Wine Tastings

Today was our free afternoon for the conference, so I decided to head to a winery. What better way to get a souvenir, I thought, than to taste some wine at a winery, and then bring a bottle of my favorite back home?

I selected the Fess Parker Winery on the basis that it was relatively close to my hotel, and I had heard of it. Granted, I had heard of it mostly through the Fess Parker Doubletree Resort, which I couldn't afford to stay in, but I had definitely heard of it. I try to avoid "celebrity" wines, but I gave this one pass on the basis that I was a little bit unsure who Fess Parker was. (It turns out he's most famous for playing Davy Crockett.)

I tasted the wines, and they were OK. In particular, the Sauvingon Blanc managed to overcome my usual distaste for whites. But I figured I should do better than OK, so I left with my only souvenir as a glass with a coonskin cap logo on it. It was tempting to get an actual coonskin cap to replace the one I had as a boy, but I restrained myself.

Still in search of my California wine to bring home, I headed down the road to Firestone Vineyard. Again, the wine was OK, and I left with another souvenir glass. I also left with an admonition to try the wine at Curtis Winery. My souvenir Firestone winery would get me a free tasting at Curtis. I tried the reds there (to avoid getting too wine-d up to drive, I poured out a lot of the stuff I didn't like), but was unimpressed.

There was a recurring taste that put me off, and I wish I could name it, so I could find out how to avoid it in the future. Maybe it's a component of Santa Barbara county wines inherent in the soil? I don't know whether to call it licorice, plastic, chemical or what. I taste it in a number of wines at Corridor Wine, our local wine mega-store, where I go to weekly tastings.

Well, at least I have my two glasses.

Really Not In Santa Barbara...

Last year when I came out here for a conference, I was staying over half an hour away from the university as part of my quest to make 50 nights with Marriott, and the associated gold status. Well, I made the 50 nights, I have the gold status, but I couldn't get a room there to enjoy the status.

No matter. Gold status with Marriott was last year's goal. Hilton is this year's goal. Hilton requires 14 fewer nights, allows me to count 13 nights that Christina stayed, and counts free stays (2 nights so far this year). That puts me 29 nights closer without really trying. 21 to go -- of which I've had 11 already this year. So I'm staying at an Embassy Suites. Ironically, I pass the Marriott and drive 20 miles past to get to the Embassy Suites in Lompoc.

It's a nice enough drive, unless Avis has upgraded you with an Isuzu Rodeo without great shocks and you've generally overindulged the previous 24 hours (brats while tailgating before the football game the previous night, 4 hours of sleep, too much creamy pasta and free booze on the upgrade to first class from BWI to LAX, all-you-can-eat shrimp and salmon at the conference's opening reception... Not a pretty sight.

The hotel itself was nice, but as there are evening receptions for the conference each day, I don't plan to see too much of it. It's set up like a compound of villas around a pool and a garden. The "suite" is really spacious and comfortable. The cook-to-order breakfast was nice this morning. I'm booked into an Embassy Suites in New Jersey in October; it should be nice if I end up going to the associated conference.

Herb Scrambled Eggs

I noticed we had some eggs that are due to expire in a few days, so I decided to have scrambled eggs for dinner. I am a very recipe-dependent cook, so I turned to the Ultimate Southern Living Cookbook that Christina recently recommended. The very straightforward recipe has several variations; I chose the "cheese" and "herb" options (and cut the recipe in half). I changed two things -- one, I used olive oil, instead of butter (which I lacked). Two, I used American cheese. Why? Because Oma made it that way.

Oh, and as previously mentioned, I halved the recipe.

It turned out pretty well. Since I still have two days left on these eggs, I may make it again. I think I'd cut back on the oregano, or possibly use another spice, though -- it was a bit over-herbed.

The Black Cauldron

With Christina at Bread Loaf, I'm catching up on my TV watching.

I wanted to watch this movie when it first came out (1985). I had read the book on which it was based and really enjoyed it. Now, I don't remember too much of the book, except I'm pretty sure it was better than the movie. (I'm guessing in the book, the bad guy doesn't yell "Curse you!" to nobody in particular when being foiled.)

I gather that this was an attempt by Disney to do more serious cartoons. It's certainly somewhat darker than most of their fare from the time, but I guess a serious Disney cartoon is still pretty silly compared to, say, a good young adult fantasy novel.

2.5 stars.

Another Wine Update

I've heard another person expressing concern with the quantity of wine updates. All I can say is that I hope the non-wine related content (some of it contained within this very post!) is interesting enough.

