It's been almost a year since we moved here to Boston, and as I mentioned in my first post, moving here has been a pretty difficult transition for us. The weather is awful, we miss our friends, the ethnic food is terrible, the produce is far from fresh, the people are unfriendly, the accent is incredibly raunchy, and we can't get our wine shipments here! The state of MA has some ridiculous laws where alcohol can only be sold through a distributor. In other words, all our wine club shipments (which are sent directly from the winery) cannot be sent to our apartment! Thankfully, we knew this before our move and packed around 3 cases of wine in the back of the car for the drive across country. However, since moving here, we've discovered the laws here are so much worse than we imagined. You can't buy alcohol in most grocery stores or markets (something crazy where only 3 stores of each chain in the entire state may sell beer and wine), you can't buy alcohol before noon on Sundays, and we recently found out you can't buy any alcohol from a retailer on a holiday like Memorial Day! WTF? Happy Hour is banned??! Seriously??? We can thank MADD for that wonderful law.
Unfortunately for us, most of the wineries we're members of are small boutique wineries that you really can't get them in a regular store. However, we've managed to make frequent trips back to Cali over the course of the last year and check-in a case or two on the plane with us. Additionally, we're really trying to expand our palate and are trying wines from different regions, in particular European wines since that seems to be popular here on the East Coast. Nonetheless, our palates seem to always bring us back to preferring wines off the Pacific Coast - wines that are complex and full-flavored: fruit forward, spicy, hints of chocolate, espresso, and a long, lingering velvety finish.
We are hoping these laws change soon. In fact, there is an entire organization devoted to changing the legislation: http://www.freethegrapes.org/. In the meantime, we'll continue taking as many trips back to California as our wallets will allow us to visit our friends and bring back wine from Paso Robles. Stay tuned for the next adventure! Suggestions/recommendations/comments on our blog thus far is greatly appreciated!
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