west virginia wine & jazz weekend.

after getting caught in the rain.

west virginia wine & jazz is my second favorite holiday, right behind halloween. i have gone almost every year since college, so we're talking about eight years of consecutive wining and jazzing.

to give you some brief history: it's a big festival held in morgantown, wv where all sorts of wineries set up in a field with jazz music as a soundtrack to your drinking. you pay $20, which gets you a free wine glass and unlimited wine tastings. it's pretty much the best thing ever.

my friend lindsay arrived from columbus friday night, and we left for the festival saturday morning. major snag = it was raining. we hoped that the rain would calm down as we got closer to morgantown, but mother nature wasn't on our side. when we checked into the hotel, we put on our ponchos and marched in the rain to the mountainlair where we would be catching the shuttle to the fest. we got caught in a torrential downpour. I'm talking it was raining in sheets and the wind was blowing our faces off.

we made it on the shuttle and to the fest, and it was surprisingly very well-attended considering the weather. the lines for the wineries were obviously a lot less crowded than when it is sunshine-y and beautiful, but we still had to wait to taste at some of them. we hiked through the wetness and mud and were basically covered in filth by the time we found a place under the tent.

the rain downpouring, our muddy feetsies and my disgusting sandals.

lambert's is usually my go-to, but i wasn't loving their wine this year. we ended up getting wine from forks of cheat winery and west-whitehill.

lindsay showing off our wine purchases.

forks of cheat's "bad cat" and west whitehill's vidal blanc. 

we drank for a few hours and then decided it was time to head back to the hotel morgan. we took a pretty hefty nap and then headed out for dinner at black bear, where we sampled some of the concoctions from the west virginia inspired cocktails. i got the moonshine martini and lindsay got the blue hole margarita.

after dinner, we went to this new bar called rock top, which is a rooftop bar with two pools. it's pretty crazy for being in morgantown. as my friend ben said: "oh my god, that place should have its own free clinic...or penicillin dispenser." 

they had a DJ named DJ marshall (his tagline was "crankin' it up and burnin' it down!") and it was apparently a "silver chalice party school trophy" party since WVU is back as the #1 party school. the DJ played the air horn sound about every 30 seconds which made us laugh/dance simultaneously.

rocktop's rooftop pools.

we got back to the hotel around 2:30am and promptly went to sleep. we got up in the morning and checked out and headed to the chinese buffet for a "goodbye, morgantown" lunch. if you want to feel terrible about yourself and your life choices, i highly recommend it. lindsay played some awesome music on the way home, and we got here around 2pm. she left about an hour and a half later, and i pretty much napped the day away after that.

wine & jazz 2012 was a (rainy) success!