Part One: Starting the Day
School was cancelled these past two days, which means I haven’t been in class since Wednesday evening. I’m hoping that tomorrow will be cancelled as well, which would mean I would be out of class for TWELVE days (I don’t have classes on Thursdays and Fridays, and this Monday is Presidents Day). This is basically longer than my Spring Break, which is coming up at the end of February.
As my blog has indicated, I’ve been cooking a lot, eating well, and drinking a lot of great wines. For instance, yesterday morning started with my making a bachelor’s breakfast skillet consisting of a layer of leftover mashed potatoes, two eggs, shredded cheddar cheese, thyme, and a whole lotta Tabasco sauce:
I had purchased two small 5″ Lodge cast-iron skillets for this very purpose but seldom use them. I should more often.
Although this was a good introduction to the day, I had bigger ambitions for the evening. See, my roommate Alex was coming home from Europe yesterday, and I figured I should welcome him back to the US of A with a proper meal of lamb shanks and butternut squash.
But how do I cook lamb shanks?
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Categories: food pairing · tasting notes
Tagged: Burgundy, France, lamb, pinot noir
I’ve been on a wine-drinking and -writing bender lately. Counterintuitively, I found that there’s something liberating about being trapped indoors by the falling snow: the physical fact of being kept indoors turns the mind inward as well, so there’s been plenty of time for reflection and self-analysis.
And of course, eating and drinking.
Added to the bottles thus far consumed during Snowmageddon are the two below:
The one on the left is a Riesling, the 2008 Selbach Riesling Spätlese ($14.99 from MacArthur Beverages). I opened this for a dinner of mahi-mahi, wild rice, and roasted asparagus. The mahi-mahi was pre-marinated, courtesy of Trader Joe’s, in a sweet-salty sauce, so I figured that the semi-sweet Spätlese would be a decent match.
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Categories: food pairing · tasting notes
Tagged: Germany, riesling, Spain, tempranillo
As you might have noticed by now, I am a native Californian, so it’s easy to surmise how crazy “Snowmageddon” is for me. Snow itself is still sort of a foreign concept, so 30 INCHES of it is strange, indeed. This is the view from my fifth-floor window in DC:
That being said, I went to Trader Joe’s on Thursday to stock up on foodstuffs. Unfortunately, everyone and their mothers (literally) had the same idea, and the line wrapped all the way around the inside of the store and down the oils/pastas/nuts/dried fruits aisle. Yikes!
What was more pleasant for me was going to MacArthur Beverages (as chronicled in a recent post) and then to Ansonia Wines to pick up some wine. I’ve had the opportunity to have a friend or two over with whom to brave the cold, and we’ve gone through a few bottles of wine.
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Categories: tasting notes
Tagged: beaujolais, Cotes du Rhone, France, gamay
My joy is complete.
I just found a bus line–the D6–that takes me from 20th and L Street to MacArthur and V Street. What’s at MacArthur and V Street? Only one of the finest wine shops in the DC Metro area: Addy Bassin’s MacArthur Beverages.
You might recall an earlier post where I purchased the bottles for a Spanish wine tasting from MacArthur. My mission today was to pick up a bottle of the 2001 Penfolds “RWT” Barossa Valley Shiraz for a fancy Australian Shiraz tasting I’m having next week. However, I ended up, as per usual, lingering for a bit, talking with Phil (an excellent wine steward who remembered that the last time I came in–last semester–I was wearing a suit and had picked up a bottle of the 1999 R. Lopez de Heredia “Viña Gravonia” blanco), and picking up a whole lot more than I came in for.
I was in the mood to pick up nice, simple table wines–nothing too pricey but still offering good quality to price. Something like the 2008 Vin de Pays du Vaucluse from Domaine de Durban, an $8.99 table red made mostly of Grenache from Kermit Lynch that was just so fun and delicious to drink.
Bingo.
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Categories: tasting notes
Tagged: France, grenache
One of my favorite pastimes in DC is to discuss ways in which California is superior to every other state. This usually takes place in the company of fellow Californians, as people who aren’t from Cali simply can’t comprehend how their domiciles are inferior.
All kidding aside, California does have a lot going for it. This being a wine blog, I will restrict the discussion of California’s awesomeness to wine. Of course, there’s Napa. Sonoma. Paso Robles. There’s Cabernet. There’s Pinot. There’s Chardonnay. Etc., etc., etc.
But just as overexposure to sun can lead to premature wrinkles and skin cancer, and being in the shadow of Hollywood creates self-aggrandizers, posers, and shallow B-list types, so can the sun lead to huge, overly-ripe wines, and so can being in the shadow of Napa create wines that, in undergoing sugar Botox and oak augmentation, have become caricatures.
Thus, there are so many California Cabs that are as undrinkably oaky, and California Chards that leave nothing to the imagination. Hence my migration towards the refined, subtle graces of Burgundies.
Thank God for Zinfandels.
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Categories: food pairing · tasting notes
Tagged: California, zinfandel
There are many different reasons for why one does anything, reasons that may be small and large, significant and trivial, obvious and perhaps unknowable even to oneself. Certainly, there are many reasons one decides to write a wine blog. Learning how to budget was not one of them, but there were things like wanting to learn more about wine, wanting to practice how to write, and wanting to become part of a community. I loved drinking wine; I loved talking about it, and I loved the culture and ceremony around this most noble of beverages.
