Tom’s Oyster Bar

Posted on March 27, 2017 by thewineraconteur

It has been a little quiet around here, so I have been digging into my boxes of labels looking at the back side of them for a restaurant that I can write about. Tom’s Oyster Bar used to have four locations in the Detroit area and perhaps more, I think there is one left, but I remember reading that the original owner sold the business. I remember one time that we went to take advantage of one of his promotional specials back in the day.


The special was run on Monday and Tuesday of each week and it was a live Maine Lobster with corn and redskin potatoes for $14.95. It was at all of the locations, but we went to the one in Southfield, because it was the closest for us. We shared a Salmon Pate for an appetizer and it was more than ample for a dinner. That dinner was an actual steal back in the day, because normally a live Maine lobster was always listed at “market price.” In fact, that is how it is usually priced even today, to cut down on the price of printed menus, though with menus being printed off by computer, I am not sure if that is really a concern.


Since we weren’t going big time for dinner, neither was the wine and I don’t recall if they had a big wine carte or not. We had a popular price wine, even for restaurants, of Kendall-Jackson Vintner’s Reserve California Chardonnay 2001. The fruit is harvested from Monterey, Santa Barbara, Mendocino and Sonoma Counties and has been made for about thirty years now and one of the top selling California Chardonnays in the country. It is made in the “sur lie” method and aged for seven months in a mix of French and American oak and it really brought the creamy, buttery Chardonnay to the forefront as the pro-typical California wine. Some may be critical of it, but they have a bona-fide winner for the populace and this wine may have introduced a lot of non-wine drinkers to wine as it is an easy to drink beverage.

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City Cellar

Posted on March 25, 2017 by thewineraconteur

The City Cellar Wine Bar & Grill was a popular venue in downtown Birmingham, which if you are not from the Detroit area is a very upscale suburb and a very tough place to open a restaurant and survive.  There almost seems to be a revolving door for restaurants and even those with the best intentions have a high mortality rate.  I remember going there once with my Bride and another couple and it was at its peak of popularity.  The food was good and they had the Blue Martini club in the basement, that we did not venture into that evening.

The menu was slanted towards Mediterranean which was in vogue at the time.  My Bride and I started off by sharing an appetizer of Escargot with garlic, always a safe way to find out how the rest of the dinner will be; and they were fine.  My Bride had the Chilean Sea Bass which came with vegetables and beans and a red wine sauce.  I had the braised lamb shanks with potatoes and fried parsnips, which I thought was unique, because normally the root vegetables are cooked with the meat.

One of the reasons that I wanted to go there was that they carried fifty some wines by the glass and an assortment of three hundred bottles of wine to choose from.  After doing the math for four, it was easier and more economical to order a couple of bottles of wine for dinner and they had some excellent offerings.  We actually had some wines from wineries that we had visited out in California and that was a nice way to remember some great trips.  The first wine that we had was Talbott Diamond T Estate Chardonnay 2001 from the Monterey area.  Robert Talbott Vineyards was a winery I had first heard of, because I was in the men’s wear business and Talbott Neckwear was one of my leading resources; the winery was started by the son of Robert and Audrey Talbott.  The Diamond T Estate was planted by Robb in 1982 using Corton-Charlemagne clones and planted in very rough terrain, to the point where small sledge hammers were used to break up the larger rocks.  It is a wonderful California take on a classic White Burgundy legend.  The second bottle of wine that we had was Duckhorn Merlot 2000 from Napa Valley.  Don and Margaret Duckhorn were sort of pioneers in Napa Valley when it comes to Merlot wines.  While most wineries were growing Merlot, they did it for blending purposes and not for a single varietal to be bottled.  There first vintage was in 1978, and I remember that I had an introduction to the winery from one of my customers that was a silent investor and one of the sons of the Duckhorn family gave us a private tour during harvest and we ended up with a private tasting in the back of a truck trailer sitting on cases of wines that we were opening up.  One of my great wine memories, but alas the Duckhorn family sold to TSG Products in 2016, but so far, as I understand the current management is maintaining the quality.  I guess that I have been of fan of Merlot from my earliest days trying St. Emilion and Pomerol wines.  Wine always creates great memories.

