Wine for Rowing my Way to Glory

Now I am well aware that it has been a ridiculously long time since my last posting, and really, there's no excuse for it, so I won't make one.

We instead will pretend that I have been filling your in-box with wonderfully pithy posts for the past two months, making you laugh and cry and toast my name each time you read them.

In that vein, we will just pick up where we've left off and jump right in:

A few weeks ago, I turned 40. That's right, I did. And my husband got me a present. A big one, for a big birthday.

Now what do you think a beloved husband might get for his adored and adoring wife on such a big birthday: diamonds? a surprise trip to Maui? A humongous bouquet of flowers?

Nope. What i got was a rowing machine. For exercise. Like the ones they have at a gym.

Now I know that getting someone a piece of exercise equipment for her birthday might seem a bit like putting a can of deodorant on a smelly French-teacher's desk (I didn't do this, of course, but some other kids in my school did. Mean, I know, but boy did that woman really need to take the hint.).

And to get such a machine for your wife on a big birthday might sound as if he's saying "Happy Birthday!! You're 40! Please God do something about that ASS!!!!!!"

But I promise you he's not saying that at all. Doesn't mean he's not thinking it, mind.

But before you start sending him hate mail, let me tell you that I asked him to get it for me, crazy as that may seem.

As many of you may know, I hate to exercise. Try as I may to convince myself otherwise, I really just hate it. I know it's good for health and well-being, and over the years I have tried various machines and classes and dvds, only to come once again to the inevitable conclusion that exercise is a terrible form of torture and punishment and should be avoided by one and all.

Of everything I have tried over the years, only two forms of exercise have ever really stuck: walking and rowing. Steve finds it very funny that the only gym machine I like happens to be the one that almost everybody else in the gym studiously avoids.

But I do like it; the smooth motion, and the fact that it's kind of a one-stop shop. It gives an intense cardio workout and pretty much works every muscle in your body (ok, not EVERY muscle, but you know what I mean).

And since I did just turn 40, and am a bit concerned about the fact that I am getting older and at some point in the future, my boobs may wind up in permanent conversation with my knees, I decided it was time to take decisive action and try to get in better shape.

Knowing there is no way I can get myself to the gym, I decided to bring the gym to me! Or one piece of it anyway.

This rowing machine is pretty. Very pretty. Plus I can watch movies while I'm rowing, and it doesn't get much better than that. If i can just figure out a way to eat popcorn and drink a glass of wine at the same time, I think i will really be able to change how I feel about the whole exercise thing.

Now the hard part begins: actually getting on the thing and rowing away several times a week, one week after another.

No doubt, I will need some help and encouragement along the way. And wine. Of course, wine.

To that end, my wine for rowing my way to glory is an Italian digestif called an Amaro. These are after dinner drinks made from spirits that have been distilled with secret recipes of fruits, spices, flowers and herbs. Traditionally they have a sweetness offset by a bitter finish.

My favorite one of the moment is Meletti Amaro, from the Adriatic Coast of Italy. A beautiful caramel amber color, the Meletti secret recipe includes saffron and anise and is deliciously sweet with a gentle bitterness at the end which is enticingly addictive.

The best part is, you can find it online for $16.99 a bottle at K & L Wines.

Trust me, try it once and you will be hooked.

This stuff is so delicious that, when I served it at my house recently, one of my guests loved it so much, she wound up carrying the bottle around the house with her, kind of like a security blankie, never letting it out of her sight.

Now that's Amaro!

Wine for Pepe

On Monday, my friend and co-worker Pepe passed away suddenly.

No one, not even Pepe himself, had any idea he was so sick.

He had been feeling under the weather for a while, and had a variety of different symptoms, one of which was a lump in his lower abdomen.

A couple of weeks ago, he went to the doctor, who diagnosed him with a hernia, and scheduled him for surgery last Monday.

During the surgery, they discovered that the lump was not in fact a hernia, but was actually a very swollen and infected lymph node.

During the rest of the week doctors conducted a number of tests and discovered that he had a very advanced and aggressive form of Lymphoma, and this past Monday, he was scheduled to go in to see his doctor to discuss their plan of attack.

Pepe lived alone, and when his friend arrived at his apartment this past Monday to take him to the doctor's, he discovered that Pepe had died.

He was 47 years old.

This whole turn of events is so shocking and so sudden, I can't quite wrap my head around it. How can it be possible that he is no longer here? How could everything have gone downhill so quickly; how could he have been at work one week and dead the next?

