My Bride and I live in a suburb that was originally a township.  I am not sure what the definition of a township is where you live, but originally in Michigan in meant thirty-six square miles or six miles by six miles.  The old city planners were quite ingenious and created an industrial park that is six square miles through the city along the railroad lines, and this industrial park has always been beneficial to the homeowners when it came time to pay land taxes.  Even when the township became a city, to this day there are a couple of small farms, a turkey farm and at one time there was a mink ranch and a rabbit ranch.  The rabbits escaped and I would venture to say that there is a rabbit warren almost in every backyard here.  We have had pheasants, turkeys, rabbit, opossums, raccoons and the other day we had a young deer maybe checking out the real estate market here. 

We also had some of the family from Louisville for dinner, after they had lunch at my Brother-in-Law’s sister home and it had been a couple of years since he saw all of his family.  His sister probably only lives about five miles from our house, so, I just mentioned that my Bride should not even think of starting a dinner, until they showed up.  We just had a casual dinner with a Caesar Salad (are you surprised?), New York Strip Steaks and Candied Carrots.

I went into the cellar and grabbed something that I thought was interesting.  We had a bottle of Duckhorn Vineyards and Winery Decoy “Migration” Napa Valley Red 1997.  We still have some of the wines that we bought from our initial visit to Duckhorn, arranged through a customer of mine, one of the sons (when it was still a family-owned winery) gave us a private tour, and a private tasting in the back of a semi-trailer, as we sat on cases of wine, and on occasion we would have to get up, to open another case to try another wine.  Memories like that can’t be duplicated. The wine was a blending of different varieties and different contract and owner properties, back when Duckhorn Vineyards produced all of their wines in Napa Valley, now Duckhorn is one subsidiary and Migration is another subsidiary.  The original concept for Migration is that the wine could change from year to year.  This wine was produced from fruit harvested from seven different vineyards within the appellation.  The wine was fifty-one percent Cabernet Franc, twenty-six percent Merlot, thirteen percent Cabernet Sauvignon and ten percent Petit Verdot.  The wine was aged for eighteen months in a blend of sixty percent French Oak (ten percent new, sixty percent second and thirty neutral) and forty percent American Oak (all second use). I had my Durand corkscrew so the cork remained whole.  For a twenty-five-year-old the wine was excellent, with a beautiful deep color. The nose was vintage Right Bank, and on the palate the tannins were soft, but it was still a chewy wine with a good long finish; and for some odd reason there was no leftover wine for the next day.