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Dinner, Wine and a Play

Posted on March 23, 2017 by thewineraconteur

It is amazing what will bring a memory back about wine. I guess I just save too many things, but in hindsight since I have started writing this blog, all of these mementos have been a blessing. Now that the house is back to order, I have started to empty out the library because it is time to replace the carpeting and I guess a new paint job is in order. The logistics of moving everything out of the room, to remove the carpet is s burden, but I found a Playbill from a theatrical production that we saw, that by rights should not have been in the room and it got me to think about that evening. The play was Plaid Tidings from the Forever Plaid series and it was at The Gem & Century Theatres. What is more fascinating is the venue itself, it started off as a theater in 1927 showing foreign films and through the years it became a location for several different movie houses, live theater and restaurants. With the building of Comerica Park, the new location for the Detroit Tigers, the building was going to be razed, but the current owner devised plans and they actually moved the entire structure to its new location. It was moved five blocks over in the downtown area and the move made it into the Guinness Book of Records as the heaviest building ever moved on wheels.


This beautiful building in the Arts & Craft style now holds the charming theater that has been lovingly restored and a fine restaurant that is open when there is a production going on, or for private parties and weddings. That night before the show we dined at the Century Grille. We started off by sharing an order of Duck Quesadilla with roasted red peppers. My Bride had the Planked Whitefish and rice pilaf and I had Grilled Canadian Salmon with a Champagne Sauce. I think that the ambiance of the building and the room, made the dinner even that much more memorable and enjoyable.


The wine list was not as elaborate as the food, and when I am faced with a smaller selection, I tend to go with a popular wine, as I tend to think that it will be fresher. I also refrained from the house wine, since they tend to do a lot of parties, most houses use wines that are more popular with caterers. We went with a bottle of La Crema Chardonnay 2009 from the Sonoma Coast. This is a very safe and dependable buttery Chardonnay and very easy to drink and goes well with lighter foods. La Crema also has a large advertising budget, so it is a brand that most people will recognize, and since it is popular and good, it is a good bet when it is offered.

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Ciao Amici’s

Posted on March 21, 2017 by thewineraconteur

We were going to have dinner the other night with The Caller and his wife, but he was not up to it, so we will have to reschedule for another time. The Caller enjoys his food and his wine and he is also partial to craft cocktails and it got me thinking about another time that we had gotten together for dinner. He lives quite away from us and we usually try to find someplace that is between our two houses and that is why we normally go to Ann Arbor for dinner. One time for dinner he suggested that we meet up in Brighton and I was a bit amazed, but since I know how he does enjoy a good meal, I was game for his suggestion, even though one does not think of Brighton as a culinary center, but as always, he had selected a great venue.


Ciao Amici’s considers themselves as a “contemporary Italian cuisine” restaurant, so that they are not confined to only the classic dishes that one thinks of when dining Italian. That being said, when I looked at the menu, there were plenty of classic dishes, but there were some distinctive offerings as well. I was all set to order Veal Oscar, as it is a dish that I have been fond of since the first time that I had it, years ago, at The London Chophouse in Downtown Detroit. That is until I heard the special dish of the evening. We had started off with a couple of appetizers to share among us. We had the Char-grilled Calamari served with a roasted garlic and lentil salad with a rosemary aioli, as well as “Rosa’s Mushrooms” that were sautéed with shallots and fresh thyme in a Marsala cream sauce on crostini. The Caller had the Filet Mignon that was served with potatoes, braised spinach, tomato butter and a Cognac mustard cream sauce, while his wife had the Shrimp and Lobster Capellini with garlic, leeks, asparagus and cherry tomatoes in a cream sauce tossed with angel hair pasta and Parmesan Reggiano. My Bride had pan-seared Ahi Tuna that had a Nicoise olive crust served with a ratatouille, artichoke hearts and a Great Northern bean puree puttanesca sauce. I had their Macaroni and Cheese with Lobster, and it was the first time that I had that dish, but certainly not the last time. It was a decadent dish of five cheeses with macaroni pasta and a lobster tail done in butter atop of the dish, I mean it was so good that I hardly even wanted to share it with the others, but we always share the different tastes of the evening. We were all extremely happy with our dishes and in the restaurant, to put it mildly.


