After having the Charbay version of orange vodka, Stoli Orange tastes like Tang. Marko took the essence of each fruit and made it into an alcoholic treat that was out of this world.

Now you ask, how does this story have anything to do with the title of this post?

We met Marko's national sales rep tonight. (She says he's like an older brother to her - how cool!) At Specs (a local liquor and wine store). We saw that some woman was giving out free samples of our favorite vodka ever and wandered over. She started giving us the standard spiel, but we cut her off saying that we knew 'cause we'd already visited the distillery.

Suddenly, we're one of the cool people.

We stood around with Moxy shooting the shit for five minutes... and invited her to our upcoming Meat and Martini party (invites aren't out yet).

She said she'd come if she was in town. How cool is that?

Hopefully she'd bring samples.

Aww yeah...

PS Sorry for the run on sentence.