There are some nights when no one wants to cook, and at the same time, no one wants a real heavy meal.  There are even times when my Bride doesn’t want to be totally healthy and have a salad and I can appreciate that.  She suggested a burger, and I could go for that, now and then as well.  There used to be a bar that had the greatest burgers, the father was a customer of mine, and he would tell me, how he would go into the cellar of the bar and he had a formula for mixing so much ground sirloin, ground chuck, ground veal and either duck or goose fat (and each was different) for a truly wonderful ground round and a slice of cheese sometimes was overkill.  The sad news is that the father has passed away and his son, uses premade burgers and people still flock there to have them, but the father was proud of his mixture.  My Bride and I, alas, can no longer do “sliders” and they have been kind of resurrected.  When I was a kid after a night out of drinking, one could get ten for like a buck and a half and I used to joke that they would spray “essence of meat” on the buns while they were on the grill, before they put cheese and onions on the buns. 

Nowadays, when we think of a burger, we go to a steakhouse and have a burger in the bar area.  One has to trust that a steakhouse will have some great cuts of meat, even down to the meat that they grind up.  We went to Fleming’s Prime Steakhouse & Wine Bar.  We sat down and they brought us, a bowl of their house-made potato chips, and I am not a chip eater, but I enjoy theirs.  We also nibbled on an order of their Crispy Castelvetrano Olives.   We each went with an order of their Prime Burger, with Wisconsin Cheddar Cheese and Peppered Bacon, and instead of French Fries they substituted a couple of jumbo onion rings and it was more than enough to sate us. 

Of course, man and woman do not live on bread alone.  My Bride ordered a glass of Sea Sun California Chardonnay 2017.   She enjoys a glass of Chardonnay and that is usually her first choice, as it is chilled and should be refreshing.  I had never heard of this wine, but it is from the Wagner Family of Wines, and I would venture that most of the steakhouses across this country carry Caymus.  Sea Sun a new wine and the fruit is harvested from Santa Barbara, Monterey and Solano Counties.  It was a nice balanced white wine featuring some fruit, some acidity and some oak, an easy drinking wine.  I went with a glass of High Heaven Vintners Roaming Elk Red Blend Columbia Valley 2017 that is from Palm Bay International, A Taub Family Company.  All of the grapes are grown or controlled by the winery from family-owned vineyards and the winery was established in 1980.  High Heavens Vintners is owned by the Zirkle Fruit Company and they have been farming apples, pears, cherries and wine grapes since the 1880’s.  They are in the fifth generation of a family run business.   The wine is sixty percent Syrah and forty percent Merlot and was aged for eighteen months in Stainless Steel.  The wine had a soft floral nose and fruit forward with some nice tannins to compliment the finish.  It was a nice wine for the burgers and many other meat dishes.  One of the best parts of the evening was there was nothing to clean up afterwards.