Category Archives: review

Review–Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse: the steak is fine but where’s my wine?

Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse Santa Barbara: better than home?

If the man in my life had a blog, it would be called Beer, BBQ & Bruce (that would be Springsteen).

But he’s too busy barbecuing for a blog.

While I tend to stick my nose in a collection of poetry and browse around, he’s likely to daydream his palate away in a cookbook.

We BBQ’d a ham for Thanksgiving last week, and I salivate just thinking about the duck eh made a few months ago. He cooks salmon perfectly, and the fine art of cooking a steak comes out just right every time.Two weeks ago, we were both ecstatic over some filet mignons which we enjoyed with a bottle of Teusner Barossa Valley Shiraz.

That night, we both agreed as we usually do, that we just couldn’t get a meal like this out that was as good as home. After all, how could you improve on perfection?

Turns out, you can. At least in the steak department.

Last night, with the Big Monkey at one end of the table and his boss at the other, celebrating the best month of sales they’d ever had, the Big Monkey proclaimed that the porterhouse steak here at Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse was not only better than any steak he’d ever had in a restaurant, but the best steak he’d ever had. Period. And that it was worth every cent.

Now that’s saying a mouthful.

However, if we’d been dining at home, we wouldn’t have sat around for ages with no wine in our glasses.  And we would have had the wine we’d ordered with the various courses we’d intended to drink them with. Continue reading →

Teusner “The Riebke” Ebenezer Shiraz 2004 & filet mignon: essentially excellent

Bacon wrapped filet & Teusner “The Riebke” Ebenezer Shiraz 2004

Give a little whistle (bacon!) Try a little bacon (whistle!)

OK, yes, maybe I’m a little bacon crazy. A little.

But who could blame me after being at the Grateful Palate warehouse sale a few weeks ago for almost three hours smelling the stuff cooking? And of course, sampling.

I came home with a huge need for bacon. I was tempted to fry some up right then and there, with some eggs maybe, for a late lunch.

Instead, I went to the grocery store where I scored two beautiful filet mignons–on clearance at 30% off! Just in case, I had the butcher check them over, and he approved, so with a warm loaf of french bread under my arms and a bag of russets, I headed home to wrap my filet in two thick slabs of clove and garlic bacon; the Big Monkey dribbled gorgonzola on his when it came off the grill. With baked potatoes and broccoli on the menu, the remaining dilemna was which wine to pour? After all, I had two cases of the good stuff, fresh from the warehouse!

The Big Monkey loves those cab/shiraz blends, and I looked long and hard at the ones I bought. And I can’t wait to try the Stray Dog GSM, but I wondered if it would have enough pow for the filet and bacon. So what I opened was the Teusner Riebke Ebenezer Shiraz–if anything could stand up to that steak and bacon I figured it would be an Eb Shiraz–and I was NOT disappointed. Yummy!  This wine typically retails around $20, and I picked up two bottles for $10 each. I should have bought more!

Teusner "The Riebke" Ebenezer Shiraz

Teusner’s “The Riebke” Ebenezer Shiraz

The color is gorgeous dark purple, and the nose is filled with lucious black fruit–cherry and plum, especially. It had good structure, and surprisingly low alcohol at 14%, which for us made it more balanced than some of the other shiraz we’ve enjoyed. There wasn’t a whole lot more going on other than that lovely perfectly ripe fruit (not jammy, not over-ripe but perfect!) and maybe a little dark chocolate–a bit of the edge of super dark chocolate, a bit of that richness.

We didn’t care really for the particulars in the moment–it was such a pleasurable, feel good, taste good wine with a wonderful rich meal.

Hmmn…but could we have gotten more out of it if we hadn’t enjoyed it so quickly? We opened it not long before we ate; maybe with a little more air time, more would have been revealed. Let’s see if I can make that happen with bottle number 2! (where might I hide it??)

The only disappointment? By August 2008, according to Michael Pollard, Grateful Palate dropped Teusner from their roster of wines (or was dropped, who knows). What a huge disappointment! I do know I want to know more and have more of winemaker Kym Teusner!

Now I wonder if I head over to the Grateful Palate’s retail store on Del Norte in Oxnard if I could pick up some more????

