One Thing I Won't be Doing for Christmas Next Year

My wife has always wanted to see one of the traveling Chrismas music shows, so we attended the Mannheim Steamroller concert in Portland on the Saturday before Christmas. I think we realized about two songs in that we really wanted to attend the other traveling Chrismas show - the Trans Siberian Orchestra. I had a premonition before the show when I was reading the program and got the instinct impression that Mannheim Steamroller was trying a little too hard to justify their existence.

How many bands consider it necessary to make points about how many hotel room nights they've booked or how many yard of video screen they've hung or how more many records they sold than Springsteen and Bon Jovi? I saw Springsteen in April and he didn't mention anything about the band's history or that he had sold more records than someone - he just played (really well, I might add).

It really hit home when one of the keyboard players introduced himself as the "featured keyboard player" and then introduced the other keyboard player - who happened to be his wife. Is his wife less valuable to the band because she's not "featured"? I can't imagine that going down too well in my house. And who cares who the featured keyboard player is anyway? Very odd.

They are perfectly fine musicians. The women playing recorder was awesome. I think we were just expecting a little more rock-n-roll and a lot less of the medieval vibe. I did check around with some friends a couple of days later who all said that the show we should have seen was the Trans Siberian Orchestra. Now that could wind up being equally lame for a whole set of different reasons, but now we're committed. We're going to have to go see for ourselves next year.

Halfway Around the World and Back Again

Made my semi-annual India/Egypt/UK trip over the last two weeks. I felt a bit guilty walking around Noida, India in a short-sleeve shirt while Carlton had a week of below freezing temps. Did get to see the Nile for the first time. But it was at night and from the middle of downtown Cairo the Nile actually didn't look much different from the Willamette near Portland.

Couple of interesting pictures. First probably only appeals to gadget geeks. The Intercontinental Hotel in Cairo features interesting elevator controls - you put in the floor you want to go to, the control then displays which elevator to get onto, and once you're inside there are no buttons, it just takes you to your floor automatically. While that prevents the kids pressing every button, it also prevents you from changing your mind during the trip. I did get stuck going up and down and in and out trying to find the lobby until I figured out I needed to enter a minus sign before the number to get there. Maybe these are everywhere now, but it's the first time I've seen them.

Second picture was just amazing to me. Seeing a Christmas tree behind an obelisk and the Sphinx was just bizarre. I don't even think they celebrate Christmas, but I forgot to ask about it

Allison Inn: Jory Restaurant - Thumbs Up

Finally made it out to the pretty spectacular Allison Inn in Newberg on the Sunday of Thanksgiving Weekend. I had seen it on a tour before all the drywall was up, so it was great to see the finished product. We had just completed three days of pouring wine and could best be characterized as wiped out. We had heard very good things about Jory (and they even have our 06 Pinot Noir 144 on their list).

The bar area that surrounds part of the kitchen is beautiful (I can't wait to sit there for a late lunch), but we had a group so we sat at a table. They're obviously used to winery people, because they had no problem opening a bunch of bottles of wine that we brought. The rack of lamb was outstanding. I wish I could remember all the appetizers I tried, but I wasn't feeling too much pain by the end of the night (had a designated driver). We had a couple from Seattle join us for us for a while to try some wine - we're a friendly group and love meeting new people.

I do want to thank Tom and the staff there - some restaurants aren't as thrilled about people bringing their own wine.

Thanksgiving 2009 - Fried Turkey and Wine Tasting

I'm always surprised at how many people haven't tried a fried turkey. We started cooking them that way a couple of years ago and we wouldn't ever think of putting one in the oven any more. You can cook a 14-15 pound turkey in about 50 minutes and it comes out moist - what's not to like about that? So here's a picture of the turkey frying and the end product. Looks very tempting even with the bad lighting. We had a very nice 1999 Belle Pente Murto Vineyard Pinot Noir with it.

Day after Thanksgiving we were pouring wine at ADEA Wine Company with four other wineries. $15 tasting fee = 20+ open Pinot Noirs. This is one of the best values and most laid back places to try wine in Willamette Valley. Come see us sometime. Next big open house will be Memorial Day Weekend but we can make ourselves available on most weekends if you call to set up a time. One note - the 2007s are starting to come together - major improvement over how they were showing at the '08 Memorial Day tasting.

2008 Vintage - First Consumer Trial

We bottled our 2008 main estate blend in early October. We think it's pretty good, but we've had no one outside our facility taste it yet. So last Sunday we had a call for an appointment and I remembered that I had a case of 08 in my trunk. These bottles were going to be used for samples because the labels were all at odd heights - every time you change a roll of labels on the machine you hope you've set it in same place as the last roll. Sometimes you're a bit off.