2002 Monte Xanic Calixa Cabernet Sauvingon

We picked this bottle up in duty-free on our way back from our recent trip to Mexico. I was in favor of using some of our "leftover" pesos to pick up whatever good wine was available, regardless of country, but Christina successfully lobbied for a Mexican wine. I was fairly skeptical -- who has ever heard of Mexican wine? As it turned out, Calixa is Monte Xanic's "affordable" line -- most of their wine is much higher-end than we'd consider buying at this point.

All in all, it was a very enjoyable Cab.

2001 Hardys Nottage Hill Shiraz

I got this wine because of how much we enjoyed their other Shiraz (which I think is technically their "Stamp of Australia" label). This was $2 more (although it ended up being the same because of a coupon that probably shouldn't have applied), so I thought it might be even better. It was very enjoyable paired with some Chinese food, but I can't say it was better. Speaking of Chinese food, does anybody know any way in advance of knowing whether a dish is going to have broccoli in it? I lost about 1/2 the mass of my food to broccoli that I had to pick out.

2001 Pietro Barbera

We had avoided this bottle for a while -- we felt that since we had bought it we had learned more about wine, and wouldn't have bought such a "cheap" bottle of wine. We were pleasantly surprised. It was definitely a lot lighter than we were used to -- which is good, since we've tended to buy heavier wines that are better paired with heavier foods. Since we're trying to eat lighter, it seems like a good idea to find some lighter wines. It's harder because we don't really like whites, and whites go better with lighter food.

We kept this lesson in mind last Sunday night when we went out to Galileo for Christina's birthday. It was Restaurant Week, where they offered a three-course menu for a reduced price. I figured we could splurge on some wine. (Well, not totally splurge -- they had four-figure prices on some of the wines.) I ordered a Barbera-Merlot-something else blend, which looked interesting. They brought a different bottle of Barbera; they said they were out of what we ordered. They said this was a good wine at the same price, and the winemaker's son was working at the restaurant for a couple weeks, so we could give him a piece of our mind if we disagreed. It was a nice wine, but the whole experience was kind of odd -- I'd expect a nice restaurant to come back, apologize and ask us to make another selection, but maybe service slips during Restaurant Week. It was definitely a heavier Barbera than the "cheap" one we had had at home.

1998 Le Lodole "Super Tuscan"

I mentioned this bottle in an earlier post. It's the most expensive bottle we've tried in our wine drinking at home. It wasn't necessarily better than all of the less expensive bottles we've had, but I feel like we took less of a chance of getting a "clunker" by spending a little more (and choosing carefully).

2001 Don Sebastiani & Sons Smoking Loon Syrah

This wine featured in an incident we around the Grantham house refer to as "The Great Fire of London Broil". I was assisting Christina in making London Broil. One trick we've learned is to use the wine you're serving in the recipe to tie the food to the wine. Unfortunately, we didn't have the requisite time to marinate the steak, so instead of draining the marinade, we left it on the steak while cooking. Also unfortunately, our top rack lies a little closer to the heating element than is probably the case in more modern ovens. More alcohol on the food + closer to the heat = steak on fire. Fortunately, Christina was able to put out the fire with no real damage to the food.

The steak was delicious, and paired well with the Syrah. Christina enjoyed the Syrah perhaps a bit more than the Hardys Shiraz (Shiraz is Australian for "Syrah"); I probably prefered the Hardys. I'd say the Hardys was "fruitier" and the Smoking Loon was "earthier", and I prefer wines in the former category.

We have been discussing whether there's wines we'd like to keep on hand, or whether we want to keep getting new ones each time. I think we're going to stock a bottle or two of this along with a bottle or two of the Columbia Crest Semillon (since we have a hard time finding whites we'll drink) soon.

The Christina Gazette

Two different Christina weblog-related updates. First, she posts here about an unfortunate incident from last night. Second, I have added a number of her old e-mails from the road to her travel blog.

Tuscan Pepper Chicken

Christina got back from North Carolina last night after a weekend visiting her family. To celebrate, I made dinner. We've been trying to pair food with appropriate wine, so I decided to start out with the wine and pick a recipe based on that. This page was helpful. I matched the "Tuscan-style peppered chicken" (or more simply, Tuscan pepper chicken) with a Super-Tuscan instead of a Chianti.

You can see the Tuscan Pepper Chicken recipe here, or if you want what appears to be an unauthorized copy, you can look here or here.

It's a very simple recipe -- not a lot of ingredients, nothing particularly exotic. The most challenging part of the preparation was halving the chicken and removing the backbone. Next time, maybe I'll get a chicken where that's already been done.

Attention Cartoonists

Just because you like golf, or have a golf tournament named after one of your other comic strips, doesn't mean you have to put golf jokes in your comic strips. I mean, if you can't think up enough medieval kingdom jokes any more, maybe it's time to hang up the drafting pencil. If your joke doesn't fit the premise of your comic strip, leave it out. Thank you.

