Opened White Burgundy from 2000 Tuesday Evening, and a Fun Wine Dinner Last Evening

So Tuesday evening, with our dijon mustard and bread-crumb encrusted baked chicken and roasted asparagus, we drank our 2000 Burgundy, the one I was writing about previously. It was not oxidized. Well, I don't think so. It wasn't putrid brown juice. It was nice, aged, but it was nothing to write home about, for me. Johan liked it and he had most of it. I thought it was nice, but I have enjoyed other (probably more younger) Meursault more. This wine didn't have a lot of weight, but had some developed flavors of caramel and apple; otherwise, it was just wine. It didn't sing, but it wasn't bad either. So that was that.

Last evening, though, I got together with some local Parker Board people for an "offline" event at a local Lebanese restaurant called Sunnin. It's in Belmont Shore on Second Street, the "strip" of Long Beach. The event was organized by a nice fellow named Kriss, who is a customer of our store and a regular Parker Board member - he organizes fun dinners and I have been to a couple before. The theme was wines from the Mediterranean. This opened the door for any French, Spanish or Italian wines that came from a Mediterranean location, but we actually had so many different countries represented that I was really impressed! I had never before tasted wines from Turkey and Slovenia, for instance. That was exciting. I think some attendants actually worked in those places and brought those wines by hand. There was also some Chateau Musar, a famous Lebanese wine, both a 1995 and 1998 that I got to try, which was fun - these wines are like Bordeaux-style blends with Cabernet dominant, and they had a real barnyard/bretty taste to them but in whole, pretty nice and French-styled.

That was the other thing, there were so many wines last evening that were vintage 1998 and older. So nice to see! They were really old world sorts of wines, so they were released aged and they age very well. None of this 2005 or 2006 vintage reds. Well, there were some 2005s there but not many.

I brought 2005 Domaine Gerovasilou Malagousia, a white wine from Greece that tasted really good - fresh, fine, a slight bit of spritz and residual sugar, but not much - a wine that reminded me of a Riesling (dry), and reminded some other people present of a Gruner Veltliner blended with a Sauvignon Blanc - which was not a bad description since it did have some of that fresh grass taste to the wine. I will have to look up this wine on Google to see if there is any description of the varieties that go into this wine. But it was nice, a winner.

The red I brought was a Corsican red called 2005 Antoine Arena Grotte di Sole Patrimonio Red Wine - that was a nice wine, kind of like a Cabernet Franc if I recall, just a good quality made red wine, not stunning or anything, but definitely good. I also don't know what was in this wine, but I liked it.

We enjoyed a variety of foods with these wines including cabbage rolls, lamb shank, lamb kabobs - this restaurant does lamb fantastically.

The only thing odd about the restaurant was that the proprietor, in a moment of severe openness, decided to tell the table a racist joke that we didn't really get and thought was in a bit of poor taste. Oh well! She could cook lamb great and hosted a nice night so we didn't hold it too much over her.