Thanksgiving Wine Picks from the Pros

Just as your Thanksgiving dinner is only as good as the guests who show up -- "and who invited crazy cousin Carl? "-- a round-up of wine suggestions for the big day is only as good as the people making them. So you're in great hands here, folks, as you shall see. To give our experts a bit of a twist, I asked what their pick would taste best and worst with, since matching the full groaning board of T-Day delights is near impossible (especially as long as people insist putting marshmallows on sweet potatoes. Please note that modifier in the name and then stop).

Want to read the rest then do so at KCET's Food Blog.

Tasting at 95+ Points

One thousand five hundred and ninety-two dollars and ninety-two cents of wine sits on a bar in front of me. I don't get to drink all of it (thank god), but at an ounce and a half per taste, I know I'm going to leave happy and with crimson-stained teeth, as seven of the eight are the reddest of reds.

I'm fortunate to be at a proclaimed "Stunning Rhones (and One Chardonnay)" tasting presented by the Winehound in Santa Barbara with fourteen other people willing to fork over $95 to sample 772 points of wine. That's an average of 96.5 points (as awarded by Wine Advocate) per bottle, the kind of wine writers' praise that would lead to some "My Honor Student Wine Kicked Your Plonk's Tuchas" bumper stickers. It was a terrific opportunity to learn a host of things, like, "How much should a good wine cost?" and "How different are French and Californian expressions of syrah-based blends?" and "If you can get the teacher's prize pupil's product for a third of the price, should you?"

Want to read the rest then do so at the KCET Food Blog.

Wine Mentors, and Coming to Grace

Indeed, there are fortunates who developed their wine knowledge traveling with their families in Europe, their tastebuds sensing the circumflex in Côte de Beaune by the time they turned seventeen. More likely there are more families like mine, where I can't remember my dad drinking wine at all (perfect Rob Roys were his potent potable), and my mom, a Manhattan gal, had some large format generic Chardonnay opened for ages in the fridge for fish dinners.

Want to read the rest then do so at the KCET blog.

Days Of Wine Futures Past

And there was a gnashing of teeth and a rending of garments and the sickening silence of hundreds of corks going unscrewed, leaving wine lovers themselves screwed. For George Eats has discovered most terrible news, dear readers--there will be no Santa Barbara Wine Futures program this year. For 19 wonderful years and two ownerships the Futures program was the province of the Wine Cask, and as I wrote about the last one they ran in 2008, until Bernard Rosenson drove the Wine Cask into the ground:

Wine Futures is Christmas, Opening Day, and the world’s best President’s Day Sale wrapped up into one for lovers of the grape. When people line up outside the Wine Cask, waiting for the noon opening, you can sense the anticipation, the whiff of worry in the air that someone is drinking the last of the best before you’re even in the door. Wine is serious--at least when it’s Santa Barbara good, you’re getting one of the first shots at buying it, and it’s slightly cheaper than it will be upon release.

It truly was my favorite day of the year, a sign of spring and the endless hope each vintage would be lovely, that each winery would learn yet more, make yet better wines. Somehow it almost always seemed to happen. Then there was the joy of running into people who grew to be old, if just one-day-a-year friends: Gray Hartley happily pouring at the Hitching Post table or Sashi Moorman working for more and more labels yet never diluting his skill. And then each year there'd be a new surprise, a new favorite: Ampelos, tercero, Autonom. Life was full of grapey goodness.

In the time between Mitchell Sjerven and Doug Margerum rescuing the Wine Cask as a restaurant from Rosenson's failure with it, Bob Wesley of the Winehound bravely stepped into the breech and delivered two great years of futures at the SB Museum of Natural History and then the Fess Parker Doubletree.

But now it's all gone, for as Wesley says, "It involved a lot of work and advertising expense, as well as facilities and food costs, and it just didn't meet budgetary expectations."

God damn.

Wesley says that the Wine House in LA might do a program up here next year (they are doing one in LA, so that means the big city gets our futures and we don't, and that's a sad state o' affairs), so here's hoping Jim Knight can pull that off (in addition to making his own fine wines Jelly Roll and working on Holus Bolus). Until then, drink slowly, my friends....

UPDATE (4/11/11): An informant has let me know that the Wine House will be having a Central Coast futures at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History next year, most likely in April.