"Don't judge a book by its cover."

Many years ago I'd read that this idiom came from a time when books were often self published, and the more money one had the more extravagantly bound the book - with leather, with gilded edges - so that it would present the illusion that an expensive looking book might be a better book to read. I don't know if this is true or not, but I confess while capable of bypassing my prejudices, I am indeed a person who responds to packaging.

I'm attracted to design and to visual cues, much more so than I am capable of producing them. I will linger over a good design moment like a good painting, and quickly pass the ones that don't appeal to me. And if I weren't occasionally reminded of the erroneous nature of this, I'd have missed one unbelievably good wine experience.

I haven't eaten meat in a while so I decided to live it up a bit and have hamburgers for dinner. Then I figured since hamburgers might be the closest thing to a full-on red wine moment I get, why not really go for it and open up a bottle? One of my winos slipped this one to me in early winter with the comment, "It's a really good wine."

That man did not lie.

This was an amazing wine experience. This was one gorgeously pleasant wine.

Hated the label. If I walked past this in a store I'd have walked past this in the store. It's too pink or something. That is the ignorance that isn't bliss, just ignorant, and the loss would have been entirely mine.

The burger was pretty good, too. It's on ciabatta bread, there's watercress and lemon and mustard on it, sauteed onions and mushrooms with red pepper, and gorgonzola...frankly, not a horribly bad pairing. But the wine was a-m-a-z-i-n-g.

Dinner: dessert.

The Wine. Last we all got together for dinner we were treated to a wine by a gentleman who cellars here and who also makes very good wine from berries and such indigenous to his home Norway. Last summer we enjoyed the wine made from kumquats, and here we collectively enjoyed this current donation to the cause. In fact, there was a collective gasp, a collective "wow" from everyone, and I was not at all jealous for it, it was a very wow moment. This is a remarkably jammy glass of wine, restrained at just the right moment. Very fresh, very alive, fitting perfectly into the theme of the evening.

Aronia Melanocarpa translated to 'chokeberries,' native to North America as well as Norway and other places. They are currently being studied for their very dense antioxidant quality.

Ripsbaer is so Norwegian I had to Google it in Norwegian and then translate the page back to English. It's a red berry that is part of the Rips family, also called or part of the gooseberry family. Outside of that you're on your own.

The other science experiment. We had split success on this one. Somewhere in all the yogurt stuff I stumbled onto this, roasted feta cheese with thyme-honey, which sounds amazing. So I got some thyme, which is why it's suddenly showing up in everything, it's on my counter so I end up grabbing it every meal. But we haven't cracked the roasted feta code yet, as you can see by the photo. Looks like raw feta, and it pretty much was. still tasted good, though, with the thyme honey, pistachios, and fresh mint.

The conversation. Remember pet rocks? Think we can revive that with free-range rocks?

Dinner, part 4. (the variations)

The wine we opened for dinner was a 2004 Cornell Alto Adige Chardonnay. There is a previous review of this from last summer, and it is still a very nice wine.

Onward to the variations. Here's all the other stuff on the table:

• anchovies, very nice with the beans and olive oil.
• warm hard-boiled eggs with olive oil, red pepper, and thyme, and a little s&p.
• roasted jalapenos, very good mashed into the crostini on top of the garlic and under the beans.
• more fennel cured olives, because I love these things.
• radishes, very good and pretty, not a big hit with this crowd, though.
• meyers lemon.
• fresh mint, which Blogger keeps turning sideways so it's fresh mint turned sideways.

Dinner, part 3. (the main course)

OOPS, I forgot to take pictures. What follows are a series of decimated dishes. Fifteen minutes after these were taken, there was nothing left.

A few summers ago I was in Seattle and discovered these, pea greens. Aren't they crazy? I got these at the Atwater Village farmer's market. Take off all the tougher stems and saute them just a little bit, just enough to soften them. A little olive oil, butter, garlic, salt, and in this case fresh mint.

I cheated - I bought canned beans. Here's how hard this one is. Open a can of cannellini beans. Rinse them off. Dump them in a bowl. Add: dried red pepper flakes, lemon, garlic, olive oil, thyme. Or curry instead of the thyme. Or a million other things. Mash it up with a potato masher.

For the crostini I used a nice ciabatta bread. After they were toasted we rubbed them with fresh garlic and layered the beans-then-greens on top. But variations were adopted along the way.

Dinner, part 2. (appetizer)

One of the science experiments, or obsessions, going on in the kitchen these days is yogurt. Stretch some cheese cloth over a bowl, dump a vat of plain yogurt on it, and stick it in the fridge overnight. In the morning you have Greek yogurt. Yeah, you can buy it that way, but it costs three times more. Also, you can use any-fat yogurt for this. If you stir a little honey into it, and grate a little bit of lemon zest into it, and eat it, you'll die a beautiful death.

So for the appetizer I went with the plain yogurt with a small bit of honey stirred in, served with fennel-cured olives, a wedge of lemon, mint, and drizzled with the olive oil. Fortunate for all, no beautiful deaths. At least not the kind that required clean-up.

Dinner, Part 1. (the olive oil)

This came my way recently. It's olive oil. One of my winos has it shipped from Italy twice a year. You may be thinking: really? You can't just go to the store and buy olive oil like the rest of us? And what I mean by that is that's what I was thinking.

I was, upon presentation, instructed not to cook with it but to make some crostini, rub it with garlic, and drizzle over it the olive oil. I promised to do so, but then I thought I haven't ventured above ground for a while, I have a few bottles of wine to kill, why not have a shindig of it?

So I spent a few weeks working on a menu around the olive oil. It coincided with a few science experiments already going on in my kitchen, so it was actually a very good bit of timing. First, the olive oil.

Silvia and Federico Giuntini Masseti are the current residents of Fattoria Selvapiana. They produce Chianti, a couple of crus. and olive oil.

Very good olive oil. You know when you've had something all your life but this particular time, this particular product, you realize you're tasting it for the first time? That is this. Oh, so this is olive oil. Who knew? It is alive, it tastes like grass, a small bite at the end; it has life in it. We had some Trader Joe's brand olive oil nearby. In comparison it tasted like oil, no dimension, no flavor, no nothing, dead oil. I tried my Whole Foods olive oil, too. