huevos con vino

We went out to Nishino tonight with a couple of old friends.  We had been planning this night for two or three weeks, or more, and we always end up enjoying ourselves quite a bit at Nishino since we are all serious sushi connoisseurs.  We didn’t have the exclusive omakase meal this time, though, as that tends to cost a whole hell out a lot of money.  Instead, we ultimately spent nearly as much on all the specific stuff we wanted.  We had:

• Seared foie gras with mushroom and soy reduction 
• Kampachi sashimi with jalapeno relish
• Tara nabe - smoked black cod in a cauldron simmered in fish stock with maitake mushrooms, tofu, and mizuni
• Mirugai (geoduck) sashimi
• Sushi platter (of our selection):

• Masago (basic red tuna)
• Hamachi
• Wild Sockeye salmon
• Amaebi (raw sweet shrimp) with the heads prepared separately
• Uni (sea urchin)
• King crab
• Tekka maki (red tuna roll) 
• Kampachi (again!)
• Spanish mackarel (much like an anchovy)
• Amberjack with ginger and scallions

• 6 kinds of mochi, all homemade - Lychee, Raspberry, Espresso, Cherry Blossom (!), Mango, and Red Bean
• Special “Rococo” orange/chocolate cookie with ginger ice cream (also homemade)

But for me, the evening was really just a great chance to open a bottle of my 1998 Domaine Drouhin Laurène.

Anyone who reads this blog should be well aware of my love for Laurène, the mid-range Pinot Noir offering from Domaine Drouhin.  The Laurène is definitely a passion that my wife and I share; it remains her favorite wine.  Other people like this wine too, and the 1998 vintage yielded perhaps the closest expression to a Burgundy of any Laurène that I have tasted.  And I have tasted 1998-2002 so far, with a few 2003 bottles in my wine fridge.

The 1998 Laurène is 13% alcohol, which is quite low compared to many New World Pinot Noirs.  Although the Web site omits the 1998 vintage from its list of Laurène wines (which is odd because they used to have information on it), the vintage was certainly a good one for Domaine Drouhin.  This wine is just hitting its stride in terms of cellaring; I believe this wine could be stored for another 5-10 years without any trouble, and in fact I may just do that with my other 2 bottles.  I think in about 3-5 years this wine will be absolutely phenomenal.  But it’s pretty darn good now, too! 

Here are my notes:

• Aroma: This wine is all about the bouquet.  Rich red cherry and blackberry with a bit of earthiness initially, then some (so help me!) maple, burnt toffee, hay, and vanilla aromas, followed by sour cherry and raspberry combined with secondary elements of cigar box, coffee, and a hint of the barnyard.  Lovely!
• Flavor: At first, slightly acidic and dry; never a fruit-forward wine, always very reserved and subtle.  Sour cherries and raspberries, some mild tannic and slightly stronger acidic activity depending on the food pairing.  A very mature, oaky, dry Pinot Noir that presents itself in an exceptionally reserved manner.
• General impression: A very detailed and complicated wine, if that makes sense.  The wine evolved over a couple of hours in the glass and certainly went better with some types of food than others.  A complete chameleon of a wine, in fact: acidic and crisp with crab, verdant and ripe with kampachi, tannic with shrimp.  Amazing.

A beguiling wine for sure.  It’s not at all the “blackberry fruit baseball bat” that many New World Pinot Noirs tend to be these days.  Don’t get me wrong, I like being smacked in the mouth by the blackberry baseball bat once in a while.  But I also like to be seduced by something a little more subtle than that.  For this reason, I believe the 1998 Domaine Drouhin Laurène will win you over as well, if you can find any for sale!  The average price online is $68/bottle or so, which isn’t too bad considering the 2003 Laurène lists at $65.  Trust me when I say you’ll enjoy spending the money on this wine.  If not, just send the rest of your bottles to me and I’ll know what to do.

Jack at Fork and Bottle has thrown down the gauntlet and challenged me to a blind taste test.  He thinks the WineKeeper “Keeper” might be more of a gimmick than an actual wine “preservation” system, but I disagree.