Twisted Oak’s River of Skulls Mourvedre for all the sinners on your list

River of Skulls: the perfect wine for Halloween & Dia de los Muertos & more

Twisted Oak's "River of Skulls"

Twisted Oak’s River of Skulls

This is the wine you need for Halloween, Dia de los Muertos, and maybe for all the sinners on your list: Twisted Oak’s River of Skulls, a mourverde with a little syrah thrown in.

Not just because the bottle itself is impressive. Which it is–the graphic was created by El Jefe’s son Andrew Stai  when he was 16, with all that intensity for which 16 year old boys are known. (Andrew, by the way, has made it to 20). The punt of the bottle is sensually curved and ribbed, asking you to run your finger around its rim. The shape of the bottle itself calls out to be held, grabbed, carressed, and slugged. Really. It is the perfect wine for a pirate and begs for a candle when it is downed and out.

I first tasted this wine with El Jefe at Doug Cook’s birthday celebration at the Wine Blogger’s Conference last weekend at Santa Rosa.  We were talking between pours and he pointed out the bottle which I’d been admiring for awhile, not even knowing it was his wine, or a mourverde (recall my fondness for Quivira’s? Or even better, the RBJ 2002 theologicum mataro? Now that’s a wild wine…)

So El Jefe opened it up lickety split and poured. Considering the powerful wines that had crossed my palate from Doug Cook’s cellar that night, it stood its ground (of course, mourverdre will do that for me!) There was a some left in the bottle so El Jefe let me take it home–lucky me!

It was the first red wine I enjoyed when I returned–with a dinner of cioppino and brown rice and a salad with blue cheese, walnut, and apple. Some lovely musky earth and spice balances the fresh lively raspberries. Certainly enough to wake the dead or to serve them on your altar. Saints and sinners will appreciate this offering.

from Twisted Oak in Calaveras County CA

from Twisted Oak in Calaveras County CA

This is a special creature, this wine. Sorry to say that unless you have a trip planned to Calaveras county, you’re out of luck. You can get on the list now for next year! Sign up here.


(WBC 11) Sharing the Wine Wealth Part 2

Sharing the OWC Wealth Part 2: Trick or Treat!

Hey there friends and fellow wine enthusiasts!

This is no trick, it’s all treat–I spent last weekend at the First Wine Bloggers Conference in Santa Rosa and scored a bunch of open wines including a motherlode of  Dry Creek Valley zins!

These wines were opened Friday so they need to be enjoyed soon! Want to come help me taste and evaluate them??

I’ll set out some crackers, cheese, apples, bread, vegies, that sort of thing, then when we’re ready, I’ll throw some pasta on and Kathy’s going to pick up marinara at Ferrarros (both meat and vegie).  Kathy’s also going to make a salad.

Since both Kathy and the Big Monkey just had birthdays, we’ll put some candles on a cake (I’m thinking cheese cake with home canned cherries and fresh blueberries actually).  SHHH! That part’s a surprise!

Looking forward to seeing you and hearing what you think about these wines!

ml, g

So went the email I sent to about 15 friends. Ten wine enthusiasts came over the other night, and in the course of the evening, we polished off the remnants of eight Dry Creek Valley zins and tasted two pinot noirs from two continents.

I laid the zins out on a table with a black cloth to hide wine spills and to carry out the Halloween Trick or Treat theme. The boy and I had put out Halloween decorations the week before, but I added a few more before the party so it was quite the festive scene.

But it was the table laden with alphabetized dry Creek Valley zins which got all the attention from the adults! (The children of course were transfixed by the led motorized pirate ship…) And it didn’t take long for us to choose our glasses and get to tasting.

In addition to collecting these wines from the conference, there was a pile of 20 or so tasting sheets from the meal I didn’t get to eat and the wines I didn’t get to taste, so since I’d brought them home for scratch paper, we used the backs of those sheets for our notes providing an intro to other Dry Creek wines as well as a place for our notes.

I’d also gathered up all the handouts that were lying around the sweet zin suite, and was able to supply those informational sheets for almost everyone. I had maps out and I showed everyone where the Dry Creek valley was, and set the scene. I had the laptop up with info from Dry Creek also but we never went there. It would have been wonderful to have someone like Nick Gorevic of Wine Scholarship lead us, but I think I muddled along quite well!

