I have been making asides about changes at the chateau, but more about that when the time comes.  In case you are wondering, my Bride hasn’t come to her senses, so I am not being thrown out with the bath water.  Needless to say, that I have been living in Wonderland, or has everything had a price explosion in the last year?  I will get into all of this at some point, as everyone knows that I tend to ramble, especially when I am having a good time.  Suffice it to say at the moment, that we have been scurrying around to find some replacement cabinet hardware, and we finally found part of our search, and the store did not have some of the pieces, but they went online and found us what we were looking, and we thought that they were going to order from their warehouse, but they actually searched some third-party distributors and printed us off a sheet with all the information, for us to order when we got back home.  That was great service, so we decided that while we were out, we would stop and have dinner.  Eight hinges and two cabinet latches to replace our old set, ended up costing more than our dinner and a bottle of wine.

We decided to dine, not far from our first stop and ended up at Diamond Jim Brady’s Bistro Bar.  I am not sure if I can actually determine which of the “Jim Brady’s” is the original, without getting a Boston barrister involved.  I guess there must have been a breakdown among family ties, as my Bride and I can remember going to such establishments on opposite sides of the Detroit area, before we ever met.  We lucked out and got there before the dinner crowd got there and they offered us either dining indoors or outdoors, and while we opted for indoors, we could observe the outdoors which was basically an enclosed and heated patio, that they must have created to survive the draconian rules levied towards restaurants, but I am happy to say that they survived.  My Bride had a special of Pistachio encrusted Walleye with Shaved Brussels Sprouts with bacon and Balsamic and their “best in Michigan since 1954” Caesar Salad (you knew that she was going to go with that) and she said that it was one of the best salads excluding her own house-made dressing, which is high praise.  I was going to get a burger, which they are known for, but they had a Lobster BLT on the menu with house-made chips, and I had to try it.  It was not a Lobster Roll; it was a Lobster Salad tossed in a Lemon Mayonnaise dressing.  I thought I was going to need a box, the sandwich was that big, but it was delicious and it disappeared and my Bride even enjoyed the chips as well. 

They had a nice collection of wines on their carte, most were available by the glass, so I had to act quickly and I found a nice sparkling wine from Spain, and those are two “buzzwords” that attracted my Bride’s attention.  We ordered a bottle of Raventos i Blanc Blanc de Blancs Conca del Riu Anoia 2017.  The Raventos family has a wine making history going back since 1497, five centuries of working ninety hectares of vines and twenty-one generations of winemaking. In 1872, Josep Raventos Fatio went to Champagne and then made his first sparkling wine with secondary fermentation in the bottle, using only native estate grapes.  Josep Maria Raventos i Blanc, was the promoter and creator of the Cava DO, and in 1986, he produces the first estate Cava.  They are striving to have the region Conca del Riu Anoia, classified, it is a small geographical area centered around the River Anoia Basin, between the Catalan Pre-Coastal and Costal Ranges.  The wine is a blend of thirty-eight percent Xarel-lo, thirty percent Macabeo, twenty-six percent Parellada and six percent Monastrell.  The wine was made in the classic traditional method with the disgorgement (secondary fermentation in the bottle) done in October 2020.  A delightful bottle of wine, that just made it through the dinner, with its tiny bubbles in a pretty gold color.  I find sparkling wines harder to describe especially since I am not partial to descriptors, but this wine was fresh with a youthful excitement, for a lack of better words.  It was slightly sweet, as I am not partial to bone-dry sparkling wines and we both enjoyed it, and it would be very easy to order it again, it was that nice.