[title type="h5"]Wednesday, January 7, 2015.
Stonehenge At The Ranch. Dr. Bob Opens A Big Tawny. [/title]
We get one stray day of nice weather today, beginning with a beautiful, once-a-year phenomenon I call Abita Stonehenge. A rather dense, mostly pine woods stands about a hundred years from the front of our house, with a lawn in between. For the first hour or two after the sun comes up, its rays shine through the woods and across the lawn at an unusual angle. It looks funny, until you figure out what causes it. The sun rises at a point on the horizon about as far east-southeast as it ever gets. It takes my mind off the torrents of rain, the wintry cloulds, and the cold we have had lately, and will no doubt have again.
It was very cold indeed when I arrived for dinner at Cava, to which my friend Bob invited me for a wine dinner tonight. He has taken delivery of a singular bottle of tawny port made a hundred years ago by Penfolds, the big old Australian winemaker of which Bob is enamored. The feeling is mutual. Bob is well known to the winemaker, and he gets rare wines from Penfolds now and then.
About a dozen of his wine-loving friends took over a big table upstairs, well away from the chilly winds that blew through the front door of Cava. (Owner Danny Millan will have to do something about that someday.) Most of the attendees are among the people who met originally during the golden age of Thursday night wine tastings at Martin Wine Cellar in the 1980s. I sit next to Warren Frederick, whose acquaintance I made at those happy tastings. When he asks me how I'm doing, it's mainly to confirm what he knows already from reading this daily diary. I don't really have much to add.
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Penfolds Tawny Port 1915.[/caption]The wines are terrific, most notably the 2009 Coonawara Claret, made from grapes grown in the St. Henri vineyards, where Penfolds as we know it began. It's poured from magnums. Bob tells us that this wine is not really commercially available, and goes mostly to Penfolds's best customers, of which Bob is certainly one.
We go through a few other wines before getting to the star: the 1915 Tawny Port. Everything about the bottle is exceptional, from the hard-to-figure out closure to the honeyed, aromatic-herb aroma and flavor of the wine itself. It's the kind of wine you don't drink often. I know of nobody who says that tawny port is his favorite wine, although few would dispute the excellence of that sweet, alcoholic, aged-for-decades wine. A wine like this you recall for the rest of your life, in accolades like this: Here was the eighth wine older than a century that I have tasted in my life. I welcome this wonderful tawny to that compartment of my mental closet.
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Mussels with apple at Cava.[/caption]
The dinner is interesting and abbreviated. I begin with the mussels, made with a creamy sauce and apples. That's a new concoction for me, but I find that mussels admit as wide a variety of sauce ingredients as any other seafood, and more than most. Danny Millan is relieved that I tried this, because last time I was here I ordered the mussels but the kitchen had run out. Danny went around to a few stores that night looking for some, to no avail. If he had told me, I would have stopped his efforts. I can always find something else I like on a menu this good.
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Rabbit Remmy.[/caption]
That was an appetizer, but a pretty big one. The same could be said for the other course in my meal, called "Rabbit Remmy." I should have asked about this in detail before ordering it. It was rabbit presented in shreds layered between fried green tomato slices, with remoulade sauce and a berry gastrique. The elements don't go together. However, the rabbit meat was good, and made me think that if they made a soup with this using a turtle soup recipe but with rabbit instead of the turtle, they'd really have something.
Danny sent out a bunch of pretty and tasty desserts to go with the port. The rest of us conspired to make sure all of Bob's expenditures for his own dinner were covered, the wines being already far beyond the call of duty.
[title type="h5"]Cava. Lakeview: 789 Harrison Ave. 504-304-9034. [/title]
