Some days everything just seems to be good.  I got home and felt good about getting my haircut, as selfish and petty that I am.  I grew up with the long hair, as I said and, in its day, it was normal.  I was a bit nauseous wearing a mask, but I can live with a minor inconvenience, actually, from some of the photos, I think our politicians should have been wearing them for years, as it has improved their appearance and since most of them should have belonged to the Daltons or the James gangs. I also like that I don’t think that I have to look up arcane bits of dialogue that made me happy while I was in lockdown.  I am feeling better for the first time in ages, though it may be some time, before I can see the rest of the family and it really hurt to think that I had to cancel the idea of throwing my oldest grandson a high school graduation party.  All the graduates of 2020 got the short end of the deal. 

I have been enjoying the fact that my Bride has been working from home, and I think that she is really enjoying it as well.  She has also been very keen on the subject of trying new recipes to try to keep us both, but especially me, from lamenting that we couldn’t go out for dinner either on a date or with friends.  She made a special treat for dinner, she made Chicken in Molé for dinner, including soft tortillas.  I think I was maybe fifteen or sixteen years of age the first time I ever had Molé Sauce, and it was back when “Mexican Town” in Detroit was like two blocks long of restaurants, bars and markets, now basically the entire Southwest portion of Detroit is referred to as “Mexican Town” or other similar sounding titles.  I guess before I get to far into this discussion,  for those that have never had Molé Sauce, one of the main ingredients at least of the recipes I have encountered, and I understand that there are several hundred varieties is the use of Mexican Dark Chocolate and no, the sauce is not sweet, actually it can be quite spicy; and it is not made from moles.  Years ago, I used to get it with Ribs, and the meat would literally fall off the bone after cooking all day in a big pot and it was wonderful, of course that is only a memory, especially since we don’t have Ribs at home, but we had, just like every restaurant for years has served it with chicken.  We had it with the sides, and she made a big enough pot that we could have left overs, and it is great that way too, as the sauce gets to permeate the chicken even more. 

I thought she was going to have Margaritas with the meal, but she wanted a white wine.  I have been finding all the stray white wines in the cellar, as I get ready to rearrange the wines again.  I found a lone relic from probably our first trip to Carmel-by-the-Sea.  We had a bottle of Chateau Julien Private Reserve Chardonnay Sur Lie Monterey County 1997 and I had a back up bottle just in case.  I do remember tasting this wine at the winery in Carmel, in fact I think it was the first winery we encountered as we were out tasting and buying wines.  The wine was exceptional at the tasting, but I remember being told that this wine would be phenomenal ten years from now, but I think I probably just humored him at the time, because I had not heard of anyone cellaring California whites back then, but thankfully I have been proven wrong a couple of times during this lockdown.  In the late Seventies, Bob and Patty Brower decided to fulfill their dream, they were from the East Coast, but had fallen in love with French wines and hospitality and in 1982, began building what became known as Chateau Julien Wine Estate and in 1985 they celebrated their first vintage from the 1982 fruit and they bottled a Chardonnay and a Merlot and they had sixteen acres on the estate.  In 2015, all the property was acquired by a local winemaker Gregory Ahn and renamed Folktale Winery and Vineyards.  I have no production notes on the making of this wine, and I used my Durand to open the wine and the cork was in perfect condition.  The color was a beautiful golden sun and the nose had still had some citrus and apple notes.  The taste was awesome with fruit and some honey from a twenty-three-year-old with the additional notes of vanilla and cloves and a nice lingering after taste that wanted me to pour another glass just to appreciate the complexity that was still apparent.  I think we were both amazed.  Just for fun I thought I would include an old photo of a youthful raconteur with long (groomed) hair when he was about twenty-three.