1989 Jordan Alexander Valley Cabernet Sauvignon

My sister graduated from college on Saturday (congrats Jen!) so I flew back to St. Louis for the ceremony and the party. While I was there I had to stop by Meshuggah Coffee to get the best cup in town. Besides the incredible coffee, the most interesting people in town hang out there too. I ran into Blake Ashby. He was on his way to Riddles wine bar for dinner. I decided to tag along and inspect the wine list. I grew up in St. Louis, but I had never been to Riddles since I was not 21. And I would not have appreciated it anyway.



The great thing about wandering into a Wine Bar in the Midwest is you never know what you are going to find. The wine list here was impeccable. Not a bad wine on the list. No cheapies, but a really good spread in the price. The '89 Jordan Cab was $85. I am pretty sure on release these days it's around $50, so we are already doing pretty good on the price. Standard restaurant markup on a wine like this is 100% on the West Coast, $20 in Missouri. But this one was 18 years old. Old enough to vote and lovingly cared for. A quick search on-line and I could not find an '89 for less than $100. I would expect it to be about $200 in San Francisco. But it is, as my friend Clif said, all about what the market can bear.

I ordered the wine and a second waiter came to verify that I was actually serious. He brought the bottle out. He looked a bit nervous opening it, and for good reason--he broke the cork. But he decanted and filtered it and the wine came out tasting great. I have not had any other Jordan cabs so I do not have anything to compare it to, but this was a very well integrated wine. The tannins were soft--perfect for a medium bodied, understated wine like this. Flavors of light berry, a hint of some various spices. Baking spices, not pepper. This was a well made wine.

I enjoyed it completely, then had to wander around the loop for a few hours until I could be sure I was okay to drive home.

1999 Quilceda Creek Cabernet Sauvignon, 2003 K Vintners Ovide

This past weekend was graduation weekend in Seattle. Both the UW and SPU had their commencement on Saturday. Sara's cousin, Ashley, and I both received Masters degrees (hers in Education, mine in Computer Science). To celebrate, the whole family went to Seastar for dinner. Sara's uncle brought the 1999 Quilceda Creek Cabernet Sauvignon, and Sara's father brought a bottle of 2003 K Vintners Ovide. The Quilceda was opened, decanted and left to breathe while the Ovide was drank first.

However, before they even got there (they got stuck in UW graduation traffic) Sara and I each had a glass of the 2004 Turley Zinfandel Juvenile. This wine wasn't as good as the Atlas Peak, but it was still a good red zinfandel and had some of the same qualities. I hate ordering serious wines by the glass, since you never know how long it has been open or how it has been stored. I've been some places where they store their by-the-glass wines in the kitchen and they come very warm. I'd be surprised if Seastar didn't take every step to keep theirs fresh, but you never know.

The '03 Ovide was a great wine. It is a Cab/Syrah blend and shipped with a wax coating over the cork, as many of the K wines do. I didn't write down what adjectives I though went with this wine, but it was a very enjoyable wine. I've had two K wines previously (Syrah, The Creator) and both were excellent. Washington wines at their best.

If Cayuse is the ultimate Washington cult wine, then Quilceda Creek is the flagship Washington wine. Their Cabernet Sauvignons are internationally recognized, highly sought after and, generally, expensive. Drinking one, for me at least, is an exciting experience.

I liked the 1999 a lot more than the 1997. Might first impression was that it had a better fruitiness and was a smoother and more refined wine. The '99 is 97% Cab, 3% Merlot, compared with the '97 which was 89% Cab, 9% Merlot and 2% Cab Franc. The smaller amount of blending in the '99 indicates a better year for the cab and much more faith on the part of the wine maker in that particular varietal. It was a good dinner and a good way to celebrate graduations.

2004 Robert Mondavi Private Selection Merlot

Last night I had the pleasure of attending a Rispoli Event. The event was the 2006-2007 UW PMP CS Masters Graduates Dinner at the Yarrow Bay Grill. I was a graduate. Mr. Rispoli was the organizer of said event. We all had a great time.

Now, Yarrow Bay Grill is a pretty decent resturaunt. Their wine list is mostly Washington and California, with a few other nations represented in small quantities. Their list is a pretty good indicator of who's who in Washington state. They have plenty of DeLille and one of my favorites, the Sequel Syrah. So I was excited to eat their.

Turns out the catered meal came with our choice of red or white. The red was the 2004 Robert Mondavi Private Selection Merlot. It seems these days Mondavi's name is all over the place in the grocery store. This is a $10 wine and I didn't expect much from it. However, as far as $10 Merlots go, you'd be hard pressed to find I better one I think. I'll open nominations now. The wine was completely inoffensive, with just a slight bit of alcohol burn on the back end. There wasn't especially anything complex or interesting going on, but for free I could drink it all night.

I'm just going to take time out and give props to Mondavi. Everything I've had from them has been a quality drop. I haven't ever been super-wowed, even by Opus One (before you jump on my case, realize I haven't tried every vintage ever made), but I've never been sorely disappointed... or mad.

There, glad I got that out of the way. I can't wait to see what I get to drink tonight.

2006 Rochioli Sauvignon Blanc and the Wild Ginger Wine Celler

I took Sara to Wild Ginger last Friday, since she had never been. Finding a good red wine to go with Thai and other Asian food is hard. Experience has show it's better to just go with a nice white. So I asked Nabil to help me find a decent white. I asked for something that wasn't sweet, was a bit crisp and had some fruit to it. He brought me the 2006 Rochioli Sauvignon Blanc. At $30, I was a bit skeptical, but he assured me it would be wonderful.