The challenge is simple: Can I tell, in a blind tasting, the difference between a wine preserved with the Keeper that is stored in the fridge and a wine sealed with a regular cork that is also stored in the fridge?  Jack believes that in a blind taste test two nights after initially opening the wine, I will not be able to tell the difference between the two wines.  Additionally, he thinks I will actually prefer the bottle sealed with the cork rather than the Keeper.

That is the essential challenge.  There are a few variables I need to nail down first, though:

• Which wine would be best?  I want to test Pinot Noir because of the typically fragrant and complex bouquet you get with such a wine.
• Am I tasting the wines right after opening and then 2 days later, both blind?  I assume so.
• If I store the wines in the fridge, how long should I wait to smell and taste the wines after pouring?  They’ll be too cold at first.

I will, of course, use the same shape of Riedel glass for each wine (with a little label on each base to indicate which wine I am drinking), and I will have my wife assist me so I can be sure I am tasting totally blind (as in blindfolded). 

So, Jack, I am ready to accept your challenge…almost.  I need to finish another bottle of wine that is currently using my only Keeper bottle tap.  And then I’ll probably need to write up my entry for Wine Blogging Wednesday #30, unless I can sneak in this taste test before then.  But soon enough, we shall see just how good this Keeper really is!

Just a quick post to say that I noticed WBW #30 is coming up quick!  I’m excited because the theme is “New World Syrah/Shiraz,” where “New World” means Australia, or South Africa, or the US, or (I assume) nearly any country aside from France.  Since I am still quite new to the WBW events, I am surprised that New World Syrah/Shiraz had yet to be the topic of consumption, so to speak, because it’s such a good theme.  The host this time around is Tim at Winecast, a well-established blog with a good reputation.

I’m excited to participate in WBW #30 and this time I intend to follow the rules a bit more closely; last time I picked a great wine that wasn’t a biodynamic wine.  But I still got my review published in the roundup so I guess these wine bloggers are a forgiving lot.

A quick mental review of my extensive cellars reveals two contenders for my review:

• 2004 Radio-Coteau Cherry Camp Syrah - I have 2 bottles and I don’t know how I got 2 bottles in retrospect, so this wine is a good possibility.
• 2000 Paracombe Somerville Shiraz - A total blockbuster wine, with only about 100 cases made, that tends to cost upwards of $80/bottle.  Man, I have been looking for an excuse to try this wine.  I might have my excuse with WBW #30 as I doubt many people will be hitting the Paracombe, although they make absolutely wonderful Shiraz.

So, I still need to weigh the possibilities here, but I am leaning toward the Paracombe as I think more wine drinkers need to check out this wonderful Adelaide Hills winery.  But that Radio-Coteau is tempting, and I have 2 bottles…although I think that wine is still a bit too young.  We’ll see!

Last night we had quite a special dinner out on the town.  We met up with one of my mentors in grad school, who has become a good friend over the last few years, and my old officemate and travel buddy who was in the grad program with me.  We decided to visit Costas Opa, a landmark restaurant in the Fremont neighborhood of Seattle.  Although there are a couple of Costas locations, the Fremont restaurant has been on the corner for decades, or at least for the couple of decades that I have lived in and around Seattle.  It’s a fun place and a very enjoyable way to have a nice meal without emptying your bank account in the process.

Since I recently got another journal article published (with my mentor and officemate as second authors), we all wanted to celebrate a bit.  So, I ordered the most expensive bottle of red wine on the Costas Opa menu: the Tsantali Naousa Epilegmenos Reserve.  At $24, the bottle cost less than many of the red wines I usually buy direct from wineries!  Very cool.  The menu didn’t specify a vintage for the wine, but when we saw the bottle I got excited as the vintage was 1997.  Now that’s a lot more interesting than 2003!  I don’t get to have vintage Greek wine very often although that may change as I was certainly impressed with this particular wine.

Tsantali is one of the biggest wineries in Greece, although they have only been exporting wine since 1973.  Their family winemaking heritage is lengthy and they currently produce wines from 6 main viticultural regions within Greece plus a few other places, such as Rhodes and Nemea.  More information about Tsantali is available at their Web site.