I keep picturing him at work, taking orders, sneaking chocolates off the candy cart when he thought no one was looking, panicking when the restaurant got too busy, humming to himself while he ate his pre-shift dinner, and going behind the curtain so no one in the dining room could see him to do various dance moves and strange stretches for us. He loved to talk about movies and was always asking people if they had a "black swan" inside them, and proclaiming, when he was in certain moods, that he himself was the black swan.

He was from Mexico, and his whole family still lives there, and he would often talk about how he wanted to go back there one day and maybe open a restaurant or bar. He was single, and he would often ask me if I thought it was too late for him to find love. It's never too late, I would always say.

When he left at the end of his shift last Saturday, he was looking forward to his surgery, because he was so excited to finally feel better. We all were excited for him, too, and hugged him good-bye, saying how he was going to have a new lease on life after it was all over.

Like most untimely deaths, it is hard to make sense of it; hard to have it feel real. Hard, of course to not think about ones own life and health, as well as the importance of living in the now.

It is so cliched, I know, but there is no doubt that this kind of sudden passing makes me think about my own life, and health, and the fact that ultimately, none of us knows what the future holds.

There is always this assumption that there is tomorrow, and a day after that, and a day after that. We assume, or at least, I do, that life stretches on, and there is time, always time, to do the things we want to do.

Pepe's death reminds me that that is not always the case. We don't know how many tomorrows we have left, and it is worth it to try, in as much as we can, to live our lives the way we want to be living them now. Make the decisions we have been putting off until "one of these days", go places we want to go, share things with people we have been putting off sharing, eat that gelato you've been depriving yourself of, allow yourself to forgive and move on, take risks, be brave, you get the point.

Above all, selfishly, Pepe's death makes me grateful, and thankful. Those are not emotions we are expected to have or express very often. We live in a culture that is all about wanting more. We are expected to live in a space of "never enough", of permanent dissatisfaction. We are never rich enough, famous enough, thin enough, young enough, successful enough, what have you. To be grateful is seen as laziness, as stagnation, how dare you be happy with who and where you are?

But Pepe has made me think, and the fact that next week is Thanksgiving allows me to put a certain frame around it: I am thankful, indeed.

I am thankful that I have wonderful parents and family; thankful that I have an incredible husband and amazing friends; thankful that I have an adorable puppy, a roof over my head, a job, and food to eat. I am thankful that I am healthy. I am thankful for good food, chocolate, and, of course, wonderful wine.

I hope, this season, you will allow yourselves to feel thankful, too.

Below are a few suggestions for wines that will enhance your Turkey-Day feast:

Schramsberg Brut Rose. A California sparkler that is a delicious way to start the celebration.

2009 Champalou Vouvray "La Cuvee des Fondraux". A beautiful white wine from the Loire Valley in France made from the Chenin Blanc grape. This off-dry wine is juicy and citrusy, peachy and honeyed with heavenly floral notes.

Canihan Family Cellars Pinot Noirs and Syrahs. You can't go wrong with any of these Certified Organic and award-winning wines from this family-owned Sonoma Valley winery. Pinot Noir is particularly good with turkey and cranberries, with its luscious cherry fruits and smoke. Visit their website to order directly.

Skipstone Ranch Winery Oliver's Blend. I have tasted the 2005 Oliver's Blend, but I believe the current release is 2008. These wines are also organic and hail from Geyserville, CA. Cabernet Sauvignon-based blends, these wines are full-bodied, elegant, smooth and rich.

Patrick Bottex "La Cueille" Bugey-Cerdon, France. This sparkling, sweet Gamay is a delightful and festive way to finish a meal. A gorgeous pink color, with sweet red apple and raspberry notes.

Niepoort Colheita Port 1998. When you have finished eating and are sitting on the couch exploding your zippers and popping off buttons, this is the time for an after-dinner drink. And in my mind, there is nothing better than Tawny Port. I am in love with this stuff. Sweet, with notes of dried fruit, apricots and figs. I can't imagine a better end to an evening.

You can find most of these wines through winesearcher.com Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant or through their respective websites.

Have a Happy Thanksgiving. I wish you good food, good drink, and good company.

To Pepe, I wish you good night, "[and] flights of angels sing thee to thy rest."

You will be missed.

Cheers.