It is always a good sign when the Sommelier looks at the bottle and says, "Ah, yes, we just got our allocation up in the cellar and I've been eyeing it in anticipation." It wasn't on the wine list yet, but it turns out they had cases of the stuff. I generally bring my own bottle when going out to the higher end restaurants, because I would rather pay the corkage fee than the markup. I sometimes feel bad if the wine I bring is actually on the list, though. Sometimes.

The wine itself was everything I asked for. It was very crisp, slightly dry wine with hints of apple and pear, and just a touch of oak. There was no alcohol burn. It was obviously a white wine made well. Usually I don't like Sauvignon Blancs at all.

Throughout the meal, the Sommelier kept returning to top off our glasses. After dinner, we still had close to half a bottle left, however (we're light weights). So I invited him to have a taste with us. He poured himself a glass and we spent about 10 minutes chatting about the various wines we like, and he told us about some of the rare one-off bottles they had upstairs. Then he offered to take us up to the cellar to have a look around. Of course we accepted.

Their cellar was certainly well-stocked. The front room consisted of boxes of wines on their main list. The next room consisted of wines on the full, expanded list which comes in a binder if you ask for it. The back room also contained the really old or rare bottles. He explained the acquire many through estate auctions or people selling their entire cellars. He let me hold a 1945 Haut-Brion. He also showed us some Latour bottles from the 50's and 60's. They had Grange going back to, oh, around the beginning of time as well as many other Aussie wines of all vintages.

Another interesting feature was the extensive collection of "send-backs." These are the bottles that are, ostensibly, corked and rejected by the consumer. It was an eclectic collection. He said they save them and return them to the distributor.

It was great experience and Wild Ginger now moves up my list of great Seattle restaurants quite a bit.

meatloaf

Whenever I try a new restaurant, I usually order a test dish. At Thai places, I get the Panang Curry. At steak houses, I get the Fillet. At diners I get bacon and Swiss omelets and hash browns. I use these as calibration dishes.

Last fall, Sara and I went to Napa for a few days. While we were there we completely failed to make any dinner reservations. On Friday night we found ourselves driving from two hour wait to two hour wait. Then a helpful limo driver suggested we try Cindy's Backstreet Kitchen. It's a block off the main drag, but what a difference that block makes. We got a seat right away (at the Bar, but a seat is a seat). Staring at the menu, I was inspired to order the Meatloaf. Aside from visiting PlumpJack, it was the best decision I made all week. It was awesome. One of the top food experiences of my life.

So Meatloaf has become one of my new calibration dishes. I mean, lets face it: it's Meatloaf. It is not a dish a lot of people go out and order. It doesn't exactly scream "fine dining." So, for certain types of restaurants to put it on their menu is for them to make quite a statement. Thus I oblige and order.

Here are my recent trials, in ascending order of awesomeness, with comments:

3. Purple Cafe and Wine Bar -- The mushroom sauce neither added nor subtracted from the dish. The ketchup-based topping was good, but way too sparse. The meat was of uniform density, but rather bland. It was well-prepared, but not spectacular. If they dropped it from their menu, I don't think anyone would notice. The mashed potatoes and green beans that came with it were excellent, however.

2. DC's Grill on the Plateau -- DC's is a great restaurant and everything they do, they do well. Their Meatloaf is no exception. It was a bit spicy. The waitress claimed it was the best in Seattle, and I can believe it just might be.

1. Cindy's Backstreet Kitchen -- I don't know how they make that sauce or what they put into it, but it is amazing.

This raises the inevitable question: what wine goes well with Meatloaf? That's the beauty of it. You can drink Zin, Cab or Syrah.

2004 Ridge Lytton Springs Zinfandel

Sara and I went to Restaurant Zoe for dinner on Saturday. Their food is some of the best I've had in the Seattle area, and I highly recommend it. The seared crispy skin chicken breast was the moistest chicken I've ever tasted; the wild boar bolognese is just awesome for being both a fairly exotic (by American standards) meat and really tasty in with the fresh arugula-based noodles. Their risotto is no slouch either.

They also have a great wine list.

Their list contains many of my favorite wineries (I first tasted Dellile here). However, neither of us felt like drinking an entire bottle of wine (or paying for it) so we ordered a half bottle of the 2004 Ridge Lytton Springs Zinfandel. I had just been discussing Ridge with a coworker on Friday, so it had been rattling around in the back of my head. My former roommate had a membership to Ridge's wine club and I was always excited when that box arrived.

Ridge does Zin. They PWN California Zin. Ridge is the Gold Standard by which I am compelled to measure American Zinfandels. The Lytton Springs Zin is one of their cheaper wines, typically selling in the $20 range (or $42 for a half-bottle at a fancy-schmancy downtown restaurant). The wine is a deep, dark purple (almost black in the mood lighting). It's got a great loamy-earthy taste and full of blackberries and other dark fruit. You can drink it with pizza (which a quick web search confirms many people seem to be doing) or you can drink it with wild boar and chicken. Or you can just drink it. Upon the first taste, Sara was exclaimed something--and I forget the exact wording--but it was basically excitement about all the things going on with this wine.

But some. Let it sit for a few years. Then drink it. I know after this little reminder, I'll be stocking up on some of their wines.