So I decided this group would be the first "outsiders" to taste one of my 08s. I poured them the 07 estate, 05, 06 and 07 reserves and the 08 estate. This was an experienced group - they've been drinking Oregon Pinot for 20 years. The 08 estate, even with only a month of bottle age, was really impressive. They forced me (OK, strongly encouraged might be more accurate) to take them into the barrel room to try the 08 reserves which are still aging in barrel. Then they went and bought two cases of reserve futures (I don't even usually sell futures - they were persuasive) and most of the case of the 08 samples.

So all I can conclude so far is that the 08s will be very well received when they are released. These are very elegant Pinots. There may be an Uh-Huh bottling and there is a strong possibility of a completely new label. If I can get the bottles, we will bottle our first magnums ever.

What's Your Favorite Oregon Vintage?

Last weekend we poured our 2005, 2006 and 2007 reserve Pinot Noirs at our Weekend Before event [Note: There are two traditional open house weekends in Oregon - the weekend after Thanksgiving and Memorial Day Weekend. Every winery including all those without regular tasting hours pour wine during those two weekends and many are also open the weekend before.]

I was interested in what people thought about those three vintages and I have almost the perfect setup for finding out. All three wines had the same clone percentages: 50% Pommard, 25% Wadenswil, and 25% 115. All three wines were aged for about the same amount of time in 50% new French oak [50% means half of the barrels were new]. And even the winemaking was almost identical - every vintage was completely destemmed and fermented in small lots in 1.5 ton fermenters.

So as I told the tasters, the variables were mostly yield and weather. We had a bad fruit set in the spring of 05, so our yield that year was very low. We had a normal crop going in 06 and then it got hot in October (the 09 harvest reminds us a lot of 06). And in 07 we had a normal crop going and then it got cool in late September with some rain.

So which one did people prefer? If you look at purchased bottles, it was 56% 06, 22% 05 and 22% 07. There did seem to be some differences in preference among people who have purchased Oregon Pinot for many years - they seemed to prefer the 07 over the 06. If you remember (and we certainly do) the "experts" were trashing the 07 vintage before we even picked it because it rained in late September. The wines are really coming around now and showing quite nicely.

I was asked quite a bit which one is my favorite and I responded by stating the order in which I'd drink them right now. I'd drink the 07 first (nice acidity with a beautiful laser beam of cherry fruit running through the wine - very refreshing), the 06 second (definite crowd pleaser with upfront dark fruit flavors and a tremendous round mouthfeel) just because I think it could benefit from another year or two of aging, and the 05 third (still very tight but showing more fruit this year) because I think that needs another couple of years.

I'll get another couple of hundred opinions this upcoming weekend and update this post if I find anything interesting.

Swedish Food

I was in Sweden last week and wound up having an amazing and unexpected dining experience. My previous experiences with Swedish cuisine haven't been all that memorable - for example, heaping plates of cold baby shrimp on lettuce isn't my idea of a mid-morning snack, but seems to be a national dish. A colleague wanted to try someplace he'd never been before in old town Stockholm, so I said let's go.

We wound up in the basement of a hotel at a restaurant called Leijontornet - Lion Tower in English. It turns out that the restaurant sits on top of an ancient outer wall of Stockholm and they actually built the dining room around some of the ruins. Parts of the wall we could see were almost 700 years old. I attached a picture. I didn't have my camera so I had to take pictures with my phone. I apologize for the horrible quality. There are much better pictures on their website.

We were the only two people in the restaurant - I guess Tuesday nights are slow. Two parties showed up later in the evening. The menu showed three choices - four course seafood meal, four course meat, and a seven course combination. The meat menu was interesting and included duck liver, ox tartare, and lamb, but we both decided on the seafood menu (picture attached). I couldn't pass on lobster and truffles.

So we needed a white wine. Our very funny Norwegian server brought out the list (my companion was Danish, so they both compared notes on Swedes throughout the evening - apparently Swedes are an inferior species). Then they let us go down into the wine cellar to look around (benefits of a slow night). It was full of first growths and ridiculous burgundies plus high-end wines from all the other areas of the world. I decided to pull out the personal credit card and we wound up with an '04 Leflaive Batard-Montrachet (picture attached). I'm a sucker for white burgundy and we needed something worthy of the menu. The wine kicked ass all night - we couldn't have picked a better match for the food.

About the food. First thing that came out was what's in the bottom picture - a four item sampler that included a salt pike lollipop, a very thin slice of reindeer jerky, some sort of cod skin and the Swedish version of a pork rind (the clear twirly thing in the left of the picture). The pork was like eating bacon-flavored air and everything else was equally good. Highlights were the mussels in the first course (I'm not a mussel fan at all - these were the best tasting mussels I've ever had), and the lobster, of course. Everything was fresh and from Sweden - even the raspberries and truffles.

I had my eyes opened to good Swedish cuisine. It's not just meatballs and herring. If you get to Stockholm, check out Leijontornet.