Hudson Valley Wine Goddess Visits Captain Lawrence

Monday, April 30, 2012
Notes From the Tasting Room, Vol. 9
by Debbie Gioquindo, Hudson Valley Wine Goddess

Music Discussion Reaches Its ‘Peak’
Caroline Corley, the voice of Westchester’s popular rock radio station 107.1 The Peak, lives the rock and roll lifestyle, and certainly looks the part—dressed all in black, a jangle of bangles around her neck, wrists and ankles, each with a unique story—as she strides into the Captain Lawrence tasting room.

But while rock and roll and booze have long been passionate bedfellows--like Jagger and Richards, the pair is manic, a bit destructive, and usually pretty productive--Corley goes easy on the potent potables. She prefers small glasses of quality beer, which makes a visit to the tasting room a logical one. The fact that she lives close enough that she could get there in the amount of time it takes a Ramones song--1-2-3-4! to fade-out-- to play on The Peak, makes the jaunt a no brainer too.

“Beers and rock and roll,” Corley says over a barrel. “It’s the formula. That’s what makes good fun.”

That voice, doing the Peak morning show out of White Plains, is a familiar one to anyone in Westchester, and beyond, who listens to rock. Her shtick includes references to the skinny young rock stars she calls her boyfriends, shout-outs to her chocolate lab, Mick Jagger, and reports about concerts around the world from her well situated “spies.”

Corley’s face is familiar too—perhaps never more so than at the annual Pleasantville Music Fest, as she ebulliently introduces the next act. In person, she’s warm and engaging. For someone paid to deliver monologues to the masses each day, Caroline Corley is surprisingly adept at listening.

We sip a pair of Freshchester Pale Ales and discuss, naturally, music. She raves about Jack White (“could fart in a bucket,” she says, and she’d buy the record), thinks the Stones kick the Beatles’ asses, and scrutinizes lyrics the way an English major studies Elizabethan sonnets.

Corley’s tastes in beer run the gamut. She cops to “girl” tastes—light and fruity, such as a Blue Moon White, but digs stout as well. “If it tastes like chocolate,” she says, “I’m in.”

She enjoys the Pale Ale too, and asks for a Family Meal for Round 2. When I return from the bar, Corley is chatting up a couple nearby. As chance would have it, the guy is the general manager at the iconic Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, which will reopen in late summer--decades after a heyday that featured everyone from the Grateful Dead to Pink Floyd to Janis Joplin.

Read the whole thing at:
http://networkedblogs.com/x4QVj