29, 2012 On the Road back from Taos to Albuquerque. Don Quixote Distillery and Winery and Santa Fe Spirits and LuLu’s Chinese Restaurant.

December 29, 2012   On the Road back from Taos to Albuquerque.  Don Quixote Distillery and Winery and Santa Fe Spirits and LuLu’s Chinese Restaurant.

We woke up and breakfasted at the Mabel Dodge Lujan and then hit the road to Santa Fe, where we had a dinner party for Max Aragon’s 60^th BD at 6:30 p.m.

We first stopped at Vivac at the Dixon turnoff and sampled their wines.  The new Fire wine made with grapes grown in their own fields was the most interesting to me.  Vivac, like many wineries in the northern part of the state, use Deming fruit to make their wines.   Since I do not like heavy reds the Deming fruit seems to me to have a lack of delicacy that I call a "baked" taste.  The opposite are those grapes raised near the northern edge of their range that seem to be more delicate, such as the pinot Noirs grown in northern California, Oregon east of the Cascades and the Chenin Blanc and Sauvignon Blanc raised in the Loire and the chardonnay grapes used for champagne raised in the Champagne.  All of these seem to have an abundance of fruit and crisp minerality, both characteristic I like very much.

So we then drove to the DQ Distillery’s tasting room at the slightly refurbished Line Camp located between the turn off for State Hwy. 503, the back road up the Pojoaque Creek to Chimayo and State Hwy. 502, the road to Los Alamos.  We tasted several distilled spirits and Suzette bought a bottle of rose flavored eau de vie. They had lovely ports.  I particularly liked the Angelica white port made with native muscat grapes.

We met Christie?, who had been doing wine tours of New Mexico wineries and took her card, which I have misplaced temporarily and told her about the recently opened Camino Real Winery tasting room in Tomé. 

We then drove into Santa Fe and walked around the Water Street area and then drove to Peyton Wright where we had a lovely conversation with the owner, John Wright Schaefer, the owner of Peyton Wright Gallery.  John had a great exhibit of contemporary and abstract paintings up, including four by his new favorite, Charles Hinman.  Hinman’s work is characterized by canvases raised into interesting shapes using stretcher bars.  It appears that John has pushed Peyton Wright to the verge of developing a major national reputation, which is very exciting.

We then drove out Airport Road to Santa Fe Spirits and tasted their lovely lightly flavored and incredibly clean tasting distilled Bourbon, Vodka, Gin, and Apple Brandy and eau de vie.  It seems that there are two ways to make brandy.  For Scotch the fermented malted barley juice (beer) is use and for Apple Brandy Santa Fe uses fermented apple juice hard apple cider) and then distills those liquids by heating them until they turn into a gas and passing that gas through six decreasingly smaller gauge filters until almost all foreign matter is removed from the liquid.  For Bourbon and gin Santa Fe uses commercially produced both a high proof alcohol made from distilling grain (usually un malted barley) to it is even cleaner than when it comes to the distillery and then for bourbon it is aged the required two years in charred wood barrels.  Gin does not need to be aged but it needs to be flavored.  Santa Fe flavors their gin with New Mexico osha root, barley, juniper and sage to give it a Southwestern flavor in a separate steel column because the guide said osha will permanently flavor a steel barrel and they do not want that flavor in their main still.

DQ also uses extracts of various kinds such as rose to flavor its vodka or brandy.   But what DQ does that is interesting is it makes wines also and then combines the wines and brandy to make port and sherry.

After a tour of Santa Fe Spirits’ facility and tasting all of their products, I bought a 750 ml. bottle of Apple Brandy and Suzette bought a 200 ml. bottle of gin for Charlie Palmer and we drove to the Lulu’s Restaurant in the 3000 block of Cerrillos Rd. for Max Aragon’s 60^th Birthday Party.  By about 6:45 about twenty people had arrived.  We had appetizers and then ordered.   Suzette and I ordered Mu Shu Pork .

When it was served it did not include the shredded scallions or plum sauce.  When I asked LuLu if we could have those, she said sure, but you should have requested that when you ordered.  That was the moment that I realized that even though the restaurant was filled with Chinese diners, there was probably a different dining experience and expectation between Chinese diners and American diners.  It became extremely clear when we opened the tortilla warmer and took out the Mandarin pancakes.  They were dried out and did not have that flexible alive dough texture of fresh made Mandarin pancakes.  We were served plum sauce and scallions, but Suzette would not eat the dried out Mandarin pancakes.   I found that the pancakes softened and became more malleable after I spread the plum sauce on them, but I could not spread that on the entire pancake.  Luckily there was a lot of sauce in the Mu Shu mix and wherever it touched the pancake the pancake became soft and more flexible.

After dinner we were served slices of carrot cake and Gruet Blanc de Noir champagne for dessert and a happy birthday celebration for Max.   We gave him wool socks, which he seemed to like.

We left the restaurant at around 9:00 p.m. and drove home in time for Saturday Night Live.

 Bon Appètit