I bought one of these bad boys today. The reviews I’ve read suggest it’s well worth the high price. Still, thank the maker for LCBO gift cards.
The recommended time frame for drinking is 2016 through 2022. It’s killing me to put it away for four+ years. But goddamn-and-a-half, it is gonna taste good when we finally crack it.
Last night we had friends over for dinner, mainly to celebrate CB’s birthday, but also just to get caught up and have a few laughs. We covered a trajillion topics, as is our custom, and ate a great meal courtesy of Nellie:
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Benjamin Bridge Nova 7
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Charcuterie (Niagara prosciutto, salami, hot csabai)
Cheese
Olives
Hidden Bench 2008 Terroir Cache Meritage
Hidden Bench 2009 Nuit Blanche
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Roasted red pepper, fennel, garlic and corn with grilled scallops on arugula
Stratus White 2006
Stratus White 2007
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Apple cider beef short ribs
Garlic mashed potatoes, sauteed greens and roasted beets
Southbrook 2008 Triomphe Cabernet Sauvignon
Southbrook 2009 Triomphe Syrah
Marietta Old Vines Lot 56
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Hazelnut birthday cake
Veuve Clicquot champagne
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Dessert and champagne were courtesy of GB, but everything else was prepared by Nellie, and nearly everything was from Ontario.
The evening ended on a high note. And by high note, I mean it got hilariously inappropriate.
What was this email in our inboxes? An event at a brewery? More to the point, a four-course meal? With both beer and wine pairings? Crowds of other people who also like both beer and wine? Bien sûr!
It was like someone custom-made this event for Nellie and I. We bought tickets as soon as we heard about it, and on Thursday rushed down to the Distillery District to enjoy the festivities. This was the second competition (well, third really, but the first wasn’t publicized) between the Mill Street Brewery and 13th Street Winery (hence the name of the event: “Street Fight”) wherein the beer and wine would be evaluated on how well they paired with each course by a panel of judges (officially) and the 60-odd participants (unofficially). Let the games begin!
The staff brought around several sample-sized glasses of beer and wine before the meal even got started. Eventually the appetizers arrived — artichoke and oka cheese fritters with tarragon aioli…tasty! By this time the tables were starting to fill in. Most people were attending in large groups, including the group of four to our right (who we talked to about good places in Ottawa, like the soon-to-be-open Mill St. Brewery, and Les Brasseurs du Temps across the river in Hull), and the group to our left who all work at Opera Bob’s, a pub on the west side of Toronto, and who entertained us for the entire evening. For example, there was a particularly humorous tale about a beautiful Indian lady and some snowballs. Et cetera.
Then the meal really kicked into gear. The first course was two huge chunks of wild boar sausage, paired with a Franconian Bock. And paired beautifully, I might add. By the time I finished mine (and a good part of Nellie’s) I was pretty much stuffed. Then came the main — a huge piece of duck with butternut squash risotto on the side, paired with a Gamay. I’m not the biggest Gamay fan, really, so while I quite liked the duck, I didn’t love the pairing.
I was stuffed, but there was a cheese course to eat. Three cheeses, one of which worked well with the wine (a Merlot; eep!) and two of which went better with the beer (an IPA). So…whew! Great. I’d managed to eat it all, despite being so super-full. All in all a very good meal, so have a good night everyone, and we’ll see you all next t…what’s that? What did you say? More? Seriously? There’s more?!? As in, more food? MORE food?!?
Yep. More food. Very well then. A soldier does his duty. It was an apple & rhubarb crisp and was actually quite good. The wine it was matched with (somewhere between a late harvest and an ice wine) was good, but the vanilla porter was excellent.
So…in the end, we both thought the beer got the better of the wine on the night. The judges, of course, ruled it a draw, but all the opinions I heard around the room leaned toward beer as victor. 13th Street does have some very good wine, but I’m not sure we saw the best of it in this competition. I look forward to them coming out swinging in the next match.
We got back from Australia three weeks ago, but it’s been tough trying to catch up, both at work and in real life. So I was more than a little happy to see this long weekend coming.
