Fabulous Wine Flight with Pour Boys Veal Marsala Wine Dinner ...
We were invited to fellow ‘Pour Boy’, (our wine group), Dr, Dan, and Linda for dinner.
They prepared Veal Marsala with buttered mashed potatoes, Brussels Sprouts, and Tomatoes with herbs, crustin and goat cheese.
Before dinner there grilled shrimp, cheese and mango blintzes, and a medley of artisan cheeses with fresh fruits, nuts and assorted biscuits.
Over the course of the evening we had a wonderful wine flight starting with a Willamette Oregon Pinot Noir, a Napa Valley Diamond Mountain Cabernet, and finishing with a special limited release Shiraz.
I took from our home cellar a bottle of one of our favorite Pinots. Readers of these pages know we don’t do a lot of Pinot Noir, but this is a special bottle we keep in our cellar for special occasions. We discovered and first tasted this label during a weekend getaway in the city (Chicago) during an enjoyable memorable afternoon lunch on the patio overlooking the Chicago River at Smith & Wollensky.
Domaine Serene Evenstad Reserve Willamette Valley Pinot Noir 2011
This is from the estate of Grace and Ken Evenstad who settled in the Willamette Valley, Oregon in 1989 to craft Pinot Noir wines equivalent to those of Burgundy from Oregon fruit. They established Domaine Serene, a 42-acre hilltop estate in the Dundee Hills in Yamhill County, effectively creating Oregon’s luxury wine industry. In 2001, they constructed a state-of-the-art, five-level, gravity-flow Pinot Noir winery. The notable Ken Wright, vintner and producer, was Domaine Serene's first winemaker.
In the ensuring years they acquired and developed several more vineyards in the area growing Domaine Serene to over 1,000 acres, with 300 planted to Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. Today they craft a portfolio of ultra-premium single vineyard designated labels, this reserve, an entry level cuvée, and also a line of Chardonnays, all sourced from individual estate vineyards.
In 2018, the couple was honored with Wine Spectator's
Distinguished Service Award.
This ‘Evenstad Reserve’ label is the Domaine Serene flagship wine, a blend crafted from best select barrels each year to create a reserve wine that is consistent in both quality and flavor profile. The ‘Evenstad Reserve’ Collection has earned world-class accolades over the years, including Wine Spectator's #1 Pinot Noir in the World (2013) and #1 White Wine in the World (2016).
Domaine Serene aims for consistency and character in their flagship "
Evenstad Reserve"
Pinot Noir, a complex blend of fruit from different clonal selections and sites in the Dundee and Eola Hills. The 2011 was aged for 13 months in 55% new French oak.
Producer’s Notes: "A true illustration of the art of blending, the Evenstad Reserve® Pinot Noir is a wonderfully complex wine that delivers an array of red fruits, caramel, baking spice, vanilla, dried flowers, and potpourri. On the palate, this elegant wine shows a harmonious balance of structure, richness and acidity with soft tannins and a clean, lingering finish. With clonal variation and site driven diversity, we are able to craft this wine to our precise and exacting standards year after year."
At fourteen years of age, this was at, but likely nearing the end of its prime drinking window. The label, foil and most importantly, the cork and fill level were pristine.
Diamond Creek Red Rock Terrace Cabernet Sauvignon is one of four single vineyard designated lablels made by Diamond Creek with the Cabernet Sauvignon variety from estate vineyards on Diamond Mountain in nortern Napa Valley.
Known as the first Californian winery to bottle 100% Cabernet Sauvignon wines from the same plot, Diamond Creek Vineyard is a benchmark for great winemakers. Founded in 1968 by Al Brounstein and his wife Adele Boots, this project started with identifying the differences in the soil composition and the slope of the terrain when planting the vines. They ended up with four vineyards with very special characteristics: Volcanic Hill, Red Rock Terrace, Gravelly Meadow, and Lake Vineyard - four unique plots with four distinctive exclusive wines with a marked character of their own.
Following the death of the founders, the winery was acquired in 2020 by the exclusive Maison Louis Roederer.
Diamond Creek Red Rock Terrace Cabernet Sauvignon comes solely from the small Red Rock Terrace plot of less than 3 hectares of vineyards planted in reddish soils with a high iron content. Throughout the year they enjoy a warmer climate and are meticulously cultivated through environmentally friendly agriculture.
In the winery, once the best grapes have been selected to make Diamond Creek Red Rock Terrace Cabernet Sauvignon, they are crushed to ferment and macerate at a controlled temperature. The wine is then aged in 225-litre wooden barrels for about 18 months.
Diamond Creek Red Rock Terrace Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon 2015
We tasted this wine as part of the three labels vintage release tasting at the release party and it immediately became my favorite, and the benchmark against which the others were compared. This was the most vibrant and expressive fruit of the three, although the others' fruit gave way to more complexity with layer of accent flavors.
This release was awarded 99 points by Robert Parker’s Wine advocate in 2018, and 94 points Vinous and 93 points by Wine Enthusiast.
Two months ago in November, 2025, Antonio Galloni wrote, “the 2015 has aged exquisitely”. While the legendary long lived anticipated maturity is projected to be 2032-2052, tonight this was spectacular and hard to imagine it will improve more with further aging. In 2018, Lisa Perrotti-Brown of Robert Parker gave it 99 points and projected anticipated maturity from 2020-2044.
Like that memorable tasting at the winery, tonight, this was fabulous, even better having aged ten years in bottle.
Deep garnet-purple colored, medium full bodied, rich, round, structured, complex, layered blackberry, black raspberry and plum fruits with earthy notes of herbs, graphite, creme de cassis, dark mocha chocolate, cinnamon spice and licorice, hints of vanilla and cedar, with super ripe, fine-grained tannins on a polished finish.
RM 95 points.
With dessert, Dan opened another 2015 vintage, this special limited release Shiraz/Syrah from Washington State.
Long Shadows Vintage Select Bin 898 Columbia Valley Syrah 2015
Dan acquired this limited release label crafted by legendary winemaker John Duvall, winemaker of the iconic Penfolds Grange Australian Shiraz. Duvall was recruited by Long Shadows to produce “Sequel” as part of the Vintners Collection series of master winemaker labels.
We discovered Long Shadows and joined their wine club during our visit to the Long Shadows Cellars winery visit - featuring world class winemakers and Columbia Valley fruit, as part of our Seattle Culinary and Woodinville and Washington Wine Tour was a visit to the Long Shadows Wine Cellars tasting room back in 2018.
This highly allocated limited release bottling was available only through the Long Shadows wine club - 125 cases were produced. It was rated 94 points by Wine Advocate and 93 points by Owen Bargreen.
This is a unique blend of 83% Syrah and 17% Cabernet Sauvignon.
Dark garnet inky purple colored, full bodied, dense, concentrated, complex structured blackberry, plum and black raspberry fruits with creosote, tobacco leaf, floral, clove and cinnamon spice notes on a tangy tongue puckering finish.
RM 93 points. .
