Monthly Archive

We went wine tasting a few times last year with our friends Mike and Sandra.  On one of the tasting excursions we all bought a library release the 2001 Lions Peak Proprietor’s Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon.  Mike emailed me the other day to let me know that he and Sandra opened their bottle it was drinking really well.  I wanted to be able to compare notes with him, so Jason and I opened up our bottle tonight.  Mike was right!  The fruit used to make this wine was grown in Paso Robles.  The Cabernet Sauvignon fruit from Paso tends to yield a wine that is soft on the palate but rich with chocolate and berry flavors.  I love Napa Cabernets (especially the 1999 Nickel & Nickel Rock Cairn Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon we drank about a month ago, WOW!), but quite frankly, I lack patience.    Paso Cabs cost less than their Napa cousins and best of all, they are ready to drink far sooner!  So while you’re waiting for your Napa Cabs to bottle age for eight to ten years, you can choose from great Cabs from Paso.  Case in point, at the 2008 California State Fair, the Calcareous 2005 Cabernet was named ‘Best Cabernet Sauvignon in California’.  This wasn’t an isolated Paso win, either.  Out of 1700 entries from wineries in California, Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, Australia and New Zealand, Paso Robles won all three Best in Class awards for Cabernet.  Trust me, if you’ll be visiting the Santa Barbara area, be sure to give yourself a weekend to taste Paso Robles’ wonderful Zinfandels, Petite Sirahs, Syrahs AND Cabs!

Neither Jason nor I were able to get dinner reservations anywhere tonight – it is Valentine’s Day and we both didn’t plan far enough ahead. We headed downtown to Elements to see if we could get one of the tables in the bar. Fortunately we lucked out and were able to get a table by the window– so we had a view of the Santa Barbara courthouse. We got married in the clock tower of the courthouse and then we had dinner at Elements, so it is extra fun that we are celebrating Valentine’s Day here. We ordered wine to drink while we were deciding what to order. I had the 2007 Chien Edelzwicker (my favorite white blend of 2008) and Jason ordered a glass of Prosecco. For our first course we had two salads, one was prosciutto and citrus on a bed of watercress and the other was a squid salad on mixed greens. For my entrée, I chose a swordfish fillet with mole and fingerling potatoes and kale. It was, hands down, the best mole sauce I have ever had. If you haven’t tried mole yet, you should go to Elements. It is an intriguing blend of chocolate (bitter, not sweet), cinnamon, chili peppers (usually ancho, pasilla, mulato, chipotle), nuts or seeds, garlic, and onions. It seems that there is no single way to make mole, it is very open to interpretation and experimentation. This mole tasted rich and had a slow, mellow burn with a very slight tang. It was so perfectly balanced – richness and spice dancing in my mouth! During dinner I had a glass of Tercero blend of Syrah, Grenache and Mourvedre. It was the second glass that I ordered…the first one I am sad to report wasn’t good so I ordered a different wine. Life is too short to drink wine you don’t like. It was a 2006 Syrah from Barrel 27 and it smelled like sherry and wet cardboard. On the palate it didn’t taste bad per se, but it sure didn’t taste good either. It was a new wine at Elements, so the waitstaff couldn’t tell me if this was just an aberrant bottle. I generally like the wines from Barrel 27, so I am inclined to believe that it was just an “off” bottle. Jason ordered the 2005 Beckman Syrah. I am consistently pleased with the wines from Beckman, especially the Syrah and Grenache. Expressive and lush, they are sheer pleasure to drink! We had a chocolate ganache dessert, reminisced some more about our sunny afternoon wedding years ago and then headed home. At home we opened a Paso Robles blend of 55% Syrah, 25% Cabernet Sauvignon, 11% Cabernet Franc and 9% Zinfandel. It was the 2004 RN Estate Cuvée des Artistes. I loved the flavor combination of blackberry, spice, licorice and white pepper. There are some really amazing wines coming out of the Paso Robles area. We went wine tasting there last year in September and were surprised at how many wonderful wineries we found. We’ll be going again this year at least once or twice, in search of more great wine.  Drop me a note if you have any favorites in Paso!

Jason and I didn’t drink wine tonight, because we had an important martial arts (Hapkido) test. We tested and passed!  We’re up to the orange belt with a black stripe.  We have a few years before we’ll have any chance of getting our black belts, but it is a fun journey.   We kickbox too – which is great exercise especially when combined with Hapkido.  Its a good thing too, because I eat and drink with gusto!

We came home today after spending a few days in Los Angeles at a trade show. Boy it is great to be back home in Santa Barbara! To celebrate, we opened a local wine, the 2004 Curran Black Oak Vineyard Syrah Reserve, made by Kris Curran. She is responsible for some award winning wines at Cambria and most notably Sea Smoke Cellars. With the Curran brand, she focuses on a handful of varietals including Grenache Blanc, Sangiovese, Syrah, Tempranillo. Her single vineyard Syrahs are really interesting to taste side by side because Kris focuses on trying to bring out the character of the varietal as well as unique characteristics imparted by the vineyard. You can drink the same vintage, the same varietal, with the only difference being that the fruit was grown a mile or so apart at a different vineyard and taste remarkable differences.

