Christmas 2023: The Word is "Subdued"

You know what? Colds suck.

Sometimes in life, all your plans end up for naught, what in the software business we used to call "overcome by events." This holiday season was such a time in our lives for Annie and me. We had all kinds of plans to celebrate with friends, to make some great food, and to open some really nice bottles of wine, not much of which happened.

Three days before Christmas, Ann started dragging and it just got worse. By Christmas Eve, she had a full-blown cold which took until the 30th to wear off, just in time to celebrate New Year's Eve with Rob and Dyce. New Year's Eve day, Dyce called to say that on the heels of their trip to Italy, he'd been sick and now Rob was down with it. So much for New Year's Eve; we pushed our celebration out to the first weekend in January, this coming weekend. 

Ann planned to make a lot of different cookies to share with friends and neighbors, especially the lovely kids next door. She ended up only making one kind and I ended up baking them while she went to shower to try to make herself feel better. I spent an entire day making a beef ragù to stuff into paccheri pasta for a gathering at our house. We canceled that and the ragù sits in the refrigerator still. Christmas Eve, we were going to friends' house for smoked brisket and I was going to make a casserole of pommes dauphinois; we begged off.

Christmas Day, we were going to make a batch of some sort of Calabrese rolled pasta such as fileja with a spicy 'nduja sauce. That didn't happen either. Just after Christmas, we were going to Yakima to see an old friend and spend the night exploring the beer of the Yakima Valley. I ended up going by myself, fighting horrible fog both ways, jamming the trip into a single day.

We had planned to pour some nice bottles for our holiday meals; they sit untouched in the cooler.

How does the old saying go? "Man plans and Fate laughs." Truth.

Here's what we did manage to accomplish for the holidays in spite of illness.

What Ann Calls "Monster Cookies," for the Neighbor Kids

Putting a Brave Face on Feeling Miserable

Christmas Eve, we had no plans to dine at home, having been invited for brisket at our friends' house. We canceled first thing that morning, not wanting to infect anyone else. Still, Ann was trying to make herself feel better and asked me if I would get a loaf of bread and a La Tur cheese, then roast the piece of lamb shoulder that I had in the freezer. I obliged, but it just wasn't the same, the way she was feeling.

La Tur Cheese

Roasted Local Lamb Shoulder
Served with Red Wine-Whole Grain Mustard Sauce

Usually, I plan a nice brunch dish for Christmas Day, but with Ann not feeling well, I assumed breakfast was off. Later on in the day, she asked me for some eggs, so I made some creamy eggs with bacon, green onions, and Brie, stirred fairly constantly to make them medium-curd, an intermediate between the large curds that I normally do and the tiny curds of oeufs brouillés that I make every so often. These eggs were right sexy.

French Scramble with Bacon, Green Onions, and Brie

Fortunately, we got our tree the second week of December and had plenty of time to decorate it before Ann fell ill. Otherwise, we probably wouldn't have bothered. We have retired all the old ornaments and are starting over with a food and drink-themed tree. If you enlarge the photo below, you can see that all of the garland is made from beads and wine corks, thanks to many years of effort by great friend Donald.

Don't You Have a Garlic Ornament on Your Tree?

Home Sweet Home!

Christmas Day, Ann and I had planned to make a spicy batch of homemade pasta for which I had ordered some 'nduja, that spicy spreadable salame from Calabria. I had given up on making dinner, just planning to graze out of the refrigerator, but late in the afternoon, Ann asked if I would make a simple, non-spicy pasta for us for dinner. And, so I obliged her with the simplest pasta I know, amatriciana, with only three ingredients: guanciale, tomato passata, and salt.

Rendering Guanciale for Amatriciana Sauce

Spicy 'Nduja, Left for Another Occasion

Did a Rat Take a Bite out of the Pecorino?
No, That's a Clear Sign that Ann Was in the Cheese

Penne Amatriciana

Delicious Sancerre Rouge

We didn't open any of the really good bottles for the holidays, but with our amatriciana, we did open a fairly obscure red Sancerre which was delicious and stylistically very different from our Oregon Pinots, the relatively big tannins and high acid working well with the pasta sauce.

So for our holidays in 2023, things just didn't go as planned. But that is life. Nothing is ever perfect and all you can do is play the hand you are dealt the best that you are able. I think Ann and I did a pretty good job making the best of our marginal hand, even if things were subdued. I'm just sorry that she felt so rotten the entire time.

A Rainy Glen Manor Sunday

With all due respect to Mark and Kelley with whom we were slated to go kayaking this past Sunday, last week beat me up incredibly. To the point where I slept in Sunday morning until 9am for the first time in months. To put it in perspective, I am up every single day between 6 and 6:30am. And so we reluctantly called off kayaking for another time when I will actually give a damn. Guys, I'm sorry. I just felt so broken last weekend.

Sunday (I was going to use the verb "dawn" but then I wasn't conscious at any time near dawn, was I?) was overcast and threatening rain, which from our perspective was a good thing; we've had hardly a drop of rain in August and all the thunderstorms (nearly every day) would roll up to the yard and hang a hard left and scoot to our north, leaving us high and dry. Or they would tease us by sliding just to the south.