We started off the evening with a bottle of white wine and followed it up with a red, which I think is the proper progression and they were both Italian wines. We had Castello di Tassarolo Gavi DOCG 1999. This is a single estate wine from the town of Tassarolo in the Piedmont region of Italy and Gavi was awarded the designation in 1998, and is by far the most popular white wines from Italy. The wine is made entirely from the Cortese di Gavi, which is known also as Cortese Bianco and the wine is noted for its unique “flinty” taste. The second wine was from Tenimenti Angelini which started producing wines in 1985 and it was their Tre Rose Nobile di Montepulciano DOCG 1997 from the Tuscan region. These wines originally lived in the shadow of Chianti, as part of the region is in one of the sub-zones of Chianti, but it now has its own designation and rightfully so. Like Chianti this wine is made from the Sangiovese grape which is known locally as Prugnolo Gentile and the DOCG laws require that the wine must be sixty to eighty percent Sangiovese and this wine is ninety percent Sangiovese with ten percent Cabernet Sauvignon and it is aged by law for twenty-four months in oak barrels. I have always found these wines to be easy to drink when young or even if one gets a chance to enjoy an aged version. Of course, no one really objected to this wine even for those that had seafood for dinner, as it is just a mellow wine.

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A Ray of Sunshine

Posted on March 19, 2017 by thewineraconteur

Thank you A Taste of Monterey for raising me out of the doldrums from the “joys” of the last week. I was at home getting a chance to start putting away the mess from the last week and now that we have power, I was helping out with the seven loads of laundry that we had accumulated for the last two weeks. I could only start that, after I replaced the cracked gas line to the dryer. Things were starting to look up and a delivery of wine from my wine club will always do that. As I always state, we get the “Private Reserve Club” offerings, because I really wanted to get some exotic and perhaps rarer wines from the Monterey area, instead of popular priced wines, as there is always the chance that I can find some of them locally, because of the larger quantities produced. Of the three wines in this shipment, the largest production was of two-hundred-eight cases, so the odds were that I would never find them here in Michigan.


The first bottle of the shipment was Pianetta Bilancio 2014. Pianetta Winery and Vineyard is located fifteen miles north of Paso Robles, so it carries a Monterey AVA. Planted in 1997 by John Pianetta, their estate is home to sixty-five acres of Cabernet Sauvignon and Syrah. The Bilancio is a blend of fifty-two percent Syrah and the balance is Cabernet Sauvignon. The winery used for this wine a mix of half new and half used barrels, with twelve percent being Russian Oak. The wine was aged for twenty-two months and was produced without filtering or fining the end product, and they suggest decanting the wine before serving. There were one-hundred-ninety cases made and the aging potential is six to eight years.


The next bottle was Joyce Antle Vineyard Pinot Noir 2013 with a Chalone AVA. Chalone has long been recognized for their unique terroir, as the soil is granite and limestone that has been churned up over the centuries as it is in the San Andreas Fault region and some liken the soil to the Burgundy region of France. This is one of the reasons that the finicky Pinot Noir grows so well in the Monterey area. The wine was aged for thirteen months Sur Lie in a mix of new and old French Oak barrels. There were one-hundred-eighty-seven cases made of this wine and the aging potential indicated was for six to seven years. I would venture to say after having some other wines from Joyce, that it may age even longer, if I can hold myself back, as I can be impetuous at times.


The last bottle surprisingly was also a red wine, and normally they send two reds and one white. Travieso Amaranta Syrah 2011 is from Santa Lucia Highlands, which is becoming one of my favorite AVA areas in California. The fruit all came from Kirk William’s Vineyard that may also be known as Fairview Ranch. This wine is also aged Sur Lie for twenty-four months in French Oak, where thirty-three percent is new. Among the tasting notes is the description that this is a “no-holds-barred Syrah. There were two-hundred-eight cases made of this wine, and the aging potential was suggested for eight to ten years. So, with these three new bottles of wine, the future looks much better.

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“Impetuous”

Posted on March 17, 2017 by thewineraconteur

“Impetuous” is my favorite line of dialogue from the classic John Wayne film “The Quiet Man” and a fitting theme for St. Patrick’s Day. Now you are probably saying what in hell does an Armenian know about that day and how would he even think of wine on that day as well. The old saying is that everyone is Irish on St. Patrick’s Day and that seems to be true. In the old days when I was just a tot, I remember going to some of the neighborhood establishments in Windsor, where my Father’s family lived for years. My Father and his cronies would order trays of shells on draught. That was the quaint way, as we Americans would say of having draft beer in glasses, and by the way, back then a shell was only a quarter, so even a tray of them would not be expensive. The other quaint thing that I remember and I don’t hear anyone doing it these days, is that they used to add green food dye to the beer for that day, and the odds are that there was never any green beer left the next day.