Now I remember why I usually don't read the Sunday comics any more.

Riding Giants

As I've noted previously, George has a habit of seeing one movie per year. This year, he selected Riding Giants, which he, Martin and I went to see last night at the Landmark Bethesda Row theater. Martin and George have a bit more familiarity with surfing (the subject of the movie) than I do, given that they have, well, surfed.

We walked into the theater just as the trailer for Maria, Full of Grace was playing. It's in Spanish, and it's about a 17-year-old from Colombia who is a drug courier. I'm really not sure what the expected audience overlap is between that and a surfing movie. That was followed by a trailer for Danny Deckchair, a movie about a guy who goes up in the air in lawn furniture. It seemed both better and worse than you'd think, if that makes any sense.

"Riding Giants" focused on the sport (pursuit?) of "big wave surfing". They said it often enough during them movie that it seemed to become one word -- bigwavesurfing. I eventually realized (remember, I'm the one not entirely familiar with surfing) that there were (at least) two types of surfing -- bigwavesurfing and "performance surfing," which was mentioned once, briefly. Bigwavesurfing centers around riding really big waves. "Riding Giants" covered the subject from the pioneers in the 1950s to the advent of "tow-in" surfing in the 1990s. The hardest part of surfing a big wave is catching it, and by towing the surfers in with a jet ski, they can ride much bigger waves than anyone ever imagined.

The part from the 1950s involved old home movies, and it was an interesting glimpse into a long-gone era of surfing -- evidently Gidget was soon to cause surfing to explode in popularity. The part from the 1990s started out technically interesting. But as you can imagine, catching bigger and bigger waves gets more and more dangerous as you wipe out, and the movie contained a lot of surfers ruminating on the Nature of Death and the Nature of Danger. That dragged a bit.

Martin commented that the director's previous effort, Dogtown and Z-Boys had the advantage that skateboarders don't risk their lives as much as surfers, so it was lower on the pretention scale. Afterwards, though, I remembered my visit to an exhibition of skateboarding photographs, which imposed a really highfalutin political ideology on skateboarding. So I guess you're never quite safe...

Mayan Madness

Christina and I went to the Mayan art exhibit at the National Gallery on Saturday. If you're interested in that, I recommend that you read her post on the subject.

After we saw the exhibit, she bought me Maya Madness, a game. On Sunday, the gaming crew used it as an opening game. It's a fairly straightforward game. Everybody gets a secret number. Then you play cards, ranging from +5 to -5, in an attempt to move the running "count" to your secret number. If you are the first to do it five times, you win. There are a few other types of cards that allow you to skip another player, reset the count to zero, or make the count negative (and reverse the order of play). I think the most suprising thing is that the count would end up in the negative twenties, despite the fact that all the target numbers were positive.

It's a pretty good game to start out, since there's not a lot of skill involved, and with the rule that the winner picks the next game, it gives everyone a more or less equal chance. It's also pretty quick.

Ben won that game, and selected for the next game Bohnanza, a game that I had picked up on Friday at Hobby Works. It's a card game based on collecting sets of bean cards and redeeming them for "gold". There are a few twists that help make it interesting -- you're forced to "plant" the beans in a limited number of spaces, so sometimes you have to throw away cards you want to plant other cards. Also, you're not allowed to rearrange your hand. You can avoid this by trading away cards. In the end, I finished 1 gold ahead of Ben and Doug, and 2 ahead of Paul. It was a very close game.

I selected Robo Rally for our next game, specifically Random Robo Rally. We ended up with only the Cannery Row board, six flags and the "Hidden Flags" variant. It was a very violent game -- Ben touched flag six a few phases before I would have lost my last robot. Paul got to flag five, and Doug to flag four. I had only recently touched the second flag, but got toasted trying to interfere with Ben's victory.

Ben selected the Buffy the Vampire Slayer game. It seemed like a good week for that, since George wasn't there, and he usually vetoes it. Let me summarize the game from my perspective. I controlled Oz and Xander. Oz ran over to the corner, failed to pick up the artifact, turned into a werewolf, attacked Adam (the main bad guy), then got killed. Xander ran over to the corner, failed to pick up the artifact about six times (in theory, these were 50/50 shots I was missing), finally picked up the artifact and found out that it was really lame. Using the artifact, I attempted to destroy the artifact, but I failed, despite having a 75/25 shot. Then Buffy died, and the game was over, leaving Ben (playing Evil), once again, the victor.

We played a couple of more games of Maya Madness to round out the evening.