Here’s a quick run down of our tasting notes with some general info as possible:

Bella Vineyard and Wine Caves: 2006 100% DCV zin, 15% alcohol $35.
Smoke right away (tar?), dark cherry, blackberry, smooth and silky yet “jazzy.” Hangs around.

Copain 2003 Arrowhead Mountain Zin 14.8
Smoother, a little smoke like smoked salmon, barn, leather, hay, thick.

Dutcher Crossing 2006 Maple Vineyard DCV 91% Zin, 9% Petit Sirah; old vines 14.8%
i was reminded right away of the light rose raspberry currant spice of carnation vanilla natural perfumed scent of an old beautiful elegant refined woman smiling, and I couldn’t shake her. Maybe it was the time of year, here on the heels of Halloween, but I couldn’t help but like her and want to know her better. (Jock’s favorite?  He worked as a sommelier at the Ranch House in Ojai 30 years ago…)

Mauritson 2005 Growers Reserve DCV Zin 15.5
Very fruity, muddy, hard to taste after the Dutcher

Mauritson 2006 DCV Zin Rockpile Ridge 15.5
Clear sense of cherry, bramble

Fritz 2006 14.6% DCV Zin
Butterscotch, black fruit, hay, leather. Lots going on.

Pedroncelli 2006 14.6%
This wine went really really well with dinner! Very satisfying and pleasurable! Easy going yet meaty and smooth.

Talty 2005 Zin Estate 15.0%
I remember really liking this one: peppery, complex, intriguing, a conversation starter of a wine

(I’ll come back and add links to more of the wineries when I get a chance…)

So here’s my latest idea for an income stream: organize regional wine tastings to go. You could order a tasting for 12 say, of Dry Creek Valley zins, or wines in general, along with tasting notes and other info from the region. This could be done for every appellation in California and beyond! I’ll leave the northeast for Lenn Thompson if he wants it!

Even better, to work with other folks in the Open Wine consortium to pull this together, drawing on different people’s areas of expertise, and giving them a shout out, for example, doing an Austrian ed pack of biodynamic wines from Anthony Nicalo Farmstead. Or working with David Strada and his New Zealand wines.

While I may not be the most sophisticated or knowledgeable person out there in wine, I do know my way around educating adults after teaching college and yoga for 20 years!

Hmmn, maybe this idea is so obvious it’s already out there. But it is a bit of a complicated idea to pull off well to provide the service of connecting people to a wide variety of regions in a consistent way. If it is out there, I sure haven’t run across it during the last six months of world wide web wine wanders. Then again, I wasn’t looking for it specifically.

Please let me know if you know anything I should know!

(WBC Post 5) Biodynamic & mostly organic Quivera

Biodynamic & mostly organic: Quivira

Saturday morning I packed up and left my sweet zin suite at the Flamingo Hotel to jump on a shuttle with other attendees of the First Wine Bloggers Conference for a hike through the wine country…except I watched the shuttles head off into the morning without me.

Fortunately, I could jump on my cell and talk with organizer Allan Wright who sent me to Quivira, and since I had both a car and Quivira marketing director Nancy’s card, I was set with a quick call from her for directions. Off I went down the chill autumn, chasing after the van, and dodging bicycles on the back roads of Sonoma County’s Dry Valley Creek Road until I found myself pulling into the idyllic, picturesque barnyard setting of Quivira, chickens, solar panels, and all.

Farmer and winemaker Steve Canter was at work with the dozen or so bloggers, explaining biodynamics and homeopathy and everything else under the sun including cleansing and purification rituals he uses (go for the power of the earth, Steve!!).

And then we went for a lovely walk, visiting goats, and Ruby the pig, and picking grapes off the vines (my favs were the old zins of course), looping along unusually dry Wine Creek to Dry Valley Creek, both which eventually feed into the Russian River, then under a fig tree, and up a ridge planted in zin and down along the olive trees to the barn.

Steve and Nancy tag teamed a bit, telling stories about the vines, the wines, and the processes both of biodynamics and organics in practice here. Of particular interest to me was how they are healing Wine Creek by building weirs to slow down the water to create better habitat for steelhead and other native species practically wiped out by the previous channelization and control of the creek.

