January 30, 2024 Lunch - Leftover Chinese Food. Reserve Wine Tasting

 January 30, 2024 Lunch - Leftover Chinese Food. Reserve Wine Tasting 

Today we started working at 6:30.  I ate a bowl of granola and worked until 11:00. Suzette went to her exercise class at 9:00 and at 11:30 I heated two containers of leftovers from our Chinese meal at East Ocean Tuesday evening. One was filled with the Mall, a stir fry of thin vermicelli noodles mixed with different meats and vegetables. The other was the flounder steamed with green onion and ginger threads and sauced with a dark thin soy and peanut oil sauce. Both were delicious and far better to enjoy their taste than at the restaurant where my taste buds were assaulted with six or seven dishes at once.

We then packed and drove to Santa Fe at 12:00.

We stopped at Trader Joe’s in Santa Fe and bought a bag of flattened pretzels (anew product I had not seen before), a container of chicken salad with cranberries, and a 17 oz. bar of milk chocolate with caramel, pretzel, and sea salt. The flat pretzels were perfect for holding a bit of chicken salad and I made chicken salad canapés on pretzel chips for Suzette as she drove north 

 We arrived at Hacienda del Sol at 3:30. It is a large house located just behind Love Apple in El Prado. We have one of the main bedrooms facing the back patio, so very nice.

                      Looking up through the skylight

At 4:30 we drove to Monte Sagrado for the Reserve Tasting from 5:00 until 7:30. It seemed as if this year there not as many people, so we were able to talk to the wine vendors and restauranteurs longer about the wines and food. I enjoyed it more. We did not try to drink every wine or eat at every restaurant’s table.  Here are photos of some of my favorite wines.

We usually start with champagnes, then still whites, then reds, and finally dessert wines. But today preceding the tasting there had been a seminar featuring champagne and caviar, and there were at least a dozen impressive champagnes being poured. As the pourer who poured the Gaston Cliquet stated, “You can tell if the champagne is made by one of the large negotiants by looking at the Bottom left of the front label. If there is a “RN” it is made by a small unaffiliated producer. If it has a “MN” it is one of the large producers.”  The bottle of Gaston Cliquet had a tiny RN on the darker colored band at the bottom of the label. That is the type of obscure, interesting information one learns at wine tastings and seminars, where the producers , distributors, and wine makers pour the best of the best such as tonight.

My favorite pairing was a Savennieres with a battered fried pasta balls (arincini) made by the Taos High School’s Culinary Arts Department. Savenneries is among my favorite white wines and the gentleman pouring was kind enough to pour several glasses of it. So I enjoyed four aricini with their large, loose layers of pasta covered in batter and deep fried with my favorite white wine for my dinner. The same table poured an excellent Italian white from Sicily produced by Besanti (second photo from top).

Savennières wine (French pronunciation:[savənjɛʁ] ^ⓘ) is a white wine, usually dry, produced from  Chenin blanc around Savennières in the Loire Valley. The vineyards are situated on the north bank of the river Loire, in the Anjou-Saumur subregion.^[1]

There are three Appellation d'origine contrôlées(AOCs) for Savennières wine: Savennières, covering most of the vineyards, and the enclaves Savennières-Roche-aux-Moinesand Savennières-Coulée-de-Serrant.

The area allowed for Savennières AOC spreads over 3 hills of schist, located on the northwest (right) bank of the Loire river, totaling about 300 hectares (740 acres), situated in three communes: Savennières, Bouchemaineand La Possonnière. Of these, about 146 hectares (360 acres) are actually planted with vineyards.^[2] Savennières-Roche-aux-Moines covers 33 hectares (82 acres) and Savennières-Coulée-de-Serrant covers 7 hectares (17 acres).^[1]

At 7:00 we had had enough to eat and drink and we left and went back to the Hacienda.

Suzette went to the hot tub, while I drank a cup of green tea and blogged.

At 8:30 we went to bed.

I woke up several times and enjoyed looking up through the skylight at the night sky which felt like I was sleeping under a Christmas tree flocked with snow, except I was in a warm bed under covers instead of outdoors in 17 degree weather .

 

Bon Appetit