But I get really antsy about rain this time of year. I have way too many friends in the wine industry to be excited about rain during harvest season. I will cringe reflexively each time that it rains between now and mid-October. Still, I must admit that the prospect of a rainy, sleepy Sunday was just what I wanted: no agenda, no pressure, no deadlines, no place to be at no time in particular.

And while I was sitting in my chair (yes, I have appropriated a chair in the sunroom as my own) Ann came over and said, "Hey, let's go to Glen Manor today, just you and me, and sit and drink a bottle of wine and talk!" She was just so damned enthusiastic and beaming from ear to ear, so how could I deny her? And the prospect of sitting at the winery watching the rain stream down with a glass in hand? How bad could that be?

And so I went to retrieve Carter from a friend's house where he spent the night and stopped in at the restaurant for a few picnic supplies and some fixings for dinner. Then we hit the road for Front Royal and points south with me riding shotgun in a semi-comotose state. The rain started pretty gently as we were heading down 522, but I could see a line of squalls in the distance and could see where the road was obscured about a half a mile away by the teeming rain.

Getting through the very narrow but violent squall line, we drove through a few more sprinkles down to Glen Manor. On the way, I was thinking that there would be a very good chance that we could catch Jeff at the winery on a rainy day when being out in the vineyard was not an option, or at least, not a good option. And sure enough, his truck was parked outside the winery when we arrived.

Bird Netting: White on Original Vineyard; Black on the New Vineyard

Because of the rain, traffic at the winery was very light and I hate that for Jeff and Kelly, but it let us spend the afternoon chatting with them and catching up, something that none of us get to do with any regularity. We got a couple more good blasts of rain before the front moved through and although we were pretty light on rain in Winchester, Jeff said that they had got an inch and a half already before we arrived. But you can see that the site has good slope and good drainage, so hopefully this is a non-issue. Only the Sauvignon Blanc is in play right now and most of that is already in the cellar.

Hmm. The '11 Franc is not yet Released. Go Figure.

Reds are scarce now at the winery because demand is a bit higher than production, always a good problem to have. Jeff was kind enough to let us have a bottle of the 2011 Cab Franc a couple days before its official release date and we thank him for that. It really has come around very nicely. The last time I tasted it was in barrel back in April. Some of the knees and elbows that were sticking out back then have come back in. In a crappy year, this is a good wine. It's not a great wine, but then, the weather gods didn't give anyone great red wine in 2011, giving us instead rain each day of September, a vintage nobody will forget.

Olli Calabrese and Ubriaco del Piave

2012: Banner Year for Virginia Figs!

I just love this time of year: fig season! 2012, for whatever reason, has produced the best fig crop that anyone can remember and we have them coming out of our ears right now, an awesome problem to have. I brought some figs, an Olli Calabrese, and a wedge of Ubriaco del Piave cheese along with some bread for our lunch. Poor, poor, poor us!

Good to See Kelly Laugh!

Telling Dumb Jokes!

The (rightly) Notorious Ghost Chiles, the Naga or Bhut Jolokia

Once the rain blew off, we moved outside to enjoy the day and the view, especially of all the butterflies on the twin butterfly bushes just outside the tasting room. Kelly also has herbs and some vegetables growing in the beds and you can see where the deer have clipped the tomato vines way back. But for some reason, they aren't touching the ghost chiles; go figure! Kelly gave me a bunch of ghost chiles to bring back to the restaurant to turn into sambal. And speaking of deer, we saw a young 4-point buck, antlers still in velvet, standing beside the driveway on the way up to the winery. I don't guess he will last long once hunting season opens.

Two Great Wines

Back at the ranch, we sat out on the patio and drank some really nice Sancerre before heading inside to make a pasta for dinner. This time of year, we have tomatoes coming out of our ears and almost always have leftover mozzarella from the night before. I cut up one of the red Abraham Lincolns from our garden, a pink Mortgage Lifter from Mark, and a Black Trifele from Beth, along with a couple balls of leftover mozzarella. Then I caramelized a large onion and several cloves of slivered garlic and browned a bit of buffalo-chipotle sausage. In went a pound of strozzapreti pasta and a big handful of shredded basil from the garden. Awesome!

With the pasta we had a most delicious Easton Zinfandel from the old Rinaldi Vineyard in Amador County. Zin would not be your first guess if you tasted this blind. Yes, it has big plummy dark fruit, but it is a very transparent ruby wine with excellent acidity and firm, but very supple tannins. This wine is the finest expression of Zinfandel that I have ever had and is miles away from the bulk of the Lodi crap that saturates the market. Bill Easton, bravo!

Pasta, It's What's for Dinner

PS. I just love the so-called black tomatoes. They are none of them black, but rather a greenish to purplish red. The endearing quality in them for me is that they are all high acid tomatoes and that acidity is the key to a great tomato.