On the Fourth Date of Christmas my true love brought to me…a lovely early motherhood memory.

It was such a warm sunny day today in Napa Valley that you could have eaten lunch outside on the patio at Rutherford Grill, one of our favorite restaurants here because the food is so satisfying, the people are nice, the prices are great and maybe the best part whether you’re a local or a visitor–no corkage if you bring your own wine. That’s both customer-friendly, and a lovely gesture of support to the local winery community. Since the kids are on the holiday break from school, my husband John took them there for lunch and then brought home one of my favorite menu items–their rotisserie chicken is the best I have ever had outside of Europe.

So it’s a “kid date” for us at home tonight, with rotisserie chicken, mashed potatoes drizzled with the chicken jus and a great wine from John’s cellar–the only other place in Napa Valley that I know of with no corkage fee. And instead of cozying up in one of the Rutherford Grill’s Hollywood booths (which were plenty roomy for our kids’ infant carrier seats when they were tiny), we’ll be cozying up in front of the fire at home.  I remember it as though it were yesterday, and that’s really lovely.

On the second date of Christmas, my true love brought to me–a glass of rose and a warm memory. We love classic rose and like most wine lovers, sip and serve it a lot during warm summer weather. But when Napa wine country cools down to Christmastime temperatures, we find ourselves scrounging in the cellar for the last few of the summer season’s bottles. For one, it’s a great way to finish them up–most northern hemisphere dry roses should be consumed the summer following their harvest date. Fine with us! But even better, returning to rose brings back those warm-weather memories, with a bonus: dry rose is an amazing match with something we’d never be able to enjoy in summer: Dungeness crab.

I’d never even have tried it if not for one of our greatest summertime-in-winter “date” memories–Michy’s restaurant in Miami. I wrote in The First Date of Christmas about Chef Linton Hopkins, who just joined the Delta culinary “dream team.” Michy’s Chef/Owner Michelle Bernstein was the original culinary goddess for Delta, and someone I considered a culinary national treasure even before Delta gave me the chance to work with her, which I treasure. Remember the old Food Network–back when real chefs cooked on it? Remember the show Melting Pot? That was Michelle.  (Okay, Bobby Flay, Alton Brown and the Iron Chefs are real culinary pros still on today’s Food Network but otherwise…)

But I digress, when we were busy tasting rose and Dungeness crab–ummm! No, Michelle was not serving Dungeness crab in Miami. That would just be dumb when she has access to the stone crab season and, huh-LO!–conch.  The joy of eating her conch lollipops absolutely dwarfed the most childhood pleasure I have possibly ever taken from a holiday candy cane. Michelle’s husband David Silverman does the wine selections and is a rockstar at it. The delicious roses he served us were a Spanish and a Napa Valley–two totally different taste experiences.  Ours tonight is Pret a Boire (that means “ready to drink” in French) also from Napa, made by the wine goddess Heidi Barrett.

Enjoy this little bit of inspiration to sip the last of your 2012 roses this holiday season–a great pick if you do the traditional (to Italians, at least) Christmas Eve meal of all seafood. You’ve heard of Christmas in July–so how about summer time at Christmas! Then afterwards you can cozy up by the fire with a glass of Port like we did with our Michy’s dessert, and get the best of both seasons.

I think that the best gifts for wine lovers are an experience–preferably one they can share with friends and loved ones because that’s what wine is about!  So here are my picks for the best, most shareable wine gift “experiences”:

• Banfi Rosa Regale Brachetto sparkling with dark chocolate.  The bottle is beautiful and so is the wine: rose petals and raspberries in the glass. Slip the bottle and a bar of dark chocolate into a little wine gift bag and you’ve got the most delicious, festive, unique gift.  My favorite chocolate pairings with this wine are the Godiva 85% Santo Domingo bar, Vosges Moe’s Bar (with bacon), and Lindt Excellence 90% Cacao–super-dark and intense.  Check out the fun Rosa Regale video tasting note that I did with Banfi’s proprietress, Cristina Mariani-May when the wine launched as one of my selections on Delta Air Lines.
• Rioja Reserva and Spanish Manchego cheese. Really any quality Rioja Reserva will make a lusty, savory match with Manchego, a firm sheep’s milk cheese that in my experience never met a wine it didn’t love, but of course loves its own kind – Spanish reds – the most.  Some great Rioja Reservas to look for: El Coto de Imaz, Marques de Riscal, Muga, and La Rioja Alta.
• Krug Grande Cuvee Champagne and popcorn. Feeling flush? This is the Champagne that lured me off Wall Street and into wine. You need a Wall Street salary to drink it often, but as a special-occasion/special-gift wine this is really unbeatable.  I adore it.  For this reason my husband John calls it his “dog house” wine meaning that if he’s in there, a bottle of this will get him out:) At least you can dollar-cost-average with the popcorn!

