St. Paddy's Day Wines

It's been a relatively eventful week for me, and I feel like I'm permanently catching up here! Today I started stirring up the dirt in my soon-to-be garden at Henry's house, adding peat moss to keep it from solidfying into the granite that it developed into last summer after a couple rains, I got a crown put on and will actually have a few months without having to see my dentist, and tasted rice pudding for the first time (yum!). And all of this was after celebrating St. Patrick's Day last night by attending a wine tasting dinner with Henry (a birthday present from his sister).

I love wine tastings. I generally just enjoy wine, but it's always hard for me to justify picking out a new, completely unknown bottle to try when there are a few nearby that I know will be worth the money. Wine tastings are my way of compromising...I pay a little more than I would for a bottle, but I generally find at least one or two wines that I like. And along the way, there's usually some pretty good food and knowledge!

The wine dinner last night was at Spill the Wine in Minneapolis. I had never been there before and to tell the truth, I'm still not sure what I think about it. The food we got was fantastic (deconstructed lasagna, goat cheese crustini, a citrus salad with passionfruit vinagrette, and homemade vanilla ice cream with peach port reduction) but the wine simply didn't measure up. Now, a large part of this might have been because the tasting was specifically focused around wines from Sonoma, and I haven't yet found a California wine that I really love. No wine was particularly bad, but I also didn't find a single one that I planned on buying...not a good track record. Generally I at least love the last wine I taste, even if I only love it because it's the seventh or eighth glass I've tasted. But, the restaurant was beautiful, the staff was extremely friendly and fun, and it is a place that I might be willing to try again--for a dinner, if not necessarily a wine tasting event. The biggest downfall to me (other than the so-so wine) were the people--I was surrounded by a lot of people who quite obviously drank wine because upper class, sophisticated people drink wine. If you can tune out the tables next to you, your evening here will be far better! But, in the future for my wine events, I'll probably stick with the Cooks of Crocus Hill, as I have yet to attend an event there that isn't fantastic.