All of this rambling is for me to get to wine on St. Patrick’s Day, so try to keep up with me and there will not be any Blarney. During my High School years, I helped with the planning for some of the Armenian Youth Federation events that were held in Detroit and the main venue that we used was the old Detroit Statler-Hilton Hotel in downtown Detroit, alas this grand old hotel is no longer around. My contact person there at the hotel must have had a great expense account, because he would invite me for lunches and dinners at the hotel to go over the plans. Most of the times we met at the Trader Vic’s restaurant to eat and specially to drink and as a kid I thought it was a great way to spend an afternoon.


We are finally getting to the wine. It was just before St. Patrick’s Day and he suggested that we have a special drink and it was called Black Velvet. I was so naïve at the time, I thought that Black Velvet was just a “bar” whiskey or what they call a “well whiskey” now. The bartender came to our table with two big “boombas.” Now a “boomba” might be a local Detroit name for a large glass tankard, and I mean a really large glass. In one hand the bartender had a bottle of Guinness Stout and in the other hand a bottle of champagne, and it was just an American “champagne” and you will understand that it does not have to be a Dom Perignon. The two different bottles were poured at the same time into the boomba, and I was told that the secret to drinking Black Velvet was to finish the drink before the champagne stopped effervescing. I only needed one, but my contact person had a couple; and there was no way that I could have had a second one as I was already seeing Leprechauns. This must have been a Detroit version of this drink, because years later I had one and it was a mug of Guinness with some champagne floating on the top of the stout. Trust me, the Detroit version is far superior.

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Camping in the Big D

Posted on March 15, 2017 by thewineraconteur

“Listen to them, the children of the night. What music they make!” That is the quote that keeps going through my brain as I am camping in the Big D. One doesn’t think of camping in Detroit and normally neither do I. Unfortunately, that is what I feel like right now on the fifth day of no power in my own home. The first couple of days it was just a slight inconvenience and we even stayed one night at my Bride’s Sister’s home. We went home the next day, and later on, her Husband brought over his commercial grade outdoor generator and we got it running. It is a pain to try to figure out how to run an outdoor cable into one’s home and to also keep critters and the cold from entering in as well. The main concern of my Bride was to keep the main refrigerator running, the other refrigerator and a freezer that is kept in the garage, was not as important. Though I feel like I have pumped more gasoline the last couple of days, then I did when I was a Gas Jockey at my Uncle’s full service gas station, back in the days. The fumes seem more deadly these days as compared to my memory.


Since we have a gas stove in the kitchen, the burners can be lit, so one can do some cooking and my Bride has been very creative making meals that far surpass the dinners from when I was a Boy Scout. There is no television, which for me is fine, since it has been some thirty years since I have watched one, but my Bride is an avid watcher. There is no internet and I have to be careful even writing on my laptop to make sure that I do not run out of energy and I have to substitute something else when it is time to recharge my computer. The cellphones work and so does the land-line, yes, we still have one of those. We play cribbage by lantern light and the whole ordeal makes her think back when she used to enjoy her family’s cottage in Canada and we have the sign from it, hanging above our fireplace.  I mean my idea of roughing it, is a Holiday Inn. The good news is that we have a Queen-size sofa bed in the family room and there is also a fireplace in that room as well, so we kind of have a roaring campsite setting, though the fireplace utilizes a natural gas igniter and unit, so the heat is not intense or smoky. Everything was well until we encountered the three to five inches of snow that is now falling, well at least I am staying warm with all of the physical activity of shoveling snow, as the “monster” snow blower we have is an electrical start engine and it would be a pain to run another cable, not to mention manually opening and closing the garage door to use it. I have so many layers of ski underwear and fleece on that my thighs may need to be introduced to each other when this is all over.


