huevos con vino

The Okanagan Valley is quietly winning people over with its wines.  I know my mother and stepfather loved to visit that wine region before they moved to Oregon and the Dundee Hills became their new favorite stomping ground. 

“Stomping Ground Winery.”  Now there’s a great name for somebody to adopt! 

Anyway, last night at the celebratory barbecue for my friends, I spoke with one of their parents’ friends for quite some time.  She and her husband had visited many of the wineries in Australia and in Canada, particularly in the Okanagan Valley.  A few of the Canadian wineries we discussed are:

• La Frenz Winery - They make lots of white wines, but also Pinot Noir, Cabernet Sauvignon, and Merlot.  I’d love to go visit this place as the location sounds wonderful.
• Quail’s Gate Winery - Looks to be a mass-market place, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.  Lots of old vines there, apparently.

We also talked about their Argentinian travels.  Yeah, I liked this couple a lot: Australia, Argentina, and Canada.  And, they’re both expert geologists, so they knew all about the differences in soil type and terrain and the rock beds below the soil in each area of each country.  Amazing.  They spoke very highly of the wineries in the Cafayate Valley in the Mendoza region, particularly Norton.

Finally, they told me about winery barge tours in France.  Now that sounds like a good vacation to me!

My fiance and I are in Vancouver, BC for the weekend…and if you find any uncharacteristic typos in this post, it’s because I’m using my laptop.  We’re up here for a friend’s engagement party, but we’re never content to just go somewhere for the weekend and eat at the hotel.  So, we went to the Moustache Cafe.

The place was very nice…the restaurant had several tables done up with red and gray velvet chairs and booth seats, all contained inside the front room of a heritage house on Marine Drive.  Very nice inside…small but cozy, very inviting, with some strange 80s music playing for most of the evening.  It worked somehow, though.

In terms of wine, their list was terrific.  It was very brief, just two pages, but the prices ranged from $20/bottle to over $500/bottle.  They also had some verticals of Duckhorn and other nice wines, as well as intelligent selections rather than a hodge-podge of value and expensive wines.  A very impressive list for such a small place!

We had a very nice dinner at the Moustache Cafe.  I had the appetizer and entree specials:

• Duck confit, served slightly crispy in a sun-dried blueberry sauce with a wild greens salad and a mysterious orange berry/tomato-like fruit that was delicious
• Beef tenderloin, served medium in a blue cheese demi-glaze with roasted vegetables and mashed potatoes
• Grand Marnier creme brulee

In terms of wine, we each had a glass of the 2004 Hester Creek Pinot Blanc.  At $6.50 CDN/glass, it was a great deal, and it went very well with our appetizers: very nice green apple and blue cheese flavors with a hint of honeydew and some citrus.  With my main course, I had a glass of some British Columbia Merlot.  I’m afraid I didn’t catch the name on the list, though.  It’s a shame as the wine was outstanding, particularly with the tenderloin: lots of mouth-filling blackberry flavor.  I wasn’t quite sure I understood that term (”mouth-filling”) until dinner last night.  Now I know why they say it!

I loved the combination of the blackberry and tannic subtlety with the perfectly-cooked beef in the blue cheese demi-glaze.  It’s funny: Twenty years ago, I never imagined I’d be writing a sentence like that.  I was thinking more along the lines of stuff like “I jumped and caught the home run before it could escape the friendly confines of Yankee Stadium, and with that we had won the pennant!”  Ahh, well.  I’d rather be an anonymous food and wine critic than Johnny Damon at this point.

After dinner, we met up with our friends and went to the International Ice Cream Factory, Ltd.  They have “218 flavours on location,” and they mean it.  The place is set up like some sort of adult nightmare in terms of the bright colors and lights, but the gelato makes it all worth the effort.  You are encouraged to try before you buy, so I tried the following flavors (and more that I have since forgotten):

• Nut kulfi
• Durian (this one had a special lid over the vat to keep the aroma from escaping)
• Persimmon 
• Dragon fruit
• Cherimoya (tasted like Big League Chew…nasty stuff)
• Porcini mushroom (tasted like mushrooms)

I settled on red bean.  It was delicious!  Apparently they have dill pickle ice cream from time to time.  Holy hell, that sounds awful.

