Player One Podcast

People have been asking, so here you go. Wedding pictures!

As you may recall, I did not appear in episode #126 as March 20th was reserved for my wedding day. My wife, Dana, and I headed up to Napa, California where we exchanged vows in a very small ceremony that included myself, her, the officiant, and a photographer. No family; no friends. Nice and simple.

Our ceremony was held out in the cheap showiness of nature

After our little ceremony, we spent the rest of the day visiting a few different wineries in our wedding gear. We got a few stares and a few toasts raised to us. The rest of the weekend was spent chilling out and…well, going to more wineries. It’s Napa Valley, after all. There’s not much else to do up there.

For our final activity before heading home that Sunday, we decided to stop by a winery that I had wanted to visit since one of our previous trips up to Napa months ago. It’s a very classy-looking place that unlike many wineries up there requires its visitors to make an appointment. The place is called Quintessa, and I am sad to confess that I had less than classy reasons for wanting to stop there.

Quintessa, you see, is not only a winery. It is also the home to the cruel Quintessons, the evil aliens from the old 1986 Transformers movie. They were the guys with the five heads and tentacles who floated around on a beam of energy. They would hold mock trials for all their prisoners and proclaim the captives innocent before executing them. Remember when they captured Hot Rod and Kup and those two were talking about how to escape as they were on trial? And then the Quintesson judge told them to be quiet or they’d be held in contempt of court and Hot Rod was all like, “I have nothing but contempt for this court.” Man, that old Transformers movie was friggin’ awesome. I mean, for seriously. But now I’m getting off topic.

Here's me at the gates of Quintessa. Not pictured: the Sharkticon pit.

Anyhoo, seeing as how I’m a bit of a Transformers nerd, I found it hilarious that this fancy winery shared its name with a relatively obscure piece of Transformers lore. So we had to go there.

Keep in mind that I explained all this to Dana before the wedding and she still wanted to go through with it. I believe it was Michael Bluth who once said, “You gotta lock that down.”

Any-anyhoo, it turns out that this half-joke visit turned into one of the highlight stops of the weekend. When we called to reserve our wine tasting, we were a bit shocked at the price–$65 per person. Compare this to the $5-$10 that most wineries charge for a tasting. But we figured what the hell. This was the final stop of our wedding weekend. We can splurge on something a bit extravagant.

The real Quintessa.

And boy, was it nice. We had a private tour of the winery. Our guide walked us around the vineyard, giving us a history lesson about the place as we sampled their ware. We were then led underground where the wine is made and aged. Then it was off to our private tasting room where they had made up personalized menus for us describing the wines we were tasting and some frou-frou hors d’oeuvres. This was some pricey wine, too. The half bottle that we ended up buying was more expensive than any full bottles that we bought from other wineries. Still, good stuff.

So there you go. Wedding pictures and a little story. And no, you won’t find any honeymoon pictures here, you sickos.

Phil Theobald Miscellany Napa, Quintessa, Transformers, wedding