OH where oh where will our wedding be ?!

This was the main question facing us after he popped the question.

We were very excited and started searching around a few weeks after we got engaged. The night we got engaged we briefly discussed some very loose conditions

- Neither one of us was attached to a church ceremony
- Neither one of us wanted a hotel ball room
- It would be in California
- Needed to hold 100 people
- I didn't want to HAVE to be out at a certain time.
- I wanted no restrictions on the music
- Didn't want a place that had 2 weddings in 1 day if it could be avoided.

When I thought about my wedding before being engaged, I had always kinda wanted to get married in Tahoe. It is GORGEOUS there. The mountains, the crystal blue lake, mountain tops with views.
There are plenty of options for someone wanting to have an outdoor ceremony. The only trouble is it's 4 hours from San Francisco. There is an airport there, but it's small and therefore more expensive to fly into versus a major airport like San Francisco, or Sacramento. With the amount of out of town guests we were expecting, it didn't seem practical to ask them to spend great amounts on plane tickets, or fly in, then travel an additional 4 hours from San Fran or 2.5 hours from Sacramento to get to our wedding location. So we reluctantly decided against looking in Tahoe.

The first place where we made an appointment to look was at Wente Vineyards in Livermore, (about an hour outside of the city)

They have two venues for wedding receptions and ceremonies. The first is at the main Wente vineyard, where you can have an outdoor ceremony, and dine inside, or have a tented reception one of their large lawns. The left is the main event center building where the indoor dining takes place if you choose, and on the right is a set up for an untented ceremony. There are more photos on their website, as I don't believe these quite do it justice.
The second is about 5 minutes from the main event center. It is called Murietta's Well. It is a spanish style building and holds less people. If you choose this location your ceremony is in an actual wine barrel cellar.
The top photo is the outside of the building. Again it is not done justice as in person there are more flowers, and some really neat tiled steps up to a patio area where they would hold cocktail hour over looking the foothills. The bottom photo is a photo of the wine cellar area.

This is the type of venue that is in THE wedding business. They have an office where you go in watch a video, look at photos of past weddings, etc then speak to a coordinator (IE; sales person)
The event coordinator was very nice answered all questions, was on time, and responded to all E mail and phone calls quickly. I did feel she was a bit "sales-y" however. Also they have very limited availability for the months we were looking into (August and September) and if you chose Murietta's well (which I preferred) it was a MUST to be out by10:30, and there was limitations on music because of the houses in the hills above. We had tried outside the city limits hoping to save some moeny, however they also had minimums for food and such which, while in our budget, would've stretched the amount of other little things we could do.

We kept looking....