The wine that we tried is quite interesting.  The Naousa Reserve is aged in French oak, which I am guessing is not necessarily new since the wine is quite refined and devoid of young oak flavor and aroma.  This wine clocks in at 12.5% alcohol, which is nice and light.  The good people at Tsantali strongly recommend this wine with any tomato-based dish.  When I tried this wine last night, my entree was baked linguini with hot Italian sausage in a tomato sauce, so this wine stood up quite well to the spice and tomato flavors.  Here are my general tasting notes, which would have been more detailed but we only had those tiny white wine glasses you tend to get at small, family restaurants:

• Aroma: Cherry, blackberry, and subtle rose petals.  Silky bouquet of fruit overall.
• Flavor: Very smooth and rich, lush mouthfeel; lots of blackberry and bramble flavors with some floral hints and a bit of chocolate as well.  Nicely integrated tannins and mild acidity; clearly the aging has made this wine a bit more mellow and balanced.
• General impression: An unexpected treat!  Very good, particularly for $24 at a restaurant.  Served a bit warm but still delicious.

I continue to be impressed by the Greek wines I have had around Seattle.  I am definitely a fan of the Xynonmavro grape, with its combination of Merlot elegance and Cabernet Sauvignon body.  Good stuff.

When I’m not tasting and reviewing wines, I typically work as an information architect, or information designer, or information developer, or experience designer, or assistance developer…I could go on, but I’m bored just looking at that list.  No matter what I call the job itself, I spend a lot of my professional time creating and organizing information. 

For example, I might design a Web site for a research group.  Or I might work on a user interface for a new software application.  Or I might develop the interaction model for a new consumer product.  I have been doing this sort of thing for a long time; I have 12 years of Web design and development experience at this point, which is pushing the upper limit of how many years of “Web” experience anyone can really have since HTML itself is only 14 years old.  I have 10 years of professional experience working in the capacity described above.  I have 5 years of university-level teaching experience, 4 years of advanced research experience, and 2 engineering degrees in technical communication (including a masters degree resulting from thesis work on Web site design).  So when I break rules of grammar, or style, or organization, it’s for a good reason…or else I might just be typing too fast.

I mention all of this snooty background information to make a simple point: When I look at a winery Web site, I believe I look with an extremely critical eye.  I can’t help myself at this stage of my career.  My training was so rigorous, I see typos and errors in places where most people don’t.  I find myself pausing my TV every time I catch a typo in the fine print of a commercial, which seems to be a never-ending source of amusement for my wife.  I hope.

So when I look at the Kendall Jackson Web site, for example, I typically see more than the information I was looking for.  I see the way the graphics work with the text to form a cohesive organizational structure.  I see how the three graphics on the home page emphasize a sense of attachment between the consumer and the winemaker, and between the winemaker and his vineyards, and between the product of the vineyards and the dining table.  I think about how the content on that home page might look to members of other cultures, or how the photo of the winemaker might suggest a certain power distance relationship between the consumer and the winery.

In essence, I find reasons to criticize nearly every Web site I see.  And winery Web sites are no exception.

Now, for quite a while I have thought about writing some design guidelines for winery Web sites.  But there’s a big problem.  I may be qualified to write such guidelines, but usually the best way to compile a list of “do’s and don’ts” is to show lots of examples of existing designs and explain why they suck.  I am reluctant to do that with winery Web sites for a couple of reasons:

• The big wineries can afford professional Web design firms, so the finished product usually looks pretty good.
• The small wineries tend to produce very small, limited Web sites that do not deserve lots of design scrutiny because, frankly, it’s a miracle they have Web sites at all.
• Excellent winemakers rarely seem to be excellent Web developers too, so it’s a little unfair to judge Web sites created by winemakers using the same high Web design standards that I apply to professionally developed sites.

I have a plan, though.  I am going to compile a list of all the US-based wineries that have been honored in the Wine Spectator Top 100 wines of 2006.  I’ll cross-reference those US wineries with their Web sites, which will result in my favorite thing: a new spreadsheet!  Once I have those sites listed, I will start visiting them all to see whether there are any consistent design decisions occurring within the sites, whether the sites were made by pro Web design shops, and so on.  Ultimately, I should be able to develop a good sense for current design and usability trends within “influential” winery Web sites, and once I’ve done that I can weigh in with my professional opinion on the relative merits of each trend or design decision.

One trend I already know that I hate is the use of Flash for Web site “intro pages.”  That’s so 2002.