| XXX |
|
|
Subject: Wine Country Living
Date: June ".... All is well here. And when the dust settles and the years pass and I end up somewhere in between Sicily and Sonoma, and the kids are old enough to travel or to stay behind, you must must very must plan a visit to the California wine country. And hopefully I have the opportunity to be your host - so we will work on that. That being said, what a wonderful experience I had in Napa and Sonoma. "Wine Country Living" sounds very cliche, but it is not. I drove from San Francisco over the Golden Gate Bridge on Sunday afternoon to meet a wine making friend who was sitting on his porch in Healdsburg (Sonoma) drinking a beer. We popped the caps on two more beers and talked about the wine world. Which was followed by a short drive to a another friend's house - this friend spent the former part of the day at the farmer's market. In the kitchen around the cook's table, six of us opened five bottles of wine, chopped vegetables to be grilled, prepared wild salmon and halibut cheeks, seared scallops, ripped crusty bread from its foundation, finished the food preparation and sat down to eat very well between cigarette breaks. The food, the experience, the conversation all about wine. I was intimidated to be around five wine makers (Belvedere, La Crema, Papapietro Perry, Joel Gott and their own label, Anthill Farms), but they made it easy for me to get involved. That was the first of two wonderful get-togethers. The second on a Tuesday night, we sat outside in the Plaza, a large grassy piazza, and listened to live music, cut cheese and salami and drank wine from paper and plastic. We were all hungry and it was early, so we visited the grocer and bought some vegetables for salad and the butcher for some steaks to be BBQed. We went back to the house and I tasted the group on some Sicilian plonk. They had good things to say, but Sicily is as far away from Sonoma and Pinot Noir than anyone can imagine, so it was quite the interesting evening of facial expressions and diplomacy. I left Sonoma on Thursday, very content and headed to Napa Valley where the wine industry is more like Disney world. It is professional and polished, not farm land and modesty and friendly like Sonoma, but still worth its salt, er or I should say, grapes. Interestingly enough, the wine talk was about "powerfulness" and "viscosity", "fleshy" and "plump", "fruit bombs" "hang-time" and "high-alcohol." I didn't know if I just witnessed a race car slamming into a fruit truck or some god-awful military expedition in Iraq. I must say, that my mouth will take some time to get used to what is happening here in the States. By lunchtime hours, a few tastings in me, I felt my nose burnt and my mouth numb. It was quite a shocker. Especially shocking to find my teeth stained the color purple, like my hands during harvest. It took days to disengage the must from your mouth and from my mouth there is much more to tell. I failed at writing a journal each day as I had hoped for. But I promise next week I will write more. Until then, I have attached some pictures I took from my rental car window: Post - June'06 Back to home...
|
|
|