Happy Birthday... to me. Part I. Dinner

Today, I turned 35 years old. I guess that means I'm officially old now. Not feeling terribly different today than I did yesterday, but hey, that is a definite milestone. It's been a good day, too, all in all. Julie took me out for a nice dinner at The Earle, a good "continental cuisine" restaurant here in Ann Arbor.

The restaurant has very solid food, and one of the best wine lists in all of the Midwest. The list is probably close to 1000 different wines, and importantly, they have been appropriately cellared, and have had enough time to age really nicely. One of my biggest pet peeves about high end restaurants is the often overpriced list of high end, good wines from recent vintages. Many of them are absolutely wonderfully good wines--arguably, even worth the hideous markup, where they charge 2.2-3.0 X retail. If only they had been aged. But, sadly, holding wines for years is not good for the bottom line, and doing it properly actually costs money, too. So, you end up drinking those expensive, monster wines before they have the time to mature and gain their real complexity. But, The Earle is different. They have a talented, brilliant sommelier who is both a bit old school, and who loves and understands his wines. He's thankfully not pretentious, and he doesn't look down on your if you're not buying that $200 bottle. And, if you know something about wine, and talk about it with him, he likes that, and shares his insights and gives you suggestions on interesting things to try. When you pick an older bottle, in particular, a mid to higher end one, and especially one that may not have been seeing a lot of turn-over, a good sommelier will very much appreciate it if you offer him a taste. Why? No, he's not trying to get drunk on the job. But it helps him to know how a particular vintage of a wine is aging, whether he should be trying to get it sold soon, and what it would pair well with.

So, tonight, we decided on a northern Rhone wine from Crozes-Hermitage. These are dense, serious full-bodied red wines, made almost exclusively with Syrah (sometimes doctored with a bit of Viognier). The bottle was a 1999 Domaine Belle Cuvee Louis Belle Crozes-Hermitage. Crozes is one of the "lowest end" wines of the northern Rhone, a second sister to uber-powerful Hermitage. They typically don't age as beautifully or have the subtle complexity as the Hermitage; they don't come from quite as primo of vineyards in the best sites overlooking the Rhone River. That is not to say they're crappy wines at all--they are usually still extraordinarily complex and will outshine most American or Aussie syrah/shirazes--but they are relatively inexpensive (usually $25-45 retail, $40-90 in restaurant, vs. well into 3 figures for Hermitage).

So, about the Belle? It was a real "belle" of a wine. Upon opening, it had tons of mature plum and cherry, blackberry, tobacco, smoke, some pepper and spice, and tons of slaty minerality. It was very refined, smooth, complex and tasty. This was a very serious wine. As it turns out, the vineyards are apparently within a few meters of "true" Hermitage, and the vines are 80 years or more in age. That all showed in the wine. Now, my one complaint is this. As the evening progressed and the wine was able to breathe, it rather quickly lost some of its bright fruit. This suggests the wine is probably a year or so past "peak"--not a flaw in the wine at all, but this is one that probably better be drunk in the next few years.

As to food: for starters, I went with escargot in a vol-au-vent--a bread-like structure, with a butter-wine-garlic sauce. Tasty, but not great. And the snails were perhaps a bit overcooked. Julie had a chevre on a bed of greens, topped with sesame seeds and dressed an acidic dressing. Tasty. For mains: Julie had filet with roquefort sauce, potatoes and veggie. A very classic dish, it was well-executed, amazing texture on the meat, and a very smooth sauce. My entree, though, just blew me away. Duck breast, seared and cooked to medium-rare, wiht a port wine reduction sauce, strawberries and raspberries. Now, cherries are a classic pair with duck, not so much these berries. But they worked. The port sauce was beautifully reduced, with an unctuous demi-glace built in. Wow. And it was a solid pairing wiht the fruit in the wine. In all, a great dinner! Thank you, Julie!