Approved Biodynamic wineries like Quivera can use this seal

Approved Biodynamic wineries like Quivera can use this seal

The idea behind biodynamics seems an obvious one: in order for a wine to reflect the land where it came from, it needs to be fed as much as possible by an integrated series of local, native, natural influences. That means Continue reading →

Tsharke Only Son 2005 Tempranillo & The Still Life Cafe

Day 9: Flash floods, Still Life Cafe, last bottle of Aussie wine

While a flashflood watch was in effect when we were fishing in the eastern Sierra south of Bishop, turns out it was a deluge the previous night which closed Highway 395 just north of Independence, and slowed traffic to an escorted crawl.

Even though this flashflood was 24 hours old, only one of four lanes on 395 was open and the thick mud, black with soot from last year’s fires, surrounded us; plentiful water flowed and had yet to run clear. Continue reading →

Brothers in Arms 2002 Shiraz: Thai green curry & more surprises

Day 8: last night, Reds Meadow, Brothers in Arms shiraz

What is it about these Australian wines (or is it Grateful Palate Imports wines??) that they offer so much creativity in what could be a boring enterprise—the label of a wine bottle?? For example, Boarding Pass,

from R Winery, which we enjoyed before dinner in early July the night Dave Staeheli flew in from Alaska to pick up his son, which has a ticket around its neck and a boarding pass on its belly! Yummy too, before dinner; with our steak dinner we downed a bottle of another Australian, “Red Edge” Cabernet in honor of the Big Monkey who used to be a red head—“Now THIS is GOOOOD!” he said. “What is this? I really like it! It’s not as fruity as that other stuff.” Cabernet, I told him, you prefer cabs over shiraz. “Yes,” he agreed. Since I bought it thinking it would be one he’d like, I was glad to be right!!

The Red Edge is a classy package but not going to win a beauty contest or stand out on the shelf or on the table in any way that will spark a conversation while Boarding Pass, which looks like a boarding pass, will catch your attention and likely fly off the shelf into your shopping cart.

Tonight I am about to open a bottle of Brothers in Arms 2002 shiraz which I just retrieved from where it was nestled in the rocks and under the alders in the creek to cool it to cellar temperature of about 60 degrees; I imagine, after this warm day, it would be in the 70s otherwise–yuck, especially for a high alcohol wine like this one (15%).

The cap is remarkable—embossed on top: two hands clasp, shirt sleeves rolled up, muscles flexed, and along the bottom on a tangerine tape it reads in black script “Brothers in Arms” with a red postmark for Langhorne Creek South Australia. The label is cream with the black script and red postmark, and the top and bottom of the label looks ot be hand torn. This label also has wine spilt from a broken bottle but that just adds to its charm as it does to Dead Letter office, another one of my favorite labels (and shiraz too!) The text on the back explains that five generations have grown grapes there and now brothers turn those grapes into wines like this one.

A wine can’t be all fancy label and braggadaccio. The wine in the glass must be at least as good as the bottle it came from. The bottle of 2006 Ringland Ebenezer shiraz is beautiful, graceful, evocative—and the wine is bold, rich, inviting, and rewarding, its promise fulfilled.

As the sun breaks through after many rambunctious thunders (no lightening from our vantage point of our fishing spot along the San Joaquin River) and some scattered rain (enough to make the sagebrush and the Jeffery pines break out the perfume), I break the lead carefully so that the top is still attached for show, I manipulate the broken corkscrew to release the cork, I pour a small amount into the Mexican green glass (I really should have brought a real wine glass on this trip!!)

Hmmn, unusual! Reminds me of spice, and herbs– Thai spices: galangal ginger, lemon grass, green curry, coconut milk, mint. No kidding! And some of that Thai green curry spice lives on from the nose to the palate. But don’t let me scare you—it’s really good! Rich and creamy, fruity of course but not as fruity as others. The richness here is meaty and fatty, almost like a porkchop (or a lambchop with mint jelly?) The label says the wine is typical of the region and I can’t wait to find out if Thai green curry is typical of the region. If I wasn’t in the middle of nowhere, at least an hour drive and 2000′ elevation gain up to Minarets summit and again then down into the town of Mammoth, I would google this wine and find out if anyone else tastes Thai green curry in this shiraz. Hmmn, I wonder how this shiraz would be with Thai food?

The remaining question is: how will it be with the trout I am hoping the Big Monkey will return with any minute for dinner?? Otherwise, we’re having pasta from the van’s pantry…which I better put on to boil just in case! With a wine this tasty, it doesn’t matter what else we might have to eat!