But of course, there are still other reasons.
My first post is dated December 23, 2007. 2007 was a very tough year for me and innumerable others. We lost a wonderful friend that June, and this world lost out on an incredibly talented, beautiful, and giving young woman.
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Categories: discussion
Is it obsessive to, when you are taking a bottle of wine over to a friend’s place, also want to bring a decanter and proper stemware?
Come on, you wouldn’t put regular unleaded in a sports car, right? Yes, yes, I know that that analogy is flawed, but you get the idea.
Such was the question that plagued me when I was bringing over a bottle of the 2007 St. Innocent “Shea Vineyard” Pinot Noir (from the Willamette Valley, Oregon) ($49.00 at Bell Liquor & Wine Shoppe) for a movie night with a friend. I asked my roommate whether bringing the decanter and some Burgundy glasses would be too much.
“Um… yeah,” he replied, looking at me like I was crazy. (Then again, this is the guy who recently ran a 50-mile marathon.) So I decided not to bring the decanter and the wine glasses, even though the Pinot was almost criminally young. It was with some trepidation, therefore, that I opened the bottle and poured some into wine glasses the hostess provided.
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Categories: food pairing · tasting notes
Tagged: Oregon, pinot noir
I am writing this post from my plain wooden desk here in DC. It’s freakin’ cold here, and drafts blow in from the assuredly-closed plate-glass windows to my left, turning my poor feet into blocks of ice. I’ve been in DC only since around 9 pm on Sunday, and already the healing properties of sunny SoCal rise again as memory in my mind.
I was fortunate enough to have spent the past two and a half weeks in Los Angeles with my family and my sister’s Chihuahua, Twinkie:
Aside from food from Lucky Boy, Taco Bell and various Mexican restaurants of varying degrees of authenticity, endless Chinese, and some delicious, delicious omakase-style sushi at Sushi Sasabune courtesy of my brother, I drank a fair amount of wine (though not as much as I had hoped to). Of particular note was a bottle of champagne I purchased for New Year’s with my family, a delightful Louis Roederer brut that went well with Peking duck.
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Categories: tasting notes
Tagged: zinfandel
About a week or so ago I wrote a post about some delicious, delicious red Burgundies I shared with some staffers of the Nota Bene. However, that was only half the story, as along with the three excellent pinots we tried three chardonnays.
I think a lot of people, when they think about Burgundy, see in their mind’s eye big jug wines labeled “Burgundy.” (An aside: I was looking up Carlo Rossi’s Burgundy to see what grapes go in it but was unsuccessful. I have no clue what goes in their Burgundy, and apparently no one on the Internet cares enough to do the research!) This is horrible, and my hat goes off to those wine drinkers who appreciate well-crafted, artisanal pinot noir-based Burgundies from Burgundy, France.
But that’s not all this wondrous region has to offer. I would argue that some of the world’s greatest white wines–and definitely the world’s greatest chardonnays–come from Burgundy. Those white Burgundies I’ve tried have all been vastly superior–to my palate, at least–to those super-oaky butterballs that California seems to churn out with a vengeance.
To each his own, though, right? This might be the case, but in my age demographic (20-30, generally) white Burgundies get ignored. This can be chalked (heh) up to four broad reasons:
- When people think of Burgundy, they think of horrible jug wines.
- When people don’t think of Burgundy in terms of jug wines, they think that all Burgundies are red.
- Many people are turned off by the “butterball” super-oaky style of chardonnay championed by Californian winemakers.
- White Burgundies can be friggin’ expensive.
I’ve already addressed numbers one and two. As regards number three, white Burgundies are as a general rule much less oaky than California wines. However, they do exist on a stylistic scale ranging from lean and mean to round and supple, which makes Burgundy a veritable playground of chardonnay.
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Categories: tasting notes
Tagged: Burgundy, chardonnay, France
I. Introduction
If you’re reading this blog you’ve probably seen or at least heard of the movie Sideways, which chronicles the last hurrah journey of two friends through the Santa Ynez Valley. It is filled with fine wine, boozing, women, and other misadventures. One of the sadder scenes is when Miles, the protagonist, drinks a bottle of his prized ’61 Cheval Blanc alone with a foam fast-food restaurant cup.
Having been in a fraternity, I’ve imbibed from many different sorts of containers: mugs, plastic cups, boxes, the bosom of life. At the time, I was proud of my set of four Crate and Barrel wineglasses (price: $3.99 each), into which I’d pour only the finest Yellowtail Shiraz and Merlot.
What a difference a few years make.
II. Riedel glassware is awesome.
Drink wine long enough and you’ll eventually come across mention of Riedel stemware. Riedel has been in the business of glassmaking for eleven generations, so they’ve not only had time to perfect what they’re doing, they’ve had the time to come up with a whole host of awesome crystal products.
Drinking out of a Riedel glass elevates the wine experience for at least two reasons. First: they’re simply beautiful and well-designed glasses, period. Most of their lines—including the affordable machine-made Vinum series—are made of lead crystal, which classes up any drinking situation. They’re well-weighted and feel good in the hand. Their lips are thin, which avoids the problem some glasses have where it feels like you’re drinking wine from a coffee mug. And, they are simple and elegant.
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Categories: discussion
