Gala Family Christmas celebration surf & turf dinner features festive flight of red and white wines
The family gathered for our gala Christmas celebration and we feasted on surf and turf and a festive flight of red and white wines. We Decked the Halls with a flight of Hall wines - a top ranked red and two whites, one from Napa and one from Sonoma.
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Offspring ... kids, grand-kids ...
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Before dinner we had an extensive selection of artisan cheeses and holiday sweets accompanied by Pierre Gimmonet et Fils 1er Cru Champagne.
Dinner started with Linda's signature lobster tails on a ramaken of buttered croutons. With this we served a Hall Napa Valley Sauvignon Blanc, a Walt Sonoma Coast Chardonnay, and a Fantesca Russian River Valley Chardonnay.
Dinner featured Linda's signature grilled beef tenderloin served with mashed potatoes, baked potatoes, haricut verts, and sauteed spinach in a Madeira sauce. For the main course we served two very special wines,
Château Léoville Las Cases 1990 and
Hall Jack's Masterpiece Napa Valley Cabernet 2015, two memorable wines ideally suited to the occasion.
Later with deserts and after dinner treats Alec opened a
Hill Family 'Origin' Napa Valley Cab, and Ryan pulled from our cellar a 1995 vintage
Pride Napa Valley Cabernet.
It was a wonderful memorable gathering with family after a tumultuous year.
Château Léoville du Marquis de Las Cases, St Julien-Beychevelle, Bordeaux 1990
I wrote about birthyear celebration wines for son Alec's wedding this summer.
To
contribute and join in the celebration dinner, I took from our cellar a
flight of very special wines I have
collected over the decades and held for this occasion, from the
birthyear vintages of the bride and the groom. Fortunately, his
birthyear 1990 vintage was one of the most spectacular of a lifetime.
Three times, wines from that vintage were awarded #1 Wine
of the Year by Wine Spectator Magazine as part of their annual Top 100 Wines of the Year, all from the 1990 vintage. A testament to the global success of the vintage, one was from California, one from Bordeaux and one from South Australia, a further testament to the amazing spectacular 1990 vintage.
We
served those three wines at Alec and Vivianna's wedding celebration
dinner. All
those wines were acquired upon their release back in the early
nineties, in some cases, even before being so recognized and heralded. A
fourth wine from that vintage was also part of the wine flight, the
1990 Château Léoville Las Cases.
At
the time, I wrote that "we're holding a case plus several bottles of
Alec's 1990 birth year release
that we'll most assuredly celebrate with him, family and friends as
part of his wedding festivities in the coming year".
Since the wedding
festivities were significantly scaled back due to the Covid pandemic, we
didn't get to serve most of these. So, tonight, we opened another one
as the 2020 celebrations continue.
This wine was awarded 96 points
by Robert Parker's Wine Advocate, he projected the drinking window at the time, in 2009 to be "now-2035". Stephen Tanzer's International Wine Cellar gave it 94 points, Wine Spectator
93 points. Neal Martin gave it 95 points in his Wine Journal.
As with an earlier tasting of this wine, this bottle had a good above neck fill
level, the foil, label and cork were all in exceptional, excellent
condition, the wine was great, drinking very nicely and still at a peak
drinking level, showing no signs of diminution whatsoever, dark inky
garnet purple, medium full bodied, elegant, polished, smooth, complex
but perfectly integrated and
balanced, sweet blackberry fruits, notes of graphite, leather, cassis,
tobacco on a
lingering balanced finish with tangy acidity and smooth approachable
silky tannins.
RM 94 points.
@DomainesDelon
https://unwindwine.blogspot.com/2019/08/leoville-du-marquis-de-las-cases.html
https://unwindwine.blogspot.com/2020/10/broad-diverse-flight-of-big-reds.html
Hall Jack's Masterpiece Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon 2015
HALL Wines is a 500-hundred acre estate in the Rutherford Hills of Napa Valley. It
was established in 2003 when Craig and Kathryn Hall acquired the
historic Bergfeld Winery and then remade it into a state-of-the-art
facility. Today Hall has ten estate vineyards and two wineries and
hospitality centers, one in St Helena and one in Rutherford.
Before getting into the wine
business, both were successful luminaries with meritorius careers, Craig Hall created the HALL Group at the age of 18 in
1968, a business in college rooming houses and apartment buildings. Over time the
company diversified into the HALL Park in Frisco Texas, the KPMG
Plaza at Hall Arts in downtown Dallas and a financial services firm. Craig has invested in oil, American
Airlines and the Dallas Cowboys.
Kathryn was a successful businesswoman, community activist, attorney and in 1991 ran for mayor of Dallas. She was Ambassador to Austria under the Clinton administration.
Kathryn’s family had been in the wine industry for several decades as
grape growers in Mendocino County where she and her brother managed
their
family property for 10 years.
This is another very special wine for a several reasons; it is devoted to family, it is based on artwork, and it is a birthyear vintage for two of our grandkids. Our dearly beloved Lucy was an artist, our daughter Erin was educated in Art, Art History and Fine Arts, and taught art for several years, and Linda is a budding artist and studied and taught art history.
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Shown 2013 Jack's Masterpiece
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Each year, HALL’s former winemaker and current president, Mike
Reynolds, returns to his first love and blends a signature Cabernet
Sauvignon known as “Jack’s Masterpiece,” named for a piece of artwork that decorates
the label. The painting was created by Mike's son Jack as a Father’s Day
gift
when he was only 18 months old. Every year Mike steps
back into the cellar to create this signature blend and he chose this
very special painting to appear on the label. Mike oversees the blending of this special wine to create a
deeper expression of Cabernet Sauvignon. “This is a wine that really demonstrates the depth and muscularity of
the fruit we source from our HALL St. Helena estate and Sacrashe
vineyards,” he says.
The 2015
HALL Jack’s Masterpiece is 98% Cabernet Sauvignon and 2% Cabernet Franc.
Winemaker notes: "The 2015 yields highly complex
aromas, lead by ripe dark fruits, espresso, dark chocolate and loads of
crème de cassis currently on parade. The hedonistic nose continues to
bring you back to the glass for more. Crème de cassis, pencil lead, dark
cherry reduction, mocha, anise and red bell pepper flavors all
marvelously build in the glass. Intense and focused, with moderate
tannins, this is an extremely age-worthy wine that needs at least one
more year of bottle age before it begins to hit its stride."
Dark
inky purple colored, rich concentrated dense black fruits, powerful and
structured yet elegant, polished, smooth and approachable with jammy
fruits accented by dark chocolate, expresso bean, hints of licorice and
baking spices with gripping sinewy fine grained tannins on the lenghty
finish. This should be delicious over the next decade or more.
RM 95 points.
This release was awarded 97-99 points by Jeb Dunnuck, 96+ by The Wine
Advocate, and 91-94 points by Vinous / International Wine Cellar.
https://www.cellartracker.com/wine.asp?iWine=2592084
https://unwindwine.blogspot.com/2018/09/kathryn-hall-vertical-tasting-hall-wine.html
https://unwindwine.blogspot.com/2013/04/hall-napa-valley-rutherford-estate.html
@HALLWines
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