Every one of these wines of course deserves a great glass to make the most of the experience. In this video I share with you a section from my video wine course on what makes a great wine glass.  Speaking of gifts, you can enjoy special holiday savings on video wine course subscriptions through December 31, 2013.  Cheers to that!

Are you smarter than a would-be Master Sommelier? Win The ONE stemware!

Read the tasting clues in this post and take the Quiz to see if you can guess the wines we served based on our pro challengers’ descriptions.  The winner will get a prize set of The ONE wine glasses.  (To store your score for prize eligibility, you’ll need to create a free profile.)  If there are multiple top-scorers, I’ll draw a final winner from that group.  (Enter by midnight Pacific Standard Time on November 15, 2013 to be eligible for the prize.)  Good luck!

The Top Taster New York City blind wine challenge winner is Joshua Nadel from Andrew Carmellini’s Lafayette Restaurant.  Both Joshua and the restaurant displayed tour de force performances during the New York City Wine and Food Festival—worthy of a future blog post.

But read on, blind taster for your chance to win some snazzy stemware:  Top Taster is a blind wine tasting challenge that showcases the city’s top Sommelier talent – including some of my Master Sommelier colleagues – and gives consumer attendees a fascinating window into the mysteries of blind tasting 6 world class wines.  Actually, it is seven wines counting a “warm-up wine” served to prep the pro challengers for the task of identifying 6 wines blind in 25 minutes, and to give the ticketed guests a mini-lesson into how blind-tasting is done.  The stakes? Two round-trip business/first class tickets anywhere in the Lower 48 courtesy of NYCWFF sponsor Delta Air Lines.  (I’m proud to choose the wines for Delta’s Business Elite service, and even prouder that at a festival full of events devoted to celebrity chefs and winemakers, they sponsor this celebration of sommeliers.)  The consumer bracket was also eligible for air tickets—two for the winner with the most correct guesses for the grape and country of each wine, and two more for a “lucky loser” selected by a random drawing from all the consumer answer sheets.  With the great wines (read on for the descriptions, and a taste of how the somm’s figured it out), the chance to rub elbows with top sommeliers, and the chance for tickets, it’s no surprise every one of the 60 available seats was sold out.

My co-hosts for the panel were three of New York City’s newest Master Sommeliers—Laura Maniec from Corkbuzz Wine Studio (a great wine bar and great place to practice your blind tasting with all of their selections by the glass) and Laura Williamson from Restaurant Jean-Georges, plus our token male John Ragan from Union Square Hospitality Group.  (Dustin Wilson from Eleven Madison Park couldn’t make it thanks to a bum leg and a packed schedule.)

The ten Advanced Sommeliers tee’d up for the professional challenge are just that—having passed their Advanced-level exam from the Court of Master Sommeliers they are all intensely training to take the next and top level, the Master Sommelier Diploma exam.  Consequently, they are just amazing blind-tasters.  They are also great teachers and showmen, as the “warm-up” wine tasting revealed.  With my panel introduced, Laura Maniec took charge, calling on three of the pros seated in the front row in rapid succession to analyze the wine—sight, scent, taste, initial and final conclusion of the grape, region, quality level and vintage—live, in front of the dumbstruck consumer crowd.  That might seem like a dirty trick designed to create reality TV-style drama and stress.  But in fact, Master Sommelier candidates are quite used to this.  All three parts of the Master Sommelier test—theory, service and blind tasting–are oral, a format that ably tests a candidate’s depth of knowledge and grace under pressure and thus is perfect for a professional whose job puts them on their feet and on-stage all the time.

