we spent our last full day in sonoma in healdsburg, a super cute little town. i forced kevin to get a massage (he survived) and we took the back roads through the countryside to town. it was gorgeous, and we even managed to not get run over as we explored a one-lane historic bridge on the way.
we had a wine and food pairing at seghesio in the afternoon. we weren't sure what to expect, but definitely found ourselves pleasantly surprised. the tasting was just the two of us--the chef came in to explain the dishes (literally small samples of seghesio family recipes), and our host, andy, explained the wines. all very delish.
back downstairs in the tasting room (yes, we joined the club again), we were greeted by a super cute little old guy running around. this was none other than ed seghesio, the 3rd generation version of the seghesio family winery founders. we all know i have a soft spot in my heart for old men, and this guy was adorable. i just wanted to hug him. we spent about 30 min chatting...he tried getting me a bottle of red that he thought i'd love (given my proclivity for petite syrah), but they didn't have any in the reserve library (curses). unfortunately, i didn't get a picture with ed, but i loved him nonetheless.
basically ed "works" on friday afternoons....by work, i mean work the tasting room and talk to all the ladies. not a bad gig. our host andy didn't have such a bad gig either. he took it upon himself to fill his glass whenever he filled ours...
kevin and i are excited about this club because we will get wines that we can't find on the east coast. although we can get the seghesio zin with some regularity and the occasional barbera at total wine, we've never even heard of most of the wines we tasted there. our favorite was the omaggio. we shipped a bottle of that home with our nickel & nickel lightning strike.
we tried hitting the rochioli and gary farrell vineyards on the way back to the hotel, but sonoma wineries apparently close by 4. we ended up on the back patio of the farmhouse inn finishing our oregon pinot from the night before. since that 1/2 glass lasted about a nanosecond, we enjoyed the cheese plate and champagne that we missed on our first night (the late dinner at auberge with the texans).
dinner was back in healdsburg at cyrus and it was insane. all week, people had been told us how much we would love cyrus because it is such an experience. shay & keith ate there when they came to sonoma, and people up and down the valleys raved about it.
we started with champagne and caviar, bc if you're going to go out, do it with a bang, right? we liked it better without any of the creme fraiche or latkes. i can't remember the name off the top of my head (they printed us a menu, but it's not here), but the hook was the caviar was pristine bc it wasn't downstream from any industry. we bought it. it was good. we also don't know a thing about caviar.
we knew this was going to be an expensive dinner. it was a tasting, and we were doing wine pairings. it was eight courses. i admit the menu was slightly confusing with all of the various options for the tastings...you could choose a number of courses, a number of tastings for any variation of those courses, etc.
thinking we were old pros at this by now, i ordered (i take responsibility since kevin hit the men's room at this time) and told the waiter we wanted the tasting menu with the wine. he said you have several options. not wanting my head to explode, i vaguely point at something called the grand cru tasting (thinking this included both food and wine). apparently not. but we'll get to that.
dinner was fabulous, the wines were out of this world. again, i have a copy of the menu (because when you spend the equivalent of a 3rd world country's gdp on dinner for 2 people, they create and print a menu for you), but it's at the lake and i'm in dc right now. suffice it to say, everything was fabulous.
we learned that we still don't like cold fois gras. there are 3 options for fois gras - seared (hot and delish), terrine (cold and ick), and tourchon (cold and double ick). auberge gave us just the tourchon version; cyrus did a duo of fois gras (a la top chef) - one was tourchon and one was seared (thankfully). another highlight was the waygu beef - kobe beef on crack. you don't get much of it bc it's so expensive, but what you do get melts in your mouth.
the cheese course was also fabulous. kevin and i have decided that we're going to start doing cheese courses at strawberry lane (our favorite restaurant is our lakehouse, for those who don't know). i'm thinking there are stellar cheese shops in dc, i just need to find them (which shouldn't be too difficult since i'm still unemployed).
as if eight courses weren't enough, they then wheeled around the sweet cart....take home boxes of brownies and various sweets and chocolates for all. we obligingly took them and gave them to jen the next day for riley and griffin. i assume they went straight to the trash as to avoid the inevitable sugar high/crash, but we did our part...
then the bill came. OOF. so the grand cru wine wasn't inclusive of dinner. we spent nearly double what we intended. OOF. after throwing up in my mouth a little, we paid and headed back home, thankful that we were flying out the next day :)
all in all, i think the meal was worth it. if i had it to do over again, i would have done the "normal" wine pairing as intended and i don't think we would've been the wiser. so for all of our mental preparation for an expensive meal, we were still shocked. alas.
so we've now exhausted any eating out budget for the next 23 months....but damn if we didn't get a good life experience out of it.
will post back at some point soon about our lessons learned from the trip.
No comments:
Post a Comment