Wine for Having More Money than Sense

Thanksgiving approaches, and with it arrive new incarnations of the beautiful Williams Sonoma catalogues. Their Thanksgiving editions are always adorned with a picture of the most spectacular-looking turkey on the cover.

This bird looks gorgeous; perfectly browned, crispy-skinned, dotted with herbs and spices. It is the Thanksgiving turkey of my dreams.

It is not the turkey that I cooked several years ago for our friends Bonnie and Chang, which turned out to be just a little on the rare side when we started carving it and putting sloppy piles on a plate.

Luckily, neither of them cared, and they encouraged me to just toss the whole mess back into the oven for a while, which I did. It cooked; we ate, and nobody got sick.

Nor would this pictured bird taste like the one I made the year after that, which had brined for too long, or in too much solution, and was so salty it was almost inedible.

Although, let's face it, that turkey on the cover is probably not even a real turkey; it's most likely made of plastic and photoshopped to look real, in which case it probably does taste like crap.

But I digress. I was admiring the Williams Sonoma catalogue in its entirety, not just the cover. I love to look through these catalogues, if only to wonder who is buying some of the items in it. Some of them just seem so ridiculous.

At least, they do at first. Take, for example, their omelette pan. This pan is a rectangle with three segments, to enable a person to make an omelette that is perfectly folded in thirds.

Now, is this necessary? Is it such a terrible thing to eat an omelette which has only been (God forbid) folded in half? Is it so hard, really, to just use a spatula?

This catalogue, I scoff initially, is for people with more money than sense. I mean, come on. Does anybody actually need these things?

But then, invariably, something happens. I flip through the catalogue, I look at the pictures of the different wares for sale, and the pictures are all so lovely, and the descriptions of the items are all so intriguing and confident, and the actual merchandise so perfect-looking, that i find myself suddenly thinking, well yes, actually, I need them.

I want the omelette that has been perfectly flipped in thirds. And how have I survived all these years without the potato scrubbing gloves? I, like an idiot, have been using a vegetable-peeler!!

Or what about the all-in-one avocado tool, or the tomato corer, the tomato knife, the pineapple slicer and dicer, the melon knife, the banana slicer, the mustard scooper, the donut cutter???!!

I mean for God's sake, I've been using a regular knife and spoon all these years!! What have I been thinking??!!

I need that egg-waffle pan, and the filled-pancake pan, and the waffled-pancake pan, I mean come on!!!! I need waffles, and pancakes...and the Darth Vader spatula with which to flip them.

And what about the toast tongs? I mean, what kind of a moron removes toast from the toaster with her fingers?? Wake up, people, that toast is hot!!!

Not to mention the meatball grill basket. I cannot tell you how many times Steve and I have fired up that Barbeque, and decided that instead of hot dogs, hamburgers or steak, what we really wanted to cook over the burning coals were meatballs.

Well, you can imagine the nightmare of trying to get those meatballs placed just right over the grate, making sure they don't fall through and ignite in a fat-ball-of-flame. But then when I've made them bigger, the number of times I've burned my fingers, catching those suckers as they roll from one end of the grill to another, falling over the edge where I then wind up chasing them around the deck, trying to keep them out of the dog's mouth long enough to get them back on the grill and into perfect cooking position.

All the while shouting at Steve, "dammit, man, I need a basket for these meatballs!!"

My Wine for having more money than sense is actually two wines. Domaine Huet Le Mont Vouvray Sec and Demi-Sec.

We have these wines at the restaurant at the moment, and I believe the Sec is 2010 and the Demi-Sec is 2007.

These wines hail from the Loire Valley in France, specifically from the Vouvray appellation. The grape varietal is Chenin Blanc, which yields a lovely, floral juicy bouquet. The sec is supposedly dry and the demi-sec is off-dry.

I say supposedly because the sec still has a little bit of sweetness to it, and could certainly not be called a bone-dry wine.

These wines are just delicious, and the demi-sec especially makes a lovely aperatif wine, but we also serve it at the restaurant with a beet salad and a roasted squash appetizer, any dish that has a bit of natural sweetness to it.

I think it could be delicious on turkey-day alongside your sweet potato casserole and cranberries.

Just make sure you are using your special sweet-potato-mashing-gloves and marshmallow tongs. From Williams Sonoma, of course.

Wine for Chateau Margaux

Last week a group of 8 friends in their late forties came to the restaurant for dinner. I had been warned that they would be bringing a few bottles of their own wine, but I was unprepared for what actually arrived with this group.