Before starting off with the practice wine (a red), Joshua set the mood for the whole event, displaying for all his formidable schnozz in profile. Obviously it served him well, and set the crowd up for a fun romp of an afternoon rather than a snobby and stiff tasting.  The pros were unfazed by the rowdiness and dug right in to the warm-up wine.   The visual analysis: transparent ruby color with a pink rim and moderate viscosity based on the speed of the “legs” trailing down the sides of the glass suggested a thin-skinned varietal.  The nose and palate of red fruits in the under-ripe family such as red currants and cranberries, and snappy acidity, gentle tannic tug and hint of earth, suggested Pinot Noir from a cooler terroir and a subtle approach—old world or new?  Morgan Harris from CorkBuzz took it home—positing a young Pinot Noir from Oregon’s Willamette Valley from the 2011 vintage.  It was a French red Burgundy, Bouchard’s Beaune-Greves 2010, making Morgan’s guess of the cool Willamette Valley a laudable miss.

Now we were ready to start the six-wine blind challenge.

I decided to cut the time from 25 minutes to 20, to amp the challenge for the pros and give us more time for the analysis and reveal of the wines.  Ready to taste along?

White Wine 1 – Laura Maniec called this one “tricky” and she was right.  Pale straw yellow and moderate viscosity could be a host of young wines, so going straight to the nose, the citrus, apple, stony minerality and low-moderate influence of new oak seemed to eliminate aromatic varietals, subtler old world grapes, and “big” new world whites—yay!  Or did it?  The palate had unexpected richness—old world or new? A subtle but long finish suggested fine quality but where to settle? A classic grape or an outlier?  Every pro challenger got the grape right, and nearly all of them the region.   Will you?

White Wine 2 – John Ragan, MS took over here.  This was a tough-y, especially since for the pros in my after-kids-bedtime haze of creating the tasting sheets I left off the right grape from the choices–aack!  “Just don’t count it” in the scoring was John’s on-the-fly advice, and we didn’t.  Still, many of the pros got it based on its classical profile:  straw yellow color with some gold glints, moderate-plus viscosity.  Moderate-plus body and acidity, with ripe pear, a hint of honey, some subtly savory celery-lentil notes, and a clean wet-rocks minerality.  No obvious oak presence, neutral barrels if any. Good luck!

White Wine 3 – Lots of sighs of relief for this “banker” wine that a lot of the consumers guessed correctly as well.  Pale watery-straw color, intense green apple and lime with notes of passion fruit and grassiness, and no evidence of oak. It could only be…

Red Wine 1 – Hello, deep purple! With a fuschia-pink rim and moderate-plus viscosity in the purple-stained tears clinging to the sides of the glass.  Very forward sweet dark raspberry fruit, eucalyptus and coconut notes (from oak?), plush integrated tannins.  Another banker based on the fact that every pro taster guessed it right.  Can you?

Laura Williamson, MS coached the group on these last two, pushing for discipline and speed in their oral analysis.  The candidates were slowing down and ruminating for too long–something you can’t afford to do in the real Masters blind taste test.

Red Wine 2 – The dark-centered ruby with garnet-brick glints at the rim indicated bottle age.  Toffee, Bourbon-barrel and sweet spice scents suggested American oak; sweet tobacco and leather on the mouth-filling palate confirmed a style of wine aged in barrel and bottle.  Although there was still lots of dark fruit, the scents of turned earth on the nose, palate and finish sealed it as…what do you think?

Red Wine 3 – A classically paradoxical wine—you can see through it, and there is a yellowish brick-tinged rim, but the bruised plum fruit and sweet balsamic flavors come wrapped in gripping, tarry tannins.  Medium-plus body, long truffly earthy finish; it’s a classic example of…

How did our consumer tasters do?  The winner Cathy Callahan, a Manhattan banker, got 6 wines out of 6 correct.  With that palate, I guess she could do what I did and quit her finance job for a wine career.  My husband John got five out of six correct fair and square; I don’t tell him what the wines are, of course.  For him that was a slightly off day as he frequently gets them all!