April 7, 2021 Lunch - Trout Salad with Manchego Sandwiches.  Dinner - Grilled Rib Steak with Caesar salad 

I woke up today feeling strong and refreshed by the cool air as I took the trash can to the curb for collection, so I dressed and walked 1/2 mile without breakfast or a sugar pill.  I did tire a bit but not so much that it deterred me from my tasks.

I prepared a breakfast of tropical fruit salad with Kirkland Greek yogurt, granola, and milk and ate at my desk.

I soon found and began to print the four bank and credit card statements I needed to complete the 2020 documentation with the assistance of a bank employee.

I spent most of the day working on classifying expenses on statements and gathering tax records, such as form 1099s and organizing them in chronological order and scanning them and sending them to Sharon, who will prepare the tax returns.

I took a break for lunch. I hard boiled four eggs and made a salad with Romaine lettuce, a diced tomato, avocado, four stalks of steamed asparagus, and an egg plus the leftover fillet of smoked trout from last night’s meal. I sliced a piece of French baguette into three slices and toasted two slices and buttered them and lay slices of Spanish Manchego cheese on them and ate a wonderful lunch with water.

Then toward the end of the day when I finished sending all my tax information to Sharon and Suzette arrived home after 5:00; I was deluged with four or five deeds to review.  

So Suzette started prepping dinner without me.  I had thawed a rib steak in the morning and brought in the package containing six heads of romaine lettuce at lunch and used four or five stalks of one for my salad. So Suzette made a simple dinner of grilled steak and Caesar salad with romaine grated Pecorino-Romano cheese and croutons. 

I finished reviewing four of the five deeds and then stopped work in time to slice four mushrooms and a poblano pepper Suzette lay on the table on a cutting board with the knife. I sliced the mushroomso, a shallot, and the poblano pepper and took them to the kitchen and pushed the slices into a skillet that Suzette was heating on the stove in which she had put several pads of butter, some olive oil, and two cloves of crushed garlic.  This type of silent coordination is what makes our dinner prep seamless and easy. 

I turned the mushroom, shallot, and chili slices to coat them with grease and arranged them so they all received heat.

I usually add sherry to sautéed mushrooms but we did not have any sherry, so I fetched the new bottle of Ruby port and doused the mushrooms with about 2 T. of port.  I think the sweeter port actually helped subdue any residual picante of the poblano pepper and made the sautéed vegetables more integrated in flavor.

While the vegetables were sautéing and the steak resting on the grill, I refreshed the dressing with the juice of 1/2 of a lemon and a bit more olive oil and Suzette constructed the salad by tearing a head of Romaine, cutting toasted bread into croutons and grating the last 2 oz. of Pecorino Romano cheese into the large teak salad bowl.

The dressing had a slightly citrus aftertaste that I found attractive.  Suzette then dressed and tossed the salad and fetched the steak, which was cooked to a perfect medium rare.  

Suzette told me, “I have a new trick.  I turn off the heat and leave the steak on the grill for a few minutes and it seems to continue to cook more evenly throughout.”

I believed her because the steak was evenly cooked.  I sliced six slices from the rather large steak while Suzette fetched two plates and plated her plate with salad and then steak and the sautéed mushroom and I took the other plate and took three slices of steak and garnished them with the rest of the mushroom, shallot, and poblano medley. And took it to the table and filled the rest of my plate with salad from the bowl Suzette had tossed and placed on the table.

Suzette poured out the last two glasses of the opened bottle of 2011 Vega del Origon Gran Reserva Spanish red from the Terra Alta region of Spain.  It is 60% Granache and 40% Syrah  now priced at $6.99 at Trader Joe’s   

Here is how a wine blogger describes the wine:

“So after all this searching, you may be wondering: is this wine as good as the reputation that preceded it?  The answer is an emphatic “yes!”  It is a delicious, balanced, food friendly wine that would be priced higher were it from a more recognizable region.