One of the evenings we had a wonderful meal of garlic sautéed jumbo shrimp, with sautéed spinach and Armenian Pilaf. We are not starving and we are not thirsty as well. Though since we have had some balmy days in the forties in the house, we have been drinking white wines and they are naturally chilled, below what the refrigerator would do. We opened a bottle of Oro de Castilla Verdejo 2015 from Bodegas Hermanos del Vilar. Verdejo is a crisp white wine with a flinty terroir taste to it and is the star wine of the Rueda district. Verdejo is an old varietal that is indigenous to Castilla y Leon in the center of the Iberian Peninsula. A lot of the Verdejo wines are blended, but this wine was one hundred percent. It also went well with the guacamole and chips that we had later on, while playing cribbage again. As to the children of the night and the music, we were constantly listening to the hum of the generator, the home alarm system that was trying to get back on line and from the whistles and beeps from the internet router. As a postscript, while I was writing this article, the power finally returned and now a new adventure as I try to return this house back to normal. Every squiggly light bulb has to be replaced for some odd reason.

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My Week of Hell

Posted on March 13, 2017 by thewineraconteur

I am just pleased that I occasionally get ahead of myself in writing, because this is not a week that I would wish on any one. When I got home last Friday night we had a mini-flood in the basement, thankfully it didn’t affect the wine cellar, but there was other areas that were affected and while I was moving boxes of storage goods, my Bride was trying to mop up the water. Eventually we were able to use the “wet-vacuum” and start getting the water under control or so we thought. It turns out that a pump that removes the extra water that is not used for the humidifier broke and that is where all the water came from. The next day we were able to get that unit replaced, but then we found out that the sanitary sewer was plugged from the water and whatever flotsam and jetsam that was washed down it. So for the next day, we were still using the “wet-vacuum” until we could get a plumber the clean out the traps. What a mess. Finally success and we installed fans in the basement to aid in the drying down there.


While I was cleaning the area, I started to notice the smell of gas, so first I poured some water and bleach down another sanitary trap thinking that it was sewer gas left over from the trap cleanings. No such luck. The flex hose that delivers the gas to the dryer in the laundry area had developed a small crack that was found by the utility company technician, and I might add that he showed up very quickly after I reported the problem. Of course, he shut down the gas, but he could not replace the flex hose, even though he told me that he carries them in the truck. So I had to remove the hose and it took a trip to two different hardware stores to find the right hose. By this time the wind was blowing so hard that as I was getting back in my car, the wind slammed the door into my leg as I was getting situated. I got home and was just going to install the gas line and the power went out. The Detroit area was struck with the largest blackout caused by natural circumstances, about 900,000 homes were out of power, including us.


With all of the nonsense that I encountered this week, it was a week of margaritas and drinking the wine that was left around the house. So there really is not any new wines for me to discuss, I will just show some of the wines that I was polishing off. The saddest part of the affair so far is that the houses across the street have power and the houses on the block behind me do not.

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Open That Bottle Night

Posted on March 11, 2017 by thewineraconteur

“Open That Bottle Night” has become a much-lauded evening among wine drinkers and especially those that write blogs. Actually, this is the first time that I have ventured into this “holiday.” The concept was created by Dorothy J. Gaiter and John Brecher who were wine columnists for the Wall Street Journal and they picked out a night in February, one of the darker and colder months, to go into one’s wine cellar and open up a bottle that one has been holding onto, just for the right moment. A very worthwhile idea, because we are all guilty of saving some bottles of wine for a special moment, that just never seems to occur. I think the main reason that I have never participated in it, is that I tend to be rather unorganized when it comes to such things. We tend to have a couple of bottles of wine open in the house most days, but they are our “go-to” basic wines that don’t require a lot of fan-fare or hoopla, but somehow, I have managed to write about most of them in the past five years.


“Open That Bottle Night” was on the same night as my Sister’s surprise birthday party, so I decided to go and grab something interesting and decided to keep it a secret from my Bride. I think that sometimes she gets embarrassed if we have indulged in too many fancy wines at any given time. The second surprise of the evening was when I opened up a bottle of Lang & Reed Cabernet Franc 2000 from Napa Valley. Lang & Reed Wine Company was founded by John and Tracey Skupay and they just enjoyed classic Cabernet Franc wines from France and thought that it could be achieved in Napa Valley as well in a single variety wine. The fruit came from the Wood Ranch and Mueller Vineyard both in Rutherford and from the Stanton Vineyard in Oakville. The wine is aged in French Oak for nine and a half months and this was their sixth vintage. I was amazed that this wine showed absolutely no signs of old age, it was so mellow and round, that I thought that my Bride might cut me off, so that she could enjoy more of it, it was that elegant, and I only wish that I had more.


