Four Springs cooking up tasty wine sauces

When you make your way into Four Springs Winery in Seven Valleys, Pa., one of these next two weekends for Tour de Tanks, make sure you try the meatballs in wine sauce. It could be a white sauce or red sauce; they've made both for an event that drew more than 300 ticketholders the first week and 450 each the past two weekends.

The white sauce has been made with Four Springs Chardonnay and Rothchild Farms raspberry honey mustard pretzel dip. That creates a yellow sauce that's a perfect dipping agent for the meatballs. When they temporarily ran out of the raspberry honey mustard, they switched to a red sauce that featured Four Springs Chambourcin and some Aunt Mae smoked sweet chipolte oven and grilling sauce. Both of those companion items are available for purchase at the winery.

In either case, lay the meatballs in the bottom of the crock and let them simmer. Then go open some wine and snack.

Two quick intros to new friends

Received two notes from folks who found the blog and wanted to get tied in for different reasons. One came from Brian Kirby, who writes The Other 46, focusing on wineries in states outside the Big 4: California, Oregon, Washington and New York. You can find his blog among my links.

I also heard from Kevin Durland at Nimble Hill Vineyard and Winery in Tuckhannock, which opened in 2007. It's located, he said, 25 miles west of Scranton. Nimble Hill and surrounding wineries have created the Great Escape Endless Mountain Wine Trail. I've linked you to the best reference I found to that wine trail, on the site of my winetrailtraveler.com buds, who visited Pickering Winery in Bradford County.