Apparently, periodically they all get together and pick a theme for the evening. This particular night's theme was Chateau Margaux.

For those who may not know, Chateau Margaux is one of the most celebrated wine houses in the Bordeaux regions of France, known for Cabernet Sauvignon-based blends.

The Chateau dates back to the 12th century, and by the end of the 17th century, the Chateau's lands covered 254 acres, one third of which remains devoted to vine-growing today.

Thomas Jefferson himself deemed Chateau Margaux the best wine of Bordeaux in 1784, saying "there cannot be a better bottle of Bordeaux."

Chateau Margaux was deemed a First Growth in the 1855 Classification ordered by Napoleon before the Second Great Exhibition in Paris. The classification system was based on how much the wines cost at the time, with the most expensive receiving the First Growth classification.

Today those first growth wines still command astounding sums, which added to my amazement at the array of vintages this table brought. They brought 10 bottles of Chateau Margaux between them, with representatives from the 2000, 1997, 1989, 1978, 1966 and 1955 vintages. Some vintages had multiple bottles. All told, about $7,000 worth of wine. That's retail. To buy all those bottles in a restaurant would cost two to three times more than that at least.

They opened all of the bottles at once so they could compare vintages from youngest to oldest.

My boss opened and decanted all the bottles, and was given a small glass of each to taste himself, and since he got to taste, that meant that I, too, got to taste.

This was a little bit of wine-geek nirvana. I won't bore you with a discussion of each vintage, but instead I'll tell you about the one which was the clear winner of the bunch. While the 2000 vintage is the most lauded of all, it was the 1989 which was drinking in all its glory.

This wine was exactly what I imagined the perfect Bordeaux should be: a gorgeous nose of dried and stewed cherry, tobacco, leather, coffee, earth and smoke and a beautifully balanced palate with a lingering cherry tobacco finish. I could have sniffed and sipped that wine all night.

All in all, not a bad day at the office.

Wine for Creatures of Habit

My father recently suggested that in this blog, I spend more time on food and wine pairings and less time on "psychic revelations about my youth".

This suggestion caused me to ponder....which caused me, of course, to have a psychic revelation...

I am so used to the way I write this blog, it is a kind of ritual, so to speak. And it made me think of how much we, and other animals, are creatures of habit.

I brush my teeth the exact same way, every time. I have a specific way i wash my face, put on my various creams and hair products, put on my make-up, and if I try to do these things in a different order, I inevitably forget one of the items, like blush, or the eyeliner on one of my eyes, and I wind up looking a bit...odd.

If Steve and I go to Half Moon Bay, one of our favorite places in this area, we always go to the same place and do relatively the same thing. One day Steve suggested going to a different beach, and i immediately felt agitated. "But...but...that's not what we DO!!"

Our puppy Tuco, is, we realized recently, even more of a creature of habit than we are.

On the weekdays, Steve gets up around 6am, takes Tuco out for a pee, and gives him his breakfast. Then he puts Tuco back in his crate and leaves for work.

What Tuco doesn't understand is the concept of a weekend. So even though Steve doesn't need to wake up at 6am on Saturday and Sunday, right around that time, Saturday and Sunday, there goes Tuco, barking away to the sound of his interior alarm clock, telling us it's time to give him his breakfast and take him out. Because that is what we normally do every day.

The same goes for the ritual around actually eating his food. As soon as Tuco hears the sound of a Tupperware container being opened, or the sound of his metal bowl on the counter, he comes running into the kitchen, where he lies on the floor and waits for his meal.

Once we have finished preparing the food, we have him go into his crate and lie down, then we say "OK!" and he runs out, and either sits on his mat or goes right to the place-mat, depending on where we have put his food.

Then he eats, and when he has finished, we give him an extra lick of food off the spoon, and out of the measuring cup. Then mealtime is over.

The other night, Steve was already asleep, and I started to prepare Tuco's lunch for the next day, thinking it would be fine since he'd already had his dinner. Boy, was I wrong.

The second he heard that Tupperware open, there he was, by my side, staring up at me with those eyes. I tried to ignore him, figuring he would remember he'd already eaten and go back to snoozing in his bed.

I finished preparing his food, put everything away, put Tuco in his crate, and tried to get in bed.

Tuco went berserk. I was violating every part of the ritual...this is not how we do things!!! What was I doing??!!

OK, I thought, I'll give him one of his little frozen treats in his crate, and after he eats that, he'll go to sleep. Wrong again. As soon as he finished that treat, the barking started again.

And that was when I realized it wasn't about the act of eating; it was about all of the rituals we do surrounding the eating. Those were what he needed to do.

So that's what we did. I let him out of his crate, and then I had him go back in. Then I said "ok" and he ran out, and I gave him the tiniest bite of food, let him lick the spoon, and put him back in his crate. Where, perfectly contented, he went to sleep, ritual completed.

The final one I'll mention is our trips to Peet's coffee. There is a Peet's a couple of blocks from our house, and almost every day we walk Tuco there, sit outside with him and enjoy a drink. He loves going there. He skips ahead as we get closer, head up, and beelines straight for an outside table.

The problem comes when we try to walk him on a different route, or indeed, try to take him somewhere other than Peet's. He knows the different routes to get there, and if he senses we are not going that way, he will lie down and refuse to move. Be it in the middle of the sidewalk, or the middle of an intersection, he will lie down and not budge, so your options are to pick him up, drag him across the pavement like a sack of potatoes, tempt him with irresistable treats, or turn around and walk toward Peet's.

I have tried them all, with varying degrees of success. I have run ahead of him with an open can of baby food, which is effective but messy; and I have pulled him, but people look at you strangely when you walk around dragging a limp dog behind you, and I have tried to pick him up, but often he just lies down luxuriantly and waits to have his belly rubbed, which is very cute to the passing motorists who laugh at me stuck there in the middle of the road with my prone pup, but a bit frustrating for me.

So often, he wins, and we head over to Peet's. It is, after all, what we do.

My wine for Creatures of Habit is a 2005 Skipstone Ranch Oliver's Blend red wine blend from

the Alexander Valley, CA.

A relatively new winery, the 2005 was their inaugural vintage, and is a Bordeaux blend of predominantly Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot with small amounts of Malbec and Petit Verdot.

This wine is ripe and fruity, but not overly so, with beautiful black and red fruits along with earth and spice. What is so nice about this wine is its round plush mouthfeel and balance. Neither alcohol, acid nor tannins shout out to be heard. Instead they all work together.

A while back, at the restaurant, we had a delicious venison dish, with a dried cherry sauce. I think it was cherry, there may have been some other berries in there too. But the sauce was kind of sweet and fruity, and that is what I would want to eat while drinking this wine.

However, since i can count on no hands the number of times I have had venison with cherry sauce in my own home, I would also just drink this wine by itself. With Steve.

It's kind of what we do.

Wine for Why I Can't See the Movie Contagion, Part Two

I think my obsession with cleanliness really took hold when I lived in Brooklyn. One trip on the NYC subway should be enough to male anyone want to take a Silkwood shower.

First there are the close quarters in each individual subway car. Especially at peak travel times, there is not a sneeze or a cough that is not shared by one and all.

Then there are the poles on each subway car, which you have to hold onto when there are not enough seats to go around. These poles are invariably greasy and slimy, and do you know why? It's because many people have sneezed into and/or licked their hands and then gripped these poles. You and I then get on the subway, grasp these same poles, and then hop off the subway and get a bagel, which we, of course, eat with the self-same hands that have just been touching the Ebola pole.

Add to this the fact that I once saw a man cutting his toenails on a subway car, and you can understand why my ideas of what was clean suddenly changed drastically after time in NYC.

People sometimes think it is odd that I don't wear shoes inside my house, and that I ask visitors to remove their shoes as well. I was raised in a house where we didn't wear shoes inside, so for me it has always been the way things are, but I continue to do it, because when I lived in NYC and walked around those streets, I realized how much disgusting matter was on those streets, and how much of it probably adhered to my shoes.

When I thought about how, if I walked into my bathroom with those filthy shoes, I was transferring that filth to my clean bathroom floor and then stepping in that dirt when I was nice and clean from the shower, I vowed to never wear shoes in the bathroom or house again.

Have I taken it too far? Probably. Especially when you consider that once you start really thinking about the nature of dirt, germs and transference, the realization hits that nothing is ever really and truly clean.

And there is mounting evidence to show that all of this cleanliness, and use of anti-bacterials is in fact creating stronger and stronger bacteria and viruses and weakens our immune systems.

But even though I know this, I also know that, were I to sit through a movie which spends two hours focusing on the minute and insidious ways in which germs spread and transfer, with disastrous results, I would be unable to resist the temptation to carry Clorox wipes with me wherever I go, and wipe down every one and every thing I come in contact with.

And let's face it, that might just be perceived as odd.

My Wine for why I can't see the movie Contagion, Part II, is not a wine at all, but rather a recipe for macerated strawberries.

I bought some beautiful organic strawberries from Trader Joe's the other day, and I took a few handfuls of them and cut them in quarters.

I put them in a bowl and added half a tablespoon of super-fine sugar, a tablespoon and a half of Cointreau and a couple of tablespoons of chopped fresh mint.

I mixed it all up and covered the bowl with plastic wrap and let it sit in the fridge overnight.

They are absolutely delicious, goo enough to just gobble up with a spoon. Or, my favorite, spooned over vanilla ice cream or frozen yogurt.

a flavor that is sweet, refreshing and, of course, clean.

Wine for Why I Can't See the Movie Contagion, Part One

I am, admittedly, a bit of a clean freak. Especially when it comes to bathrooms and kitchens. I have gotten a bit of a reputation at work, where I am constantly wiping down liquer bottles and spraying Windex on the bar.

One of my co-workers has told me that I can't see the movie Contagion because I will wind up walking around in a plastic bubble, or refusing to leave my house.

At the very least, I told him, I'm going to start spraying everyone who approaches me with Lysol.

I wasn't always so clean. In high school, I went through a dirty phase where my room was a mini-dump. It wasn't full of dirty food-plates or bugs or anything, but rather piled ankle-deep with clothes and magazines.

When friends came over, rather than actually clean up, I simply threw my bedspread over the offending pile, and hoped no one would notice.

Unfortunately, what actually happened was that one of my friends came running into my room, and the moment her foot hit that bedspread, which covered a slippery pile of magazines and catalogues, she went flying. It was like she was on a slip and slide, only instead of sliding on a film of water, she instead went sailing on a sea of Seventeen Magazines and J-Crew catalogues.

I would like to say that that moment caused me enough embarrassment to force me to finally clean up my room, but I'm not sure it did. My mother would probably remember.

All I know is that my parents actually had to fumigate my room when I left for college. It was that bad.

When I moved to Los Angeles, my apartment was kept clean, but my car became the repository for all things paper and discarded. Again, there were no dirty food or drink containers, but the back seat filled almost to the window with newspapers, magazines, school notes and papers I no longer needed, empty shopping bags and who knows what else.

A guy I was dating got in my car for the first time, looked in the backseat, and said "You know, if I'd seen that first, I'm not sure I ever would have gone out with you."

The exterior of the car didn't fare much better. From the time I left Boston with my friend Maria, and drove the car cross-country, to the time I sold it 4 years later, I didn't wash it. Not once.

I lived in a neighborhood with abundant street parking, and so that car sat outside, all year, under trees, covered in bird poop and pollen.

Only when I was about to sell it did I finally wash it, and my sister and i took it to a carwash and watched as it went through the jets of soap and water, and watched as the guys who buff and dry the cars actually worked on it and laughed. Actually laughed at how dirty it was, even after the washing.

The paint had gone from a bright, shiny maroon, to a dull version of the same color. It had certainly lost its luster. But that car had bigger problems: it would only go about 45 mph on the freeway before the engine light would come on (25 mph if I was driving uphill); the windshield wipers went on one day and wouldn't go off; and the passenger side window rolled down and then steadfastly refused to roll back up. So honestly, i didn't feel too bad that I had neglected to wash it.

I fear this post is getting too long, so I will leave off here for today and continue next week with part two: the clean streak begins.

My wine for why I can't see the movie Contagion, Part I is a 2005 Domaine Drouhin "Laurene" Pinot Noir from Oregon. We carry this particular wine by the half-bottle at the restaurant, but if you can't find this vintage, i highly recommend you try any of their Pinots.

The Drouhin family lives and makes wine both in the Dundee Hills of Oregon and Beaune, France, in Burgundy. Their Oregon Pinots balance beautifully the fruitiness of Oregon with the earth and slightly more reserved character of a Burgundy. The 2005 is quite rich, but still bright with acidity, fruit and spice.

Personally, I also really like that all of the Drouhin wines are made by Veronique Drouhin, one of the small number of female winemakers out there.

They have a wonderful website for Domaine Drouhin Oregon, where you can get info about the family, the estate vines and the wines themselves. I highly encourage you to try one.

Just remember to wash your hands first.