Catalunya itself has an interesting backstory.  It is a proud and industrious region on the Mediterranean coast which encompasses parts of southern France and and north east Spain. Its inhabitants identify less as French or Spanish, but as Catalan first.  The region has its own language, and most consider it the primary tongue.  As separatists, the region has suffered a turbulent past, but this rebel spirit put the region at the vanguard of Spain’s 20th century wine-making revolution, which thrust it upon the modern wine world stage.

Tasting Notes:

Nice aromas of berries and bramble, vanilla, white pepper and milk chocolate.  Sipping reveals dark fruits, black cherries, black and red berries, notes of leather, oak and and vanilla. Eight plus years of barrel and bottle aging have rounded the tannins and smoothed out any acidity.  Finishes long with spicy and sweet accents. 

This wine is a blend of 60% Garnacha (aka Grenache) and 40% Syrah.  

Garnacha is one of the most widely planted red wine grape varieties in the world. It ripens late, so it needs hot, dry conditions (such as those found in Spain) where the grape most likely originated.  It is generally spicy, berry-flavored and soft on the palate and produces wine with a relatively high alcohol levels. As Grenache ages the wines tend to take on more leather and tar flavors. Wines made from Grenache tend to lack acid, color and tannins.  As such, it is often blended with other varieties such as Syrah, Tempranillo and Cinsault. Note that we recently reviewed a Garnacha/Tempranillo blend. In this case, it is Syrah that is stiffening up the Garnacha.

Syrah is was the seventh most grown red grape in Spain, with some 50,000 acres planted.  Which sounds like a lot but it only accounts for 4% of the red grape total.

 

<img data-attachment-id="2798" data-permalink="https://vinopointer.com/a-5-99-unicorn-wine-from-trader-joes/terra-alta/" data-orig-file="https://vinopointer.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/unnamed.jpg" data-orig-size="512,376" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;}" data-image-title="Terra Alta" data-image-description="&lt;p&gt;Map showing Terra Alta, Catalunya, Spain&lt;/p&gt; " data-medium-file="https://vinopointer.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/unnamed-300x220.jpg" data-large-file="https://vinopointer.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/unnamed.jpg" loading="lazy" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-2798" src="https://vinopointer.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/unnamed.jpg" alt="Map showing Terra Alta, Catalunya, Spain" width="512" height="376" srcset="https://vinopointer.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/unnamed.jpg 512w, https://vinopointer.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/unnamed-300x220.jpg 300w" sizes="(max-width: 512px) 100vw, 512px" />

Map showing Terra Alta, southwest of Barcelona

 

This Vega del Origon Gran Reserva is made by Reserva de la Tierra, which is the same producer as the Satis Dei bottling that we reviewed here. 

My advice should this “unicorn” show up on the shelves of your local Trader Joe’s, peel a $20 bill out of your wallet and buy several bottles. If you like it as much as we did, hurry back and stock up.  By all means, if you do find some and try it, let us know your thoughts by commenting here or on our Facebook page. 

But above all else, stay healthy out there. 

Cheers!”

 We watched Rachel Maddow and then The Last Word and then got in bed to watch Trevor Noah, although I fell asleep before it ended at 9:40.

Today was the first day in about a week that I worked all day and did not take a nap in the afternoon.  I slept until 12:30 a.m. when I blogged this.

As for the market, the averages weakened today toward the close with all four major indices ending slightly in the red.  Luckily for me both Apple and Square surged a bit, so even with the late sell off, my portfolio gained .6% bringing it to within 1.25% of its all time high.  

I have a hunch about why Square surged almost $10 a share today.  CoinBase, the Bitcoin brokerage firm, announced that it was going public, which created a stir in the market. In its announcement it mentioned that Square and Pay Pal were its two largest competitors.

So folks must have waken up to what I grocked several weeks ago; that Square was a major international credit facilitator and clearing house for credit transactions that had positioned itself to play a major role in Bitcoin commerce by buying 8000 or 9000 bitcoins.  In other words, Square could become the first major international banking firm to facilitate retail Bitcoin transactions and crypto lending.  Square could have a much broader footprint than a brokerage house like CoinBase that  only buys, holds accounts of, and sells bitcoins and other crypto currencies for clients.

Bon Appetit