The other thing that happened that evening that was unique, was that my one cousin who master-minded the surprise birthday party gave the other fellow co-conspirators a gift as well. We were each given a bottle of Ararat Five Star Brandy from the Yerevan Brandy Company of Armenia, which was a great gift, as it is no longer marketed in Michigan and I had emptied my last bottle years ago, to my dismay. All I could find out that the wine is made from small white Armenian grapes, but they were not identified. It is estimated that there are thirty to forty wine varieties that are indigenous to Armenia, perhaps some going back to that vineyard that Noah planted when the Ark landed at Mount Ararat in biblical times. The most notable white grapes from the area are Voskehat, Kangun, Muscat Vardabuyr, Garan Dmak and Chilar; so, I will presume that it is one or more of those used in production. Ararat Brandy is still marketed in the Russian speaking parts of the former Soviet States as Cognac, because the company won the Grand-Prix in competition in France in 1900, and they were legally allowed to call their product “Cognac,” but not with the Origen laws in place in Europe, that is not allowed. I might add that we all enjoyed a shot of this brandy during the evening in remembrance of my late Father who was named after the famous mountain and not for the brandy.

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My Sister’s Birthday

Posted on March 9, 2017 by thewineraconteur

We had a surprise birthday for my Sister, as she attained a milestone year, but we shall leave it at that, as it would not be gentlemanly of me to give out her age.  This surprise party went perfectly without a hitch and oh the mechanism that turned, creating it. It was all under the guise that she was going to meet one cousin and go to another cousin’s house, so that there would be a “dog-sitter” available and then another cousin was going to show up and then the cousins would all go out for a dinner and a show. There was texting galore going on to make everything work out perfectly. She was totally surprised with all her cousins and aunts there to help her celebrate. 

There were enough appetizers there, that everyone could have made a dinner just from that and we were munching on them, while waiting for the guest of honor to arrive.  There was a large platter of jumbo shrimp and cocktail sauce and no matter how much was wolfed down, it didn’t seem to make a dent in the array. There was the spicy Armenian Basturmah, a cured meat with a pungent scent and flavor, that I tend to avoid from working with the public, because the spices seem to stay for a couple of days after eating it. Of course, there was the accompanying Armenian String-cheese, falafels and some delightful stuffed mushrooms to snack on as well. There was a large dinner with two salads, one tossed and a Caesar Salad. There was Bourbon Salmon, Armenian Keftah, Armenian Pilaf and Armenian Macaroni and Cheese; can you tell that the menu tended to be leaning toward the Armenians. The Birthday cake was amazing and it was surrounded by matching cupcakes.

As for the libations, there was an ample selection for all tastes.  There was an assortment of liquors and beers for some. There was also a selection of wines arrayed and I thought I would mention two of the wines that evening. Sofia Blanc de Blancs 2015 is from Monterey County, and Sofia is the actress/ director/winemaker daughter of Francis Ford Coppola. This is a very easy drinking sparkling wine that most people can enjoy without any fussiness. It is a blend of Pinot Blanc, Riesling and Muscat that was aged in Stainless Steel and finished in the Charmat method, the more affordable bulk-method way of producing sparkling wine. The other wine that is always a crowd pleaser is Ruffino Riserva Ducale Oro Chianti Classico 2007. This is a wine that one usually sees on menus as Ruffino Gold Label (Oro) and it is not issued every year, only when it is a great vintage. This wine comes from the demarcated zone known as Chianti Classico and Ruffino uses their famed Gretole and Santedame Estates for the fruit in the sub-region of this area known as Castellina. Naturally with this wine eighty percent is made from the Sangiovese grape and the other twenty percent is rounded out with Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot. The grapes are aged in an assortment of oak, Stainless Steel and concrete and aged for thirty-six months, twelve months longer than required by law for a Riserva from Chianti Classico and then it spends additional time in the bottle before it is released. I think that it is one of the best of the area and considering all that is involved in the production is quite affordable. All in all, the evening was perfect and from the guest of honor, on down, everyone had a great time.

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