Days of Wine and Pork Loin
This weekend, Mitch and I went to Palisade, Colo. to help friends who own a boutique winery, Garfield Estates, with the Grand Valley Winery Association's Spring Barrel Tasting.
For those of you who think Colorado wine probably tastes like dirty sweat socks soaked in kerosine, you are so wrong. Colorado's maturing wine industry is pressing out some serious vino. The Grand Valley itself is a designated American Viticulture Area with an enviable warm-days-cool-nights climate perfect for producing rich, delicioius fruit. The annual wine festival in the fall draws thousands to the area for a free-for-all bacchanal where you have the classic Colorado combo--mountain-bike riding winos wheeling from winery to winery. Approach with caution. (Oenophiles, check out the kudos for Colorado wines here.)
Back to the Barrel Tasting. A barrel tasting allows people to sample young wines straight from the barrel, an event which helps boost spring sales while educating wine drinkers about how wines transform in the oak casks. At Garfield, owner Jeff Carr was dipping into a syrah and a baby cabernet sauvignon. The ready-for-prime time syrah gave sippers a sense of what a wine tastes right before bottling, while the infantile cab sauv displayed the characteristics of a temperamental adolescent--great out of the starting gate but short on finish. Carol Carr, Jeff's wife, whipped up a fabulous pork tenderloin in a ginger-hoisen sauce to showcase the syrah to best advantage. Mitch and I were there as genial support and backup.
Well, have any of you ever catered a party for 320 of your closest friends with only four hands on deck and two of those hands were pouring wine? Mitch and I were chopping, running, pig-flinging fools, tossing around phrases like, "Well, the rose is a classic European-style rose, dry with a hint of fruit. The perfect picnic wine." And, "the reserve merlot is a big wine, complex, a wine with an opinion." What the...?
Forty pounds of pork later and lots of gelt in the till, the four of us were exhausted, and our 320 guests--tipsy and happy as friggin' clams. I gotta say this about the wine business, you get very few cranky customers--and you don't have to help them calculate their decreases!
(If you ever get a chance sample my favorite Garfield Estates' wines, the Cabernet Franc and Fume Blanc. Nummy! (That's a technical wine term, by the way.)
Knitting bulletin: Of course the big tragedy of the weekend was not visiting Cozy Knit and Purl, Palisade's apparently fabulous yarn shop. Have added the aforementioned to my Colorado Yarn Sources page, however.
8:29:42 AM 
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