Normally on such an occasion I'd go hog wild, spend all day cooking a fabulous meal and serve it with a great bottle of wine. Today, however, we had plans most of the day, so we kept it simple yet nice:
Filet Mignon
Garlic Mashed Potatoes
Asparagus with Beurre Blanc sauce
Certainly an excellent dinner, but nothing particularly special; we probably had a similar dinner 20 times over the summer. Still, with limited time to work with, a pretty damn good meal.
For the "special wine" part, we had many good ones to choose from, including an amazing bottle that a very good friend bought us for our Anniversary. More on that, and some other fabulous wine shopping we did today, in tomorrow's blog. We decided to go with a classic:
2008 Quails' Gate Pinot Noir
Without a doubt, our favorite "regular" Pinot Noir. This wasn't just any bottle, however, this was a nicely aged 2008. Absolutely superb. This would probably have still been great if we'd let it sit for another year or two, but it seemed like a good bottle to open tonight and certainly did not disappoint. Pinot Noir is the flagship product of this great winery and they do it like no other. Fab-u-lous.
OH OH OH OH OH......I almost forgot what might have been the most exciting part of dinner! Did we ever find another fantastic use for our Cedarcreek Platinum "M"! It is great for it's intended purpose - as a digestif or aperitif - but let me tell you, that is one hell of a wine to use in sauce! It gave the beurre blanc sauce an extra je ne sais quoi; an extra little something that kicked a normally terrific sauce up a notch or two.
As a wine, I think I previously rated this a 7/10. In beurre blanc sauce, I'm giving it a 9.5! Beautiful.
What else do these two great wineries have in common? We are visiting them next weekend! Dinner at Cedarcreek on Saturday, lunch at Quails' Gate on Sunday. Looking forward to both!! I'll have a full report on that trip sometime the week after we get back and I have recovered.
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