September 21, 2016 Breakfast – Gravad Lax Sandwich. Lunch- East Ocean. Chile and Wine To the Trade Tasting in Santa Fe

September 21, 2016  Breakfast – Gravad Lax Sandwich. Lunch- East Ocean.  Chile and Wine To the Trade Tasting in Santa Fe

This is one of my favorite days of the year.  The day when all the wine merchants try to entice the wine purveyors of our region to buy their wines.  It is somewhere between a family reunion and an old fashion Irish wake.  Because wine is an annual crop, every year there are hnew beverages to try, many of which are among the highest expression of legal drugs on the planet assembled in one room with money and commerce fueling the excitement of sharing God’s bounty.

The Annual To the Trade Tasting at the Chile and Wine Festival is an assemblage of 90 vineyards, importers, and distributers eac pouring up to a dozen bottles of their wines for liquor store and restaurant proprietors.

Suzette gave me strict instructions as we drove north, “We want to find three reds, two whites, and a rose’ that taste great and cost less than $10.00 a bottle.”

When we arrived at the Santa Fe Convention Center Grand Ballroom we immediately saw that the room was arranged in two halves with rows of tables and iced plastic basins filled with wines arranged in rows on two sides of the large ballroom separated by a long table filled with food; cold platters filled with cheeses and salamis and bowls of particularly enticing small pickled red sweet peppers, then iced foods like a small mountain of ice covered with jumbo shrimp, and finally covered steam units filled with fried oysters on the half shell, spicy duck confit quesadillas, pulled pork sandwiches and at the end of the table, a chef carving thick wedges of roast beef and dabbing them with a dark brown Demi-glacé sauce.  This lavish offering of food was sponsored by Sysco, the huge food purveyor to restaurants and institutions.  It did not take long for David to introduce himself to us and then his boss when Suzette told him she owned a restaurant, a 45 bed assisted living facility, and a day spa and she was having trouble ordering from U.S. Foods, the other giant food purveyor.  They spoke for a few minutes about automatic reordering systems and we departed from the food table, cheered by the Sysco employees’ promises, “To Call next Week,” after exchanging cards. 

As I said before, the thirty or forty foot long food table is a sort of green line or no man’s land across the middle of the room that divides the producers and exporters who have pledged their allegiance to one of the two major alcoholic beverage distributers in New Mexico and the U.S., Southern Glazer’s assembled tables of their exclusive brands were on one side of the food table and National’s were arrayed on the other.  A  hundred or so ten foot long tables filled with wines filled the ballroom with pourers from wineries and exporters standing ready to pour any wine you wanted to try.  So it was soon impossible to follow Suzette’s admonition to only drink $10.00 wines.  How do you turn down an offered taste of Stag’s Leap Fry Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon or Roederer Vineyard’s Chateau Ott or vintage champagnes (think Cristal) or after tasting two lovely Concha y Toro Reserva Cabernets in the $11.00 range, you are offered a taste of its Don Melchor Cabernet with the encouragement that, “It is ranked number 9 in the world.”  As it melts in your mouth, you casually ask, “How much is it a bottle?” And the pourer cheerfully states, “$110 per bottle.”  And you nod approvingly, as if to say, “ A fair price for one of the best drinks on this planet.” 

No sane person can turn down such an offer and we are still sane, so we drank our way through all the rows of tables from 3:30 to 5:30, being particular to limit out tasting to $10.00 bottles.  And we found several.  Fetzer is one of the best producers of wines in that price range had several, but our favorite was Fiasco, a small distributers that offered two exciting whites, a Chilean Pedro Ximenez and an Argentinean Cabernet Gris.

We loved spending the afternoon tasting wines and at 5:30, when the pouring stopped, attacked the food table once again as a substitute for dinner while the Sysco employees stood by for another 20 minutes to allow those of us who wished to eat their food offerings save them the added labor of carrying the food laden trays back to the kitchen and throwing the food out as garbage because it could not be re-packaged or sold.

This morning I made open faced sandwiches for Suzette and me on toasted rye bread smeared with goat cheese and then layered with slices of Gravad lax, red onion, and tomato and capers.

Then after a 2 ½ hour meeting ending at noon I went to East Ocean for my favorite lunch of Scallops in Lobster Sauce with Fried Rice served with a small plate of Sweet and Sour Chicken, a pot of hot tea, and a bowl of really good egg drop soup for $7.46 to get my body and mind ready  to drink a lot of wine.

When we arrived home from Santa Fe we were hungry for something sweet, so we made a batch of chocolate chip cookies with chopped roasted walnuts and ate several of them with cups of chai.

I awoke at 11:30 from all the food and wine coursing through my body and finished reading “Breakfast at Tiffany's” and and read the great short story, “A Christmas Memory”, by Truman Capote.

Bon Appetit