SLOLindsay

Chateau de Mirambeau -- 2005 Grand Vin de Bordeaux Delicious white wine, some mineral qualities with a nice tangy finish. I think I paid $13? Yummy!

Cilantro. Wasabi. But I try to like them, having them in small quantities and all, because I feel like they're an important part of cuisines that I really want to learn more about and learn to enjoy. Liking cilantro and wasabi seems like an important part of shaking off my Midwestern boring-chain restaurant-bland eating roots.

To me it's important that the server know what they're serving me. At a local, relatively upscale restaurant, my husband and I made a bet that if any server could ever identify the cheeses on the cheese plate (they've been the same for more than a year), we would buy the server a drink. We must've asked a dozen times. Finally some savvy server knew his stuff and earned himself a mojito. No other knew the answer before or since, and often they still weren't sure after returning from the kitchen to check. TRAIN the staff. I guess that's my main point.

In the central coast of California, it's normal to pay $5 or so for tastings. What surprised me was the $10 per MINIMAL tasting when we went to Santa Ynez. Perhaps it's the "Sideways" effect (many of the wineries had movie stills on their walls). In any case, it meant that we really couldn't afford to buy many bottles and were forced to split more tastings that we might have liked. I suppose my husband and I are in the minority -- young, limited-income wine lovers who want to taste and purchase good wine, but who will be severely limited if everyone charges $10-12 for a few splashes. My request is that if a winery charges for tasting, it should deduct the charge with the purchase of a bottle. And don't include the glass! That's a cheap ploy and we never want them.

<P>Steven, that was exactly my first thought. I have tasted almost no French wine (I'm only 25 and I live in California wine country) but my impression was how can a person, panel or<a href="http://www.vinography.com/archives/2006/05/wine_tasting_man_against_machi.html"> machine</a> make a blanket judgment on something so subjective? <P> I like to see arrogance from any person, country or winemaker get taken down a notch, but to say the Californians "won" anything in this competition seems incredibly arbitrary and ultimately irrelevant to anything but prices of wine I never would've been able to buy anyway.

I went to three different places today to try to ship two bottles of local California wine (packaged in styrofoam) to my in-laws in Wisconsin, where it is legal to send wine. Or at least, it was. Suddenly, nobody will ship my wine!! UPS won't, FedEx won't, and the US Postal Service certainly won't. They say there's some sort of certification now, that it came down at the beginning of the month "like a hammer," that they'll be fined thousands of dollars if they send my two bottles. UPS drivers, they said, won't even touch it if it looks like wine. Did something happen I was in the dark about? I've been sending wine to people in Michigan, Ohio, New York and Washington too, and I've never had this problem before. I'm worried I won't be able to send wine at all anymore. What's going on?!

I have to add <A HREF="http://www.weolive.com/main.htm">We Olive</A> as a great resource. I buy the Olea Farms Arbequina olive oil locally (by the gallon, incidentally -- it's that good) but you can order it on that site.

I would second many of these suggestions -- Tobin James Ballistic and Norman Zins are favorites of ours. Also, Wild Horse and L'Aventure, and of course Pretty Smith, whose winery is so far north in the county I think we were the only tasters they had the weekend we went. Anyway, I'd add Eberle to the list, though perhaps they're too large a distribution for inclusion here. I love their Cabs and they have an awesome Rose of Syrah. The guy at Zin Alley makes good Zins and Zin Port (that's all he makes). He's not on the map, but he's just north of a deli off 46W. Delicious, both $40 bottles. I like Midnight Cellars and Grey Wolf in Paso as well. The Grey Wolf Grenache is great but you can only get it at the winery right now, I think. Enjoy!