Granted, it wasn’t a long weekend for everyone (including Nellie) but it was long a weekend for me. At least, it was supposed to be a long weekend. I actually spent a full day in the office (part of the aforementioned ‘catching up at work’) before heading to old friend the Duke of York for a drink. The Duke pubs have always had a pretty generic draft list, but that night I had two from Muskoka (a Mad Tom and a Dark) and Nellie had a Hop City Barking Squirrel. Anyway, that’s where I’d planned to meet another old friend, someone I hadn’t seen since university. Nellie (who also knew her) joined us a little later and we got caught up. We then took her to Fieramosca where we were well entertained and, predictably, ate ridiculously well — I had the risotto special with prosciutto di parma, butternut squash and…something else that slips my mind, and our wine was some spectacular thing that I can’t remember.
Saturday featured beautiful weather, maybe some the last we’ll see this year, so I found an excuse to go for a walk. That excuse? Wine! Just a few bottles from the new Vintages release, nothing serious. Meanwhile Nellie was buying gifts that we took with us over to T-Bone’s place, to meet the new addition to their family, drink their wine and share some Indian food.
Sunday started with one of my favourite things (breakfast at Hank’s) and just got better from there.
Good weekend. Quiet, but good.
Yup, I know we just got back from a 3-week trip and our to-do list is still blazing out of control, but the hell with it…we felt like driving down to Niagara and stocking up on wine for the fall and winter. The weather gods were certainly with us — it was a beautiful, sunny fall weekend. We hit nine (!) wineries on Saturday and had an amazing lunch at Stone Road Grille as well as dinner at On The Twenty, across the street from the Inn On The Twenty in Jordan where we stayed. The soup we had at the former and the duck at the latter were among the best things I’ve eaten all year.
On Sunday we had a bit of a stroll on the Twenty Valley Trail, and then visited seven more wineries, including Vineland Estates — where we ate yet another spectacular meal. After pillaging the region for all it was worth we drove home, dropped the car and produced the final tally:
We had two purposes on this trip: stock up for the winter, but also try some places for the first time. Calamus, Creekside, Featherstone/2027, Kacaba, Lailey, Malivoire, Staff and Vineland Estates were all first-time visits for us. Flat Rock and Megalomaniac were more proximity plays since we had to drive right past them to get to others on our list and we knew each had wines we wanted to pick up. Hidden Bench, Jackson-Triggs (for the Clos Jordanne), Southbrook, Stratus and Thirty Bench are practically must-hits whenever we’re in the area. And, in case you’re wondering, Cave Spring only happened because it’s the house winery at Inn On The Twenty and we felt bad leaving without one.
I’d classify most of the new places as good, not great. Only Kacaba really wowed us…their reds were terrific, and very reasonably priced. And it wasn’t even in our original plans for this weekend — several people responded to my tweet announcing our agenda, telling us not going to Kacaba would be a miss. They were right, and we left with two bottles. And there may be a case in our future. I should also point out that we didn’t spend nearly enough time at Vineland tasting their wine; we just tried three in the few minutes before our lunch reservation, but liked two of them enough to buy bottles, so more investigation is probably warranted.
And now, the classic follow-up problem…where do we put all this freaking wine?!?
So, kangaroos were a pretty common sight now. They lounged all over the villa’s grounds in the mornings when we awoke, gnawing on grass, just like the sheep. Roos + sheep: it was confirmed, we were most definitely in Australia.
We started our day at a nearby beach, watching the waves crash into the western shore and taking a bit of a stroll. We very definitely saw a whale that day, breaching and blowing just off the shore, on a common migration route back to cooler waters.
We drove into the town of Yallingup itself for coffee and some bacon sandwiches. There we again saw waves crashing, and saw several people riding them — Yallingup being very much a surfing town. But surfing, whales and bacon be damned, today was about wine!
We visited eight wineries (!) in total:
In between cellar doors we stopped at Bootleg Brewery for an excellent sampler of beer, and returned to Swings & Roundabouts for a lunch of wood-fired pizzas on their outdoor patio. This, incidentally, was the first time during our first week in Australia that we had warm, sunny weather.
Earlier in the afternoon we’d decided to have a simple dinner back in the cottage, and so we picked up lots of meat, cheese, bread, pate and produce to go with all the wine we now needed to drink rather than carry it back on the plane.
