Springsteen, Birthday Dinners and Wine Lists

Thursday, August 16th marked my 28th birthday, and I was lucky enough to be able to take some time off from work to celebrate. I headed to Boston on Wednesday night, and closed out my 27th year watching Bruce Springsteen deliver one of the most memorable concert performances I've ever seen at Fenway Park. Fenway Park Scoreboard Before SpringsteenAside from wine, two of my biggest passions are sports and live music, so seeing Springsteen at Fenway was an amazing synthesis of my life's other interests. I know that this is a wine blog, and you probably didn't come here looking for a concert review, so I'll leave it to the experts to recount just how incredible the Boss' Fenway performance was. Let me just say briefly though, this show was unbelievable. If I were to relate it to a wine drinking experience, it would have to be akin to drinking Salon or Krug or some other top flight Champagne. It's expensive, and it's not something you'll do everyday, but as you're enjoying it you have to smile, because you know that you're experiencing something that's absolutely transcendent, and worth every penny you paid for it. That's how I felt about Springsteen's show.

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Wine Suggestions for Shark Week

I've always been a person who's into holidays. Give me a reason to celebrate, and I'm on board for it. That's why our next panel tasting will take place on Cabernet Day. Life is too short not to celebrate every chance we get, and I find that people who take the occasion to celebrate are generally happier people.

I'm a fan of all holidays, and growing up, my mom would decorate my house for literally every holiday. We'd not only have a Christmas tree, but we'd also have decorations for Thanksgiving, Easter, Valentine's Day, St. Patrick's Day, birthdays, and the 4th of July. I haven't adopted my mom's flair for decorating, but I do try to celebrate all the holidays I can, as appropriately as I can. This usually means drinking an appropriate beverage, which for me, means finding a wine to match the holiday. 

There are some holidays that have perfect pairings when it comes to wine, i.e., New Year's and Champagne. However, other holidays offer a little more flexibility. Generally, I advocate for drinking what will make you the most happy while remaining true to the spirit of the holiday. For example, I may waver between red, white, rosé and sparkling wines, but I do try to drink American wines on American holidays like Thanksgiving, and the 4th of July. After all, if drinking an appropriate beverage tempers your enjoyment, it's not really in the holiday spirit, is it?

For that reason, I generally don't offer holiday wine suggestions, but this week, I've been struck by the novel idea of drinking South African wines during Shark Week. Shark Week is one of my favorite weeks of the year, and I'm not sure why I hadn't though of this idea before this year. Anyways, in preparation for "Air Jaws Apocalypse" (filmed off the coast of Seal Island, in False Bay, South Africa), I thought it best to drink False Bay Chardonnay. This is a terrific, unoaked Chardonnay, with notes of peach and citrus. I enjoyed this tremendously on Sunday night, as I went the extra mile, and prepared a meal of swordfish, with a lemon caper butter sauce, to kick-off Shark Week. Talk about perfect pairings. The swordfish and Chardonnay were exceptional compliments for each other, and I even managed to match the wine's place of origin to the geography of the TV show.

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Charles Smith Casts His Vote for Chardonnay... What's Yours?

Charles Smith has become quite the iconic figure in the world of wine over the past decade. A former rock band manager, Smith's reputation in the wine industry took flight with the inaugural release of K Vintners 1999 K Syrah Walla Walla Valley in 2001. Smith moved back to the United States from Europe in 1999, having been encouraged to make Syrah in the Walla Walla Valley by Christophe Baron of Cayuse Vineyards. Since releasing the inaugural 1999 K Syrah Walla Walla Valley, Smith's Syrah has become one of the most heralded in Washington State, and his reach has expanded to include both the K Vintners line of wines, as well as a more moderately priced line of wines that he bottles under his own name - Charles Smith: The Modernist Project. Both lineups consistently receive critical acclaim, and some of the more limited production bottlings can be incredibly difficult to come by.

Given Smith's reputation for producing top-flight terroir influenced Syrah at K Vintners, I was surprised to see a recent article in the Wine Spectator that announced that Smith had purchased the former Whitman Cellars (the winery was foreclosed on by its bank in early 2011), and planned to use the winery to focus entirely on Chardonnay. This shocked me for two reasons. ...

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Revisiting a Great Home Cooked Meal: My Attempt at Wine Monday

Every so often, maybe more often then not, I'm inspired to prepare a gourmet meal at home. This weekend, while visiting the Burlington Farmer's Market, I realized that I had never prepared rabbit at home. As I'm constantly searching for new challenges, and new things to try, I purchased a half rabbit from the Tangletown Farm booth, and when the heat from the weekend subsided yesterday, I set about searching for a means of preparing it. In a way, the meal felt somewhat akin to a Wine Monday event, as I was determined to enjoy a wine from my cellar with the meal. Admittedly, my culinary talents don't even begin to compare to those of Frank McClelland, and L'Espalier's Wine Monday events consist of a five-course tasting menu, as opposed to a simple home cooked meal, but I felt that both events shared a similar spirit. 

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94 Degrees and a Rosé of Pinot... Grigio?

The heat was oppressive here in Vermont on Saturday, with temperatures reaching into the mid-90s, and the humidity only compounding the rising temperatures. As I watched the local farmers and merchants sweat beneath their umbrellas at the Burlington Farmer's Market, I knew that the afternoon would be spent finding ways to beat the heat. Unfortunately, still being in the process of rehabbing from knee surgery, I wasn't able to go swimming. So naturally (for me, anyways), my thoughts turned to wading in the water as far as my sutures would let me, and sipping on my summertime drink of choice: rosé.

For those of you who are interested, I did consider bringing Lambrusco as well, but I couldn't find any readily available. I suppose, like most trends, Lambrusco will be somewhat delayed in arriving to the Vermont scene. Nevertheless, I was not at all disappointed in having to bring Calatroni's Rosé of Pinot Grigio on my trip to the Waterbury Reservoir.

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