When worlds collide is rather catchy, but it really was nothing ominous, we were enjoying the last night of Ms. Yoga being in town and the first night of the Louisville clan in town and everyone decided to meet at Rocky’s.  Actually, everyone knows each other and Ms. Yoga has even stayed at their home in Louisville with my Bride, when they were both there for business.  We have been eating there quite a bit, as my Bride likes their Happy Hour Menu and we are starting to sound like we need to be in Florida.  I also have written about some of my club meetings that are being held there.  It was the week between Christmas and New Years and they were packed and even though we had a reservation we had to wait a little bit for a table of seven.  The parking lot was even packed, as I had to park about six lanes back, but it is good to see an older restaurant still packing them in. 

This was an evening for the poor waitress, but I think she survived as this time there was a lot of changes and alterations, but it all went smoothly.   While we were all just catching up at the table and enjoying being right next to the fireplace, we started with a couple of orders of Fried Calamari with Roasted Garlic, Capers, Banana Pepper Rings and Provencal Sauce.  It didn’t take long to empty those two orders and then there was an assortment of salads and soups, my Bride had their Onion Soup, which was really old school and excellent, and I had the Black Bean Soup which had some nice zing to it, and it was the first time that we actually had the soup there.  After that, the food was all over the board with fish and seafood, chicken, steaks and I tried their Braised Short Rib dinner, which is a dish and we actually made it at home and decided that it was so involved, that it is now better to let the restaurants do all of the work and I will just enjoy the fruit of their labors. 

We had a couple of bottles of wine for the table and we started off with Robert Hall Winery Viognier Paso Robles 2016.  Paso Robles is in the San Luis Obispo County of California and the AVA was granted in 1983. Robert Hall Winery is four different estate vineyards totaling one-hundred-fifty acres and they grow twelve different varietals.  Robert Hall Winery is a division of O’Neill Vintners & Distillers.  The wine was aged for three months on the lees in French Oak.  It had the charming floral nose and spice that this varietal always seems to impart and the better the winemaker, the better the grape behaves in their administration.  The other wine we had that evening was Rodney Strong Vineyards Pinot Noir Russian River Valley 2016 in Sonoma County.  Rodney Strong founded the winery in 1959, initially buying bulk wine and sold under the Tiburon Vintners label.  In 1962, he bought a winery and vines and formed Windsor Vineyards and then eventually it became Rodney Strong Vineyards.  He was the first winery to produce a single vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon out of Alexander Valley and one of the earliest for Pinot Noir in Sonoma.  In 1989 the Klein family bought Rodney Strong Vineyards and kept Strong on as a consultant until his retirement in 1995.  They now have fourteen estate vineyards.   This wine had a total of twenty-one months of fermentation and cellaring in French Oak, of which thirty-five percent was new and it was a well-balanced wine with some fruit and a nice finish.  The two wines offered a good choice for everyone and a great send off for Ms. Yoga and a good starting point for the Kentuckians.