You can’t see the many bottles of wine but trust me, they’re there.
Before we began the day’s wine tastings we decided to expore another of the area’s features: caves. We drove to the southern end (more or less) of the region and booked in at Lake Cave. We had a little time to kill before getting started so we tried zooming down the road to Eagle Vale, but they weren’t open.
The cave itself was better than I expected. It wasn’t cheesy and, as the name suggests, featured a small lake on the floor of the cave. We had an interesting tour, saw some beautiful underground sights, even spent a few moments in complete darkness. It was a worthwhile visit, even though we had to climb some 300+ steps on the way out.
Our first winery of the day wound up being Redgate, which was okay. They were sold out of the Cab Franc that we’d wanted to try, but we picked up a very nice Chenin.
By this time our rummies were tumbling, so we stopped in the actual town of Margaret River for lunch at Must. It was very good — the brother claimed his burger was one of the best he’d ever had — but it took a long time. Not that we were on a tight timeline or anything, though, so we didn’t particularly care.
We hit four wineries in quick succession after lunch:
It was late afternoon by this point, and we decided we needed more of that fresh bread. We returned to the bakery and saw people literally hugging their bread as they walked to their car. One gentleman was so hungry he began biting chunks off the bread cradled in his arms while walking to his car. After we picked up our loaves, Nellie took a page from his book and ripped into the white bread just as he had done. The bread would not be denied.
We were a little too tired for a giant meal, and the first place we called was booked up anyway, so we visited a nearby wine bar and had tapas. Decent food, and blessedly small. The weather turned foul on the way home — lightning and heavy rain — so there was naught to do but hunker down and plan the next day’s visits.
We returned to Tart, the previous night’s restaurant, for a coffee to fuel our drive south, toward the Margaret River. Within a few minutes of leaving Perth, the view turned far more countryside-y than anything we’d seen so far. We even saw kangaroos in the distance, though not nearly close enough for Nellie’s liking. We stopped off in Bunbury to see their beach and pick up supplies, and in Busselton to see their beach and ginormous jetty.
After leaving Busselton we drove up to the Eagle Bay Brewing Company, where we enjoyed great food, tremendous beer and amazing views.
Our first winery stop of the day was Wise Vineyards, just down the road from our lunch spot. It too featured incredible views, and was hosting a couple of weddings. We picked up a bottle of Verdelho, which was quite decent, and debated as to whether we’d seen a whale breaching in the distant Indian Ocean.
We then arrived at our heretofore-secret accommodations: the Wildwood Valley Villa. We had a nice 3-bedroom cabin to ourselves with a proper kitchen, grill, deck, etc. tucked into the rolling hills just outside Yallingup: a perfect base from which to launch our excursions.
Our host gave us the lay of the land, suggested restaurants for dinners and — perhaps most importantly — told us about a local bakery adored by locals and which would be producing bread fresh from their ovens in just twenty minutes. Fresh hot bread? Allons-y! We jumped in the car and headed that way with all speed, slowing only when we got a close-up of some roos hopping alongside the car.
The bakery was hard to find, but was swarmed by cars of people coming to get the bread. We took a sourdough loaf for later and a fruit loaf for breakfast and drove home to nap and strategize before dinner.
Our dinner that evening was at Studio Bistro. Because of the large lunch, constant snacking and tired bones none of us felt quite up to the gastronomic (read: tasting) menu, though it looked fantastic. Still, all our meals were excellent, and the red I randomly selected from the list — a Cab Sauv from Laurance — earned the winery a spot on our must-visit list over the next two days.
That was enough excitement for one day, so we drove home and crashed hard.
Despite it being nearly three days shorter than I’d intended, the trip to Nova Scotia Nellie and I just wrapped up was a pretty good one.
We arrived in good time Wednesday night, and spent Thursday catching up with family whilst enjoying sunshine, taking walks, observing hummingbirds (more than a dozen frequent my parents’ kitchen window), playing catch, scratching dogs and eating everything in sight. We were also quite glad we were not back in Toronto for the 51-degree heat.
That evening many people stopped by the house to say hello and catch up with my parents and brothers. My friend Adam came, and we caught up for the first time in years.
