Heitz and Three Rivers at the Sorrento
We went in and did a wedding dinner tasting yesterday. Of course, when you do such a thing, you need some wine to go with all the excellent food! Here’s a glimpse at what we narrowed our list down to prior to the tasting:
- Appetizers:
- baked mushrooms with crab and pepper filling
- phylo-wrapped spinach and feta (spanakopita, essentially)
- Dungeness crab cakes
- artichoke hearts with goat cheese
- bruschetta
- whole-leaf Caesar
- mixed greens with a fruity balsamic, candied walnuts, and blackberries
- Pacific King salmon with mashed potatoes and spinach
- Pacific King salmon with Granny Smith apples and an apple cider reduction
- Pheasant over wild rice with arugula and grapes
- Tortellini with a light cream sauce
As you can see, we ate a lot of food. To go with all this terrific stuff, we had a Heitz Chardonnay. This wine wound up being totally boring and not really as much of a match for these foods as I had hoped. One of our friends asked, “This isn’t the wine you plan to serve at your wedding, is it?” Ouch.
The wine captain at the Sorrento did let me try something else, though: Three Rivers MC2. It’s a Washington wine, a blend of Merlot (50%), Cabernet Franc (45%), and Cabernet Sauvignon (5%). I can’t find any info about it on the winery’s Web site, oddly enough. A lot of their wines cost about $39/bottle, but the MC2 is more like $12. It was good, a bit young yet with some tannins and acid at first, but then it settled down and turned into a nice, drinkable wine.
For my wedding, though, I’m hoping to have Domaine Drouhin Pinot Noir. It’s all a question of how much the Sorrento wants to charge me to have wine, though. I might go instead with Domaine d’Aupilhac or Chateau Lascombes as they could be cheaper, if that’s even possible. I’m not sure I get how the pricing works at the Sorrento, but then I plan to charge my guests for the wine since we’re buying their dinner…seems fair to me!