albear_garni

We spent most of Thanksgiving day this year with some old friends of ours - Joyce, who was in graduate school at UC Berkeley with David, and her husband, Larry. Their friends, Mary and Bill, came up from LA for the long weekend. A highlight of the meal was a sparkling wine tasting, along with some incredible appetizers made by Larry. The gravlax was the best he's ever made!



We sampled six sparkling wines at the tasting. The idea was to figure out which wine was which, per the score card:



It was very difficult to determine which was which, with the exception of the red wine, which Larry inadvertantly gave away in his description. My favorite - the Kalinda NV Reisling Select, from Germany.



The red sparkler, a Barbarini Lancillotto Lambrusco from italy, was actually pretty good, I thought. David then stumped the group with a bottle of red shiraz, from India. We happened to get it from a friend, who owns Vic's Chaat House in Berkeley. It's a very good, fruity, complex red wine, and gets better and better as it breathes. Everyone guessed it to be a California Cabernet.

Hope you all had a good holiday. It certainly looks that way, from the postings I've cought up with so far. We're now up in Willits, and stopped off to visit sfroamer and his partner Mike, at their new digs in Cloverdale on the way up.