My Bride enjoys have company over for dinner, but there are dinners that get her crazy, like if she hasn’t ever been in the kitchen before.  Certain situations get her antsy, which is alright, but I don’t want to be part of second guessing.  I will let her pick out the tablecloth and napkins, and the service, since we have multiple selections of most options.  Actually, I think we still have table linens and napkins still in the original packaging and gift boxes, maybe from our marriage.  I am sure that we will use them eventually, we actually even have towel sets from that same affair, still wrapped in tissue, but I digress.  After all these years, she still gets nervous; I mean I understand wanting the evening to go smoothly, but it isn’t like we have multi-million-dollar business venture riding on the success of the meal.

She was getting the appetizers ready, and I told her not to start preparing anything too early.  I mean cheese and crackers are easy.  My job was easy, as well, I only had to find a couple of bottles of wine for the evening.  The cheeses were a bit more esoteric, so I thought I would serve a bottle of Merry Edwards Winery Sauvignon Blanc Russian River Valley 2020; since Sauvignon Blanc has become our go-to white variety, unless we have guests that are adamant that they want Chardonnay, which we also have in abundance.  Merry Edwards Winery specializes in Pinot Noir, Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc.  Merry Edwards started her career in 1974 at Mount Eden Vineyards, she then helped establish Matanzas Creek in 1977 and founded her own winery in 1997.  She added fifty-four acres of Sauvignon Blanc in 2010.  The fruit is hand-picked and hand sorted in the field and she uses Clones Shenandoah and Sauvignon Musque.  They use whole cluster pressing and barrel fermenting age the wine sur lie for five months with eighteen percent new French Oak.  A golden-yellow colored wine that offers notes of Meyer Lemon, pineapple, line zest and white florals.  On the palate yellow stone fruit, lemon grass, melon and a touch of marzipan, with bright acidity and very refreshing.

Once we entered the dining room, we started off with my Bride’s Caesar Salad, in fact our guests called for dibs on the leftover salad to take home.  For the main course, we had Salmon marinated in Bourbon, and Armenian Pilaf.  I was told that our guests like “big red wines” which made me pause in the cellar, trying to make everyone happy.  I chose a bottle of Cima Collina Private Reserve Pinot Noir Hilltop Ranch Monterey County 2007.  Cima Collina produces “artisan wines from small Monterey vineyards, it is a partnership with growers who cultivate their vineyards and the wines are created barrel-by-barrel.  Winemaker Annette Hoff Danzer’s commitment is to create wines represented by the terroir of each vineyard. The first harvest was in 2005 and this was their third venture.  The fruit is hand-harvested and aged in French Oak, of which forty percent is new, for eleven months.  The wine was bottled unfined and unfiltered which gives the wine additional body and flavor and they produced two-hundred-thirty-three cases.  The wine was a deep burgundy color with no foxing noticeable and offered notes of black cherries, leather, forest floor, and violets.  On the palate the tones of black cherry were still prominent reminding me of a much younger wine, still very chewy, but with teasing aspect of aged leather underlying the fruit, mellow tannins and finishing with a nice medium count of fruit and violets. The joys of long-term cellaring at a constant temperature, I think has made plenty of wines last much longer and that makes me happy.