Smoke on the water…but the company wasn’t bad
Wow, I’m really trying hard these days to give lame titles to each blog entry. Maybe I should settle for something more pedestrian, like “We Drank Sea Smoke Last Night and Enjoyed It.” It’s so much more descriptive and far less cringeworthy.
Nah, I’m sticking with that title.
Anyway, last night there were four of us dining at Daniel’s Broiler (Leschi). That particular location is quite nice and recently renovated. And, apparently it used to be the home of Grand Prix Motors, a Seattle auto showroom where one could obtain a brand new Alfa Romeo GTV6, if one were so inclined. One of our guests last night was, in fact, so inclined to buy that car…and then drive it down to Laguna Seca for the Alfa Club meeting in the early 1980s. It was the one time I have ever driven on a race track…but that’s a different story that doesn’t involve wine.
I decided to bring my bottle of 2004 Sea Smoke Botella to dinner. After the Southing’s strong showing at The Met, I thought I’d give another Sea Smoke release a chance at steakhouse glory. As predicted, though, everyone but me ordered fish, so the Pinot Noir was an especially good choice for its versatility. Strange, isn’t it? A versatile Pinot Noir…for under $30…that’s almost shocking.
We arrived and were shoehorned into a small table that, while it had a great view of the waterfront, was stuck next to the lounge act: a guy playing the piano. We couldn’t hear anything that was being said, so I moved us to a much better table that also had a suitable amount of room for 4 people. That’s a major pet peeve of mine, by the way: restaurants that try to cram 5 people around a 4-person table, or 4 people around a 2-person table. I need space for all my cutlery and glasses and plates, you know!
When we arrived, I told two different people to decant my wine, yet they still tried to simply open it and start pouring. That’s a 5% tip deduction right there. I had to stop the maitre’d from pouring the wine into my glass; he finally got a decanter, which was dusty. Another 5% tip deduction. I wanted to let the wine breathe for about 45-60 minutes, or at least until we got our appetizers, but the waiter had other ideas. Two or three times, he tried to pour us some of our wine before we even had anything to eat, and I mean we didn’t even get a loaf of bread for about 20 minutes. Yet another 5% tip deduction!
Of course, I’m being sarcastic here with the automatic tip deductions, but really: How much is it to ask to have your valuable, personally meaningful wine decanted in a container that is clean at a restaurant that charges $90 for lobster tail and $10 for a salad? It shouldn’t be this difficult.
Anyway, the restaurant was much better than I am making it sound. Well, sort of. When we switched tables, the waiter had no clue which person had ordered which salad/soup as an appetizer. That was amusing to me; all four were different, yet he got them entirely wrong. No big deal, though. It became a much bigger deal with my fiance’s salmon arrived covered in cream sauce. She is extremely allergic to cream, and she pointed that out when she ordered, but they gave her cream sauce anyway. About 10-15 minutes later, her plain salmon arrived and we were all halfway finished with our own dinners because they didn’t take them away to keep them warm. Hmm…we’re looking at a 5% tip before all of this happened…*)
Okay, so how was the wine? It was frigging amazing. Everyone loved it. It went well with lobster bisque. It went well with a Caesar salad. It went well with clam chowder, bacon bits, creamed spinach, filet mignon, mashed potatoes, halibut, salmon, you name it! The name of the wine was initially a bit of a cause for amusement, but once everyone tried it they quickly loved the wine, the name, the bottle, etc. They were blown away that this wine cost $28/bottle, too. As my fiance said later (and this is why we’re getting married, I think), “That wine was so much better than that Archery Summit we tried!” And she meant the $150/bottle Archery Summit Pinot Noir that we tried last October. Ouch.
Here are the tasting notes I wrote up when I got home: needed about 30-45 minutes of decanting; pencil lead and rich floral/cherry aromas; lots of mouthfilling cherry flavor, along with some other nice red fruit and smooth tannic activity. Amazingly good for the price!
I stand by those notes today. For the first time I got a sense of the pencil lead aroma that I have heard other wine writers mention. I always thought it was a bit pompous to suggest that particular aroma, but I was dead wrong. Perhaps it was the dust I was smelling, who knows? I do know that this wine needed all that decanting time…that was critically important in letting the nice cherry and other fruit flavors and aromas bloom, while allowing the acid and tannins to settle down a bit. I smelled and tasted a bit of wine right when it was opened, and it sure wasn’t ready to drink yet.
Now, the interesting thing about this 2004 Sea Smoke Botella is how low it was rated at this comparative tasting event. I really like what I’ve read at Josh’s blog so far, so I am very excited to hear that he and some other folks rated this exact same wine 15th out of 17 drinkable Pinot Noirs. Granted, they came from different regions in California, and from different vintages, but still…that tells me I have a lot of other Pinot Noir to try! I am excited to see what, for example, a 2001 D’Agostini tastes like, particularly at $10/bottle. Wow. I’d love to see a repeat of that taste test with a Domaine Drouhin Laurène and a Radio-Coteau La Neblina thrown in just to confuse the issue a bit.
So, the moral of today’s post: Price does not equate to enjoyment. Daniel’s Broiler is expensive but The Cellar Bistro has better service, frankly. Sea Smoke Botella and Southing both cost less than other Pinot Noirs, but taste better…to me and my friends and family, anyway. And salmon should never be covered with cream sauce, not even if you’re British.