On Friday some of that Toronto heat made its way east to us, and we had to take shelter from the sun and humidity as best we could. That meant crib, playing catch in the shade and (naturally) more eating. We couldn’t escape the heat entirely though, as we helped our dad make three batches of maple cream and bottle some syrup while the ladies were off at the spa.
That night we drove into the town where we went to high school and met up with a few of my brother’s old classmates. We soon switched locales from the old tavern to Bare Bones, the lone decent spot in town as far as I can tell, where they had live music (Jenny MacDonald, on this particular night) and better wine. It was there that I had a completely random bump-into with a friend from high school, who I hadn’t seen since he graduated in 1992. But we recognized one another right away and, in the few minutes that we had to catch up, realized that we share a favourite beer: Maudite. It’s a small, tasty world.
Saturday morning we got up early and drove back to Halifax. Along the way we saw a deer walking along a riverbank, a young bear running into the woods and five cattle running down the Trans Canada median. I can’t explain that last one; I just know what I saw. Our family and our sister-in-law’s family had a get-together planned for the afternoon, but our early appointments at the airport (approved for Nexus passes…woot!) meant we had a few hours to kill, so we checked in to our hotel and found a spot on the Hart & Thistle patio. We’d been meaning to try out the new gastropub since we heard it opened. The food was nothing to write home about, but the beer was good — we each had a brewed-in-house Preacher Man’s Daughter hefeweizen to start, followed by a Propeller hefeweizen. It was just a hefeweizen kind of afternoon, apparently.
Rain hampered the family get-together somewhat, but we piled into someone’s lovely home to catch up and break bread. It brought back memories of France four years ago, when we were all together last, and the times we had there. Except with kids this time. Nellie and I said our goodbyes to everyone just after dinner as we had plans with friends, plans that involved me finally having a couple of drinks after so many nights of being on medications and/or acting as designated driver.
Another new Halifax joint we wanted to try out was Obladee wine bar. Four friends joined us there, and we perched in the window (the same table as the ladies you see in the picture on their website) trying several glasses of very yummy wine. I had an Alsatian Riesling whose name I can’t recall right now; a Bonterra organic Chardonnay; a Domaine Bernard Beaudry Chinon; an Arboleda Carmenere; The Wolftrap, from Franschhoek South Africa; and a Luigi Bosca Reserva Syrah. All were terrific, even the Riesling which was — as advertised — bone fucking dry.
It’s too bad we were stuffed from the family do — they had lots of charcuterie and cheese on offer too. Ah well; next time.
All in all it was a great, if abbreviated, getaway. Lots of family time, a few old friends, some excellent new finds in Halifax and, maybe most importantly, a gentle reminder that I really did grow up someplace beautiful.
Oh, it’s been some kind of long weekend so far, yes it has. My brother and his wife arrived early yesterday morning; we met them at the airport and — a little car-location trouble aside — got on our way down to wine country. Traffic was pretty awful with all the people headed for (presumably) the border, but once we jumped off the QEW we were fine. We stopped at Hidden Bench, where they also had sausages and burgers on the grill, followed by Fielding, Thirty Bench, Rosewood, Daniel Lenko, Tawse and Megalomaniac. We filled our bellies with charcuterie and cheese from Good Earth and then boogied back to Toronto.
That’s eleven different bottles plus a case of Daniel Lenko White Cabernet for Nellie. Not bad for an afternoon’s work.
The wine theme continued that night as we settled in for dinner at Wine Bar. Excellent as always, with the scallops and short ribs being the stars of the night, along with a German Riesling whose name escapes me. We came home full and happy.
Today has entailed: greasy breakfast, St. Lawrence Market, the Distillery District, food trucks (too crowded, alas), Soma drinking chocolate and lunch at Against The Grain Urban Tavern, a new pub down by the waterfront. They have one of the few lakeside patios I can think of in the city, and a very good beer list, and pretty decent food on top of that. It’s a bit of a hike — perversely, Toronto’s waterfront isn’t easy to reach — but I can see that we’ll be back soon.
Tonight we head to Fieramosca, where I am required by law to bring any family members within Toronto city limits. So…blogging may be sparse tomorrow.
Skirl | Dan Dickinson 