Raible Designs

Wine Tasting in Napa Valley

Earlier this month, I had the pleasure of traveling to California for the monthly commute to my current client. It was a fun week, mostly because my partner in crime started working with me again. We kicked off a new mobile project and I helped finish up a UI refresh that I've been working on for the last few months. While the happy hours and late night chats were fun, it didn't hold a candle to Trish and my journey to Napa Valley over Mother's Day weekend.

Before heading to Napa, I started by emailing some local friends to get some recommendations. We got some really detailed responses, especially from Dusty and Mrs. Crazy Bob. We took their recommendations, setup some appointments, made some reservations and booked a room at Harvest Inn.

After settling in the first night, we drove to Round Pond Estate to have a glass of wine with the sunset. The sunset was great, but Trish made it look even better with a little HDR.

That evening, we dined at Ad Hoc. We couldn't get a reservation until 9:30, but the food was fantastic and the pairings even better.

On Saturday, we slept in a bit and started our first tasting at Orin Swift in St. Helena. It was a private tasting in a hard-to-find area. We didn't recognize the name when we first made the appointment, but were impressed to find they made The Prisoner and Papillon. We enjoyed hearing the story of the winery and how all the labels came to be. We liked it so much, we bought a bunch and send it to our Moms for Mother's Day.

From Orin Swift, we went to Cade Winery. This was perched on the top of a mountain and had a terrific view. Trish had booked our tasting and tour online and we someone got into a release party, complete with oysters, exotic cheeses and lots of wine for everyone. We also got a tour of their underground cave.

While Orin Swift had our favorite wines of the day, Cade was our favorite winery. Not only that, but we discovered they made PlumpJack, which is one of Trish's favorite brands.

The last place we visited that afternoon was Anomaly, a very small winery that was in the owner's backyard. The winery itself was like a tall garage with the tasting room downstairs.

That evening, we dined at Auberge. It was incredible. The Nuggets losing to the Lakers in Game 7 was not.

Thanks to Dusty and Mrs. Crazy Bob for all the excellent recommendations. We thoroughly enjoyed ourselves.

You can check out of Trish's pictures in her Napa Valley Gallery. I especially dig her California Chevy photo shown above.

How to build a Shot-Ski

At this year's Java Posse Roundup, James Ward, Trish McGinity, Brad Kizzort and I embarked upon a mission to build a Shot-Ski. Actually, we decided to build two. We wanted to show all the things we learned at the Roundup into a 5-minute Lightning Talk and building Shot-Skis seemed like an excellent mechanism. As Skiing Magazine says:

Everyone should have a shot-ski at their disposal. They're versatile, classy, and always appropriate. And, best of all, easy to make.

We spent about 3 hours researching, building, testing and deploying our shot-skis on a quiet afternoon in the town of Crested Butte. Below is a picture of our finished products, complete with stickers to demonstrate modern webapp design, a.k.a. sex sells.

We developed two different types of shot-skis, one that had the shot glasses top-mounted and the 2nd with the glasses mounted in the skis. We A/B tested them and decided we liked the top-mounted ones better. However, the in-ski version has the benefit of built-in brakes, in case you're using it on the mountain.

The whole crew was proud of what we were able to create in an afternoon. You can almost feel our pride as we strolled to that evening's lightning talks.

And now, thanks to The Java Posse, we actually have video footage of our lightning talk!

If you're ever in the town of Crested Butte, we donated these skis to The Secret Stash and Montanya Distillers. We encourage you to stop by and try them out. You can also checkout Trish's photos of our development process.