A Late Summer Visit To Gadino Cellars

While I have been on radio silence in the bloggisphere, I have still been hitting the VA wine trails here and there. Recently, we took a trip down to Gadino Cellars to enjoy one of the last summer days of the year and check on our geocache.

Dan decided to slip inside for a tasting, while I went right for a glass of Luminoso with our friends from Wine About Virginia. We all sat out on the patio with the sun streaming down through the vines that grow over Gadino’s pergola and listened to Triptych, one of our favorite local bands.

Triptych playing on the patio

About halfway through our bottles of Luminoso and Sunset, Bill, the winery maker and owner walked over with Quinn, a sweet lab that my son instantly began petting and talking to. Talking with Bill was easy and delightful, as he and I share a similar Italian heritage. We talked favorite foods and restaurants, family, and of course, wine!

Bill shared how this years’ crops were growing and which would be getting harvested soon. Dan eagerly asked about how Gadino Cellars was planning to use petit verdot grapes from Berryhill Vineyards, a local vineyard that we were sad to see sold recently. Happily, Bill plans to add it in with his own wonderful petit verdot, and we can’t wait to try the results. Wine About Virginia asked after his petit manseng and dessert wines, and he shared how he uses local whiskey in his port wines.

Bill and I

Throughout our visit, as we listened to live music and spoke with Bill, my little one was also enjoying the winery. We’ve worked hard to teach him winery etiquette, even at his tender age of 2, and while we still get some typical toddler breakdowns, he had a fantastic time running in the yard, jumping off rocks into Dan’s arms, and reading his favorite dinosaur book under the grape vines.

Playing with daddy

Jax reading under the vines

As the afternoon came to a close, we packed up and headed for the parking lot. We enjoyed our afternoon at Gadino Cellars, and we’d like to send a special thank you to the winery owner and staff, Triptych, and our friends at Wine About Virginia who made it so.

Arrivederci amici!

A Snag in Wedding Planning

I usually write posts about my reading, outdoor, or wine adventures, but today I am going to briefly break from that mold and write a post about wedding planning. Please do not worry, I am not going to change the style of my blog or redesign it with an overabundance of pastel colors. This is just a quick foray into the world of wedding planning, because at this moment, I am spending countless hours planning my own.

The majority of my wedding planning is coming together without a hitch – probably because I was pressured into helping out with dozens of weddings at my ex-church, and therefore, I have a good bit of experience. Food, dress shopping, registries, and so forth have not been much of a problem for me.

Unfortunately, the one giant hole in my planning experience is finding a wedding DJ. Where I grew up, music was appreciated, but dancing was pretty much forbidden. Because of this (and the fact the audio for these weddings, which almost always HAD to be held at the church, where controlled by the church audio team), I had never needed to search for a wedding DJ before.


As with all things attached to the word “wedding”, I instantly noticed that DJs liked to charge an absorbent amount for their services. I understand how live bands charge thousands of dollars to play at a wedding. They have to pay multiple people, and they are also wearing themselves out playing an instrument and singing for hours on end.

However, I can’t understand how a simple DJ could charge $1,000-$2,000 dollars just to sit there and play a list of songs. Truly, I get that a lot more can go into it than that, but I still think the cost is ridiculously high for such an easy task.

As I surfed through the hundreds of wedding DJ listings online, I discovered that it is easy to weed out many of the bad options by answering the questions below:

• Does their web page take forever to load and/or look really bad?
• Do they list their prices on their site? (not a deal breaker, but annoying)
• To contact them for a quote, do you HAVE to call them? (Seriously, email is free; use it.)
• After you send them an email for a quote, do they reply that they want to talk/meet with you instead of giving you a quote? (I get the importance of face-to-face, but if you're that secretive about your cost, you're obviously hiding something. No amount of you talking is going to get me to pay thousands of dollars for a DJ!)
• Is their quote over $1,000?

Looking online is always a good place to start, but another fantastic way to find DJs is by word of mouth. Through one of Dan’s co-workers, we found out about one DJ, and this DJ led us to another one who lives closer to the wedding location. :)

We have not booked with any DJ yet, but now we have multiple people who we can talk to and see who will be the best fit for us. Hurray!