I was drafting a pleading with Scott Boyd, one of my clients
in the LRG adjudication, all afternoon and Josefo Martines another client, who
is an electrical contractor, who was kind enough to volunteer to come over to repair
a short in the electrical system at my home was working on that with Willy as
his assistant,, so I was busy until after 5:00 p.m. when Scott left.
Suzette had come home and she was hungry and I had not taken
any steps to prepare any dinner, so she took over and in her own special way,
went through the fridge and assembled ingredients and created a new dish. The dish she created included chopped baked
ham, two kinds of mushrooms sliced and sautéed, finely sliced fresh asparagus
in a Mornay sauce served on egg noodles.
The unique part of the recipe was the Mornay sauce. It was made with a roux and then grated Swiss
Gruyere was added, but instead of milk, Suzette used some pasta water from the
egg noodles, a little heavy cream and when I finally came into the kitchen,
some Amontillado sherry and a little white wine. The
combination of liquids created a light yet creamy and flavorful sauce that
coated the noodles and ham and mushrooms beautifully.
The dish was wonderful.
We drank a 2007 Lazy Creek Vineyards Anderson Valley Riesling that we
had bought in 2009 on our second trip to Anderson Valley for its Pinot Noir
Festival. Lazy Creek sits on the plateau above the north side of Anderson Valley, where its south facing vineyard catches more moisture and sunlight at its higher elevation.
If you love Pinot Noir and have not been to the Pinot Noir
Festival in Anderson Valley, I recommend that you go. It is usually held the second or third
weekend in May. Friday night there is
usually a catered barbeque to which every attendee is supposed to bring an
interesting bottle of wine to drink. I
have had amazing wines at this event, like a Sangiovese dessert wine. Remember,
many of the attendees are winemakers or growers.
There are technical lectures during the day on Thursday and Friday. Then on Saturday there is a Grand Tasting,
usually in a huge tent in the middle of Golden Eye Vineyard where only Pinot
Noir in all of its manifestations is served; red, blush, rosé, and champagne. If you like Pinot Noir, entering the big tent
after a walk through Golden Eye’s beautiful tasting area and part of its vineyard
will be closest thing most of us on earth will experience, short of arriving at
the gates of heaven. It is wonderful in every way. Three food lines with delicious food and about
seventy booths serving some of the best wines you have ever tasted in one spot.
Saturday evening is devoted to wine dinners, much like those we have here, where a vineyard
or two will provide the wines for a dinner at a restaurant or winery with a
kitchen. That trip we stayed at Shirlee
and Larry Londer’s Londer Vineyard guest house with Rick Davis, their
winemaker, and attended the Boonville Hotel’s Wine Tasting Dinner given in conjunction
with Navarro Vineyards. Navarro produces
consistently great wines of many different types. Here
is a list that demonstrates their overall quality of wine:
Prior Release Medals -
March 2011
In the past three years Navarro Vineyards has
released 67 wines, with 62 winning Gold or Silver medals in National and
International Wine tastings.
Both the Boonville Hotel's
dinner and the wines were really impressive.
My strongest recollection was the wine served with dessert, Navarro’s Late
Harvest Cluster Select Riesling or Gewürtztraminer. It blew me away. I had
never known that an American winery could create a wine with a taste similar to
noble rot and manipulate it into a wine that stood on all fours with the great
wines of Sauterne, but they did. This
wine has won many awards and sells for $59.00.
There is also an Alsace Festival in February in Anderson
Valley that is very interesting. Anderson Valley, because it is so far north
and so near the coast, produces not only exceptional pinot noir, but all the other
northern grapes. Its climate enhances
all wines that benefit from cooler, wetter growing conditions. Anderson Valley is only twenty miles over one
ridge from the Pacific Coast and the valley’s open end is at the Pacific at
Mendocino. It used
to be filled with Coastal Redwoods and still has a significant grove of
redwoods.
The secret to learn from this meal is that there are a range
of options one can choose from when making a cream sauce from all milk and the
addition of cheese for a very creamy taste to all stock and wine for a very
non-dairy taste. This dinner
specifically demonstrated that you can mix those different approaches to reach
a desired taste and consistency. In the
case of this meal Suzette was pushing both ends of the spectrum at once. Cream and Swiss Cheese combined with sherry
and pasta water and a bit of white wine to produce a sauce that is not
distinctively at either end of the spectrum. That is
what was unusual about this meal, that you can have both ends of the spectrum
in one sauce and enhance it further with the woody flavor of sautéed shitake
and white mushrooms.
Bon Appétit |
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