Bartlett: “Gentlemen, no doubt you’ve heard the immortal words of our new commandant: devote your energies to things other than escape, and sit out the war as comfortably as possible.”

My Bride and I have been most fortunate as we seem to weather this storm.  She has commandeered the dining room table, so that she can spread her work out.  Usually a little past 4:30 Monday through Friday, after she shuts down her computer and we go for our 5K walk in the subdivision.  I mean there is no place to go, the spa that we joined is shuttered, because of the lockdown, so we do some exercises at home and our walk.  The good thing is that the we have not been reported as selfish protesters, because we still walk hand in hand, no six feet space between us, and we walk in the fresh air with no mask, as we live on the edge. LOL. The last week or so, we have started to notice more people walking or riding a bicycle.  There are some strange new etiquettes involved when walking.  If we see people either walking or talking to their neighbors, without breaking pace, we venture out into the street for a couple of house widths, before getting back on the sidewalk.  It is really not that serious, as there is almost no automobile traffic in the whole area.  People wave to us from their porches or from chairs in their garages.  My biggest beef I guess is how people try to squeeze more cars in the driveway and then we have a choice of either walking on their lawn or back on the street, so it is back on the street for us.  In the 58 days of lockdown we have had the pleasure of walking in weather from the thirties to the seventies; and have enjoyed rain, snow and blasting sunny days, of course it is Michigan, so fluctuations are the norm. 

My Bride is still experimenting with the menu, as she is trying to make me not miss dining out.  She is also going and getting some of the different sauces and spices she has bought and never used, either because she didn’t want to take the extra time or she figured that her pain the arse husband might balk at something out of his comfort zone.  She was going to make Salmon, and I figured that she was going to use one of her tried and true recipes that I enjoy.  When I met her, she was basically a fish-eater and a white wine drinker.  I had to basically reintroduce her to red meats and to red wines and she hasn’t really complained about it.  She marinated the salmon in a Peanut Sauce, I don’t know about these things, it was better than I had anticipated.  Let us just say that it is a good thing that I am not a food critic. 

I found another lost soul that needed liberating from the cellar, it was Kendall-Jackson Great Estates Chardonnay Arroyo Seco 2000, in one of the heavy-weight bottles and the label etched in the glass.  I am going to go out on a relatively safe limb and opine that this wine later was renamed “Highland Estates” and now goes by the label of “Jackson Estate.” Kendall-Jackson Wine Estates is one of California’s largest wine producers with 10,500 acres of land in both Sonoma and Napa Counties.  The estate was founded in 1974, when Jess Jackson purchased and eighty-acre pear and walnut orchard in Lakeport, California which would later be in the Sonoma Valley AVA.  His first wine was a vintage 1982 Chardonnay and it was successful from the get-go, and it has snowballed over the years.  This particular wine is from the Arroyo Seco, Spanish for Dry Creek in the Salinas Valley of Monterey County and is famed for Chardonnay and Pinot Noir.  The wine was aged for about nine months in French Oak of which sixty percent was new. This is one of their prestige wines and not one for making a killing on, as there was probably only a little over four-hundred cases produced. For a twenty-year old Chardonnay, it had a beautiful soft gold color and an enticing nose of citrus.  The wine was full bodied and still offered some fruit and some spice, with a decent finish, my Bride did think that there was noticeable tinge of alcohol permeating through the finish, but I didn’t pick that up as much.  I have to admit that we are tasting some wines that we may have passed over for one reason or another, but so far all have been excellent and the sad thing is that they were all singular in the cellar, and they have all been enjoyed before they may have started showing their age.