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).
This release was awarded 92 points by James Suckling and 91 points by Wine Enthusiast.
Ruby colored medium bodied, smooth and elegant with bright ripe red berry fruits, floral, earthy, dusty rose petal, tangy acids and smooth polished fine tannins on the finish.
RM 91 points.
https://www.domaineserene.com/shop/2011-domaine-serene-evenstad-reserve-pinot-noir-15l
We visited the magnificent Diamond Creek Vineyards and Winery back in 2011 as featured in this post - Diamond Mountain Wine Experience - Diamond Creek Vineyards.
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.
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.
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.