We celebrated my father-in-law’s birthday tonight with a special dinner at our place. While prepping the dinner Jason and I opened a chilled Scott Cellars 2005 Pinot Gris which we shared with our guests when they arrived. Scott Cellars is a tiny winery – they produce only about 900 cases a year. I met the winemaker, Peter Scott Fraser, when we were both pouring wine at a charity event. I traded him a bottle of Consilience Santa Barbara County Petite Sirah for one of his Scott Cellars J Cuvee (a lovely fruity blend of Zinfandel and Syrah, named after his wife) which I fell in love with after one taste. Alas, I digress. The Pinot Gris is not subtle nor delicate, it is balanced with a crisp richness that I enjoy in white wine. Dinner was salmon with a lemon dill sauce and roasted root vegetables (pearl onions, garlic, parsnips, potatoes, beets) with a lovely Alma Rosa 2005 Sta. Rita Hills Pinot Noir (90 points from Wine Spectator). The owners of Alma Rosa, Richard and Thekla Sanford, are friends with my in-laws, so we thought it might be fun to drink Alma Rosa wine tonight. The Pinot, with its subtle floral aroma and deep cherry and earthy flavors, went really well with the fish. I also made a “three hole chocolate cake”, using a recipe from my Mom. Since this cake doesn’t call for any perishable ingredients (like milk or eggs), my Mom would bake it whenever the roads were closed (we were snowed in often during the winter and couldn’t get to the supermarket). Here is the recipe in case you are jonesing for chocolate cake.

3 Hole Chocolate Cake
1.5 C flour
1 C sugar
3 TB cocoa
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
6 TB salad oil
1 TB cider vinegar
1 TB vanilla extract
1 C cold water

1. Sift the first 5 ingredients (flour, sugar, cocoa, baking soda, salt) together into a large bowl
2. Make three holes (depressions) in the sifted ingredients
3. Pour salad oil into hole #1
4. Pour cider vinegar into hole #2
5. Pour vanilla extract into hole #3
6. Pour 1 C of water over all
7. Mix it all together with a spoon or wire whisk until very smooth
8. Pour into an 8″x8″ pan
9. Bake at 350F degrees for 30-35 minutes

Sometimes when the cake was still a little warm from the oven, Mom would put a simple glaze on it. With that said, the cake is great without the glaze. Here is the recipe for the glaze:
1 C powdered sugar
1 TB butter
1.5 TB cocoa
A few drops of vanilla extract
Milk (add just enough to make the glaze spreadable)
Mix the glaze ingredients together and then spread over the cake. Enjoy!

Tonight we opened a 2001 Sunstone Syrah but I think we might’ve waited a bit too long to drink it. It just seemed a little one dimensional. I guess we shouldn’t have waited so long. This isn’t the first time we’ve made this mistake. The one that really broke my heart was a bottle of 1970 Chateau Lafite Rothschild that I gave to my husband as a gift (for one of those ‘significant birthdays’) years ago. I cannot be certain, but I was pretty sure that his eyes teared up when he saw the year on the label. We’d waited for the perfect occasion to open the bottle. Everything needed to be right: the glasses, decanter, the season and the friends who’ll enjoy the bottle with us. The perfect occasion presented itself; dear friends of ours who’d recently moved to the Virgin Islands were visiting for the summer. They are passionate, interesting and fabulously alive people and we love spending time with them every chance we get. We don’t drink wine with them very often, now that they’ve moved out of the country, and so this occasion was made even more special. After much anticipation and preparation, my husband Jason handed the wine opener to Bob, biology professor and wine aficionado, and asked him to do the honors. After the cork came out, I knew from the disappointed look on Bob’s face that the wine had turned. We were left with a bottle of dashed hopes and vinegar.

After that heartbreak bottle, my husband and I decided that we’d try very hard to avoid letting a beautiful bottle of wine turn to salad dressing sitting in wine storage. These days, we make it a point to open a good bottle with most of our dinners. It makes every dinner seem like a celebration, and is also a way to dress up a simple meal at home. Hamburgers, baked beans and a simple green salad get infinitely more interesting when paired with a glass of Rusack Pinot, Andrew Murray Roasted Slope Syrah or the Kunin’s Grenache/Syrah/Mourvedre blend called Pape Star. Also, wine is a wonderful reminder of your travels, as you open bottles acquired on your successful wine tasting adventures. My husband and I went wine tasting in France years ago; we think of our trip whenever we open a bottle from the Chateauneuf-du-Pape region. It is wonderful to reminisce together over a glass of wine; it binds us and deepens our love. It is instant romance, with a baguette and a spot of brie!

We’d been storing a special bottle for a friend of ours for many years. He kept saying “I want to share this bottle with you,” but then he moved to Brazil for a while, got married and years slipped on by. In light of our heartbreak bottle of 1970 vinegar, we prodded Mike until he decided that it was time to open the bottle. He and his wife came to Santa Barbara and we all went to the farmer’s market where we bought yellow and red beets, new potatoes, red grapes, herbed goat cheese, olive tapenade, a loaf of bread and fresh salad greens from Tom Shepherd. We stopped on the way home to pick up a tri-tip. Then we had all the makings of a fabulous lunch. During our casual appetizer course of grapes, bread, tapenade, and cheeses, we set the table for our lunch and Jason started cooking the meat. We opened the 1997 Far Niente Cabernet Sauvignon to give it adequate time to breathe. We roasted the beets and made a salad. After nearly an hour we sat down in the sunshine at a table in the backyard and reminisced about what our lives were like when the grapes were harvested a decade ago. At that time, Mike wasn’t married and had not even met the woman who would later become his wife. Jason and I weren’t married then either. Over the eight years we stored Mike’s wine, Jason and I moved it to three different zip codes. We found ourselves working day and night during the dot-com boom. We traveled to Belize, Guatemala, and Europe. During this time, Mike (also caught up in the dot-com craziness) met and dated Sandra here in the States, then she went back home to Brazil. Mike pined for her and took Portuguese lessons. He then went to Brazil and proposed. They married and then moved back to America. It is breathtaking to think just how much our lives have changed over the years. The wine was the catalyst for us to sit down, really connect, and talk about life and love and travel and food. No heartbreak in this bottle, only sunlight and celebration!

1997 Far Niente Cabernet Sauvignon - Michael Wilsker pixillusion.com