As promised a few months ago, Domaine Drouhin finally has a new Web site.  Now, I’ve been making Web sites for over 11 years.  No joke.  I realize that the Web browser concept is about 15 years old at this point, but the first version of Mosaic came out in September 1993 and the first version of Netscape came out in October 1994.  So when I made a Web site in July 1995 as a rock band fan site, I was at the cusp of the Internet revolution, sort of like Al Gore.

Since then, I have obtained undergrad and grad degrees in Technical Communication (and also in Art History, but only undergrad).  I have spent years studying graphic design, text layout and design, Web site design, etc., etc.  I have also been putting these ideas into practice for many years in many different ways; my Web sites are only one expression of this knowledge and experience.

But why prattle on about my background?  Well, I wanted to provide some context for what will follow in this post and, frankly, for every other post where I talk about visual design and effective communication.  In this case, the appropriate context is that, with regard to design and with all modesty aside, I know what I’m talking about.  In terms of wine tasting, I’ve still got a long way to go.  But in terms of developing a Web site and making it usable, I’m an expert.

So, with that background in mind, here are a few thoughts about the new DDO Web site.

I’m glad they made a new site, although the old one was just fine to be honest…this is one of my biggest pet peeves in the online design world: Why scrap a perfectly useful design?  This isn’t the nightly news; we don’t need a new set every 6-12 months.  But with that concern aside, the general aesthetic is okay.

The site takes much longer to load now because of the inclusion of Flash.  I’m not a huge fan of Flash; you can do some cool stuff with it, but it tends to bog things down and it’s annoying to update compared to straight HTML.

To be honest, I was going to write a lot more about the new site, but I think it’s best for you to go see it and post your thoughts to the Comments section of this entry.  Overall, I do like the site, but I think it’s a little busy and flashy for my taste.  Time will tell, I guess, as to whether the site gains acceptance.  It certainly sets the winery apart!

I was relaxing in my apartment this afternoon, trying desperately to avoid the 94-degree heat in Seattle (in a town that is ill equipped to deal with anything over 80 degrees), when the buzzer rang.  UPS showed up with three bottles of Odisea:

• 2004 TI Tempranillo, a nice replacement for the bottle I drank two nights ago!
• 2004 Two Rows Garnacha, a 90/10 blend with Syrah that I can’t wait to try
• 2005 Muse Rosé, a 50/50 Grenache/Tempranillo blend that I also can’t wait to try

Now, as I said it’s 94 degrees here today.  I put the wines into climate-controlled quarters immediately, but they’ll probably need a few weeks or months of recovery time after this heat.  I hope they didn’t get baked too badly…I really want to try these wines!

I also got a nice newsletter with the release, although I may volunteer to copyedit all future newsletters from Odisea.  It’s not a big deal to most people, I’m sure, but I’d love to help them avoid the typos and punctuation issues that most busy people tend to sprinkle into their text.  I’d do it all for a free bottle or two as well!  So, Adam, if you’re reading this blog, feel free to inquire about my highly reasonable editing services in exchange for some of what you do so well!!

My fiance and I went to an old friend’s house last night…well, she’s the mother of an old friend, but I spent many weekends and evenings at her house when I was growing up, so she’s sort of like my aunt or something.  Details.

Anyway, we had some really nice food and I decided to bring along two bottles of wine:

• 2000 Paracombe Cabernet Franc
• 2004 Odisea TI Tempranillo

We wound up opening and consuming the Odisea; I left the Paracombe as our gift to the hosts for their hospitality and food.  The Odisea definitely needed about 90 minutes in the decanter, which was a bit more than last time…but then, this “decanter” was actually an antique ceramic pitcher.  It was the closest thing they had to a decanter, but it worked just fine.

I have to be honest here.  Every time I try the Odisea Tempranillo, I just love it!  I want to buy a case of it just to have some on hand, and it’s one of the very few wines that I’d want a case of in my house.  Of course, I have no more space in my house, but since I’m in the Odisea Journey wine club I’ll still get a few bottles of their wine every few months.  That’s reassuring, as I’m lazy.

Finally, it’s neat to go update CellarTracker! after consuming or giving away some of my wine.  It makes me realize that I need to buy some more to replace those gaps in my fridge!