Hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas

December 26, 2012 Leave a comment

It’s a slow start to Boxing Day this year, which is just the way I like it.  I’m still recovering from a wall-to-wall Christmas, which is, well, also just the way I like it.

Yesterday was a wonderful escapade that started with cooking, ended with two bottles of 2009 Ravenswood “Estate” Zinfandel (which were extremely drinkable even given their relatively young age), and in between featured stops at three different locations for LOTS of food with family and friends.  Unlike other years, there were no games (Monopoly, poker, craps) — must be residual fear of my mad skillz after having won $20 at Thanksgiving.

Anyways . . . the driving to and fro provided a couple more hours to listen to our iPod playing Christmas music on shuffle mode.  From that collection comes the classic diddy above.  The picture in the video is unrelated to the song, but is not completely irrelevant to the goings on here (though for the record, as much as I admire Bing’s work, I’ve always been partial to Carey Grant).

Happy Holidays and a Happy New Year.

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Wine to go with Tchaikovsky

August 13, 2012 Leave a comment

For last Thursday’s all Tchaikovsky concert at the Hollywood Bowl,  I had the pleasure of sitting next to Hadley and Tatiana of Grub Street Los Angeles.  They’re wonderful people — I say this for a great variety of reasons, only one of which is their willingness to share with me some of their wine:  a bottle of 2009 House Claret from Christ Church, Oxford.

If you try to search for this wine on Google, you won’t find much helpful information, so I am glad to pass on some of the basics of its story as Hadley told it to me (mind you, a few glasses of wine had been consumed prior to the telling and hearing of this story, so if I mess any of this up, I trust someone will correct me).

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Wine and a Weekend of Celebration

June 25, 2011 1 Comment

Typically, when the weekend comes around, Mrs. CKDH & I tend to open a bottle of wine (or perhaps two or six bottles, depending on which folks we happen to be drinking with).  Since last weekend was a particularly celebratory one filled special occasions with family, friends, and lots of yummy cuts of USDA prime beef, I went into the celler and pulled out a couple of Cabs that had been laying down for a little while.  I’ve been asked a couple of times by the wonderful folks with whom we dined to remind them what we drank — my apologies for the week-long delay:

  • 1995 Caymus Cabernet Sauvignon Napa Valley, right before the U2 concert at Angel Stadium, coinciding with the wedding anniversary of me & Mrs. CKDH:  Once it opened up a little,  still lots of great fruit on the nose; on the palate, nice and complex, though the tannins were quite a bit softer compared to how I remember the last bottle of ’95 we opened last year.  Smooth and long lasting finish.  The prime rib and steaks that we ordered at Prime Cut were decent, but undistinguished; what can you expect from a place where burgers take up almost as much room on the menu as the steaks; still, we weren’t expecting anything much more than we got.
  • 2001 Groth Cabernet Sauvignon Oakville, Father’s Day dinner at Nick & Stef’s Steakhouse:  First bottle of ’01 Groth that we’ve opened.  Quite big, even after all this time, but not overpowering.  Complex and a bit spicy, drank very well on its own, paired exceptionally well with the dry-aged New York that is the specialty of the house whether I took the bite plain or with some Maytag blue cheese sauce, and even complimented the bread pudding we had for dessert. Yummy. Very yummy.  So glad I’ve got more bottles left.

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