Finger Lakes Winery Tours

So the family and I had a great time, despite the cold, camping this weekend.

I did a Whrrl story about our first day touring the wineries-so go take a look, you’ll feel as if you were there with us!

I’m not going to kid you-we spent several hundred dollars on wine, and got almost 5 full cases. In case you were wondering, we aren’t heavy drinkers or anything-the last time we bought that much it lasted a couple of years.

We did do several things that were frugal on this trip:

#1-We camped with our camper trailer at a State Park. This was much less expensive than a hotel.

#2-Because we were camping, we cooked our own food. We did not buy a single meal out for the entire 4 day weekend. Not only that, but we brought snacks with us to keep the kiddos occupied. Having looked at the tourist aimed prices at the wineries that did have eating establishments, well, we saved a ton.

#3-Because we were camping we could bring our puppy with us and not have to board her somewhere. Again-big savings.

To really have made this a much less expensive vacation we could have simply done the tastings and not bought the wine. At each winery the tastings ran anywhere from $1 to $3 and you typically sampled between 5 and 8 different wines.

Yankee Bill and I bought wine, but we didn’t crack a single bottle-it all stayed corked to be brought home. So technically we would have had the same fun if we had tasted and not bought at all! It was the act of tasting, comparing notes, thinking about what characteristics we enjoyed in each wine. . . even seeing the various locations and admiring all the labels. Those were what made the vacation.

If money had been tight we could simply have written down the names of the wines we had enjoyed and then bought them, a bottle at a time, at our local wine stores as we wanted them.

Have any of you ever been wine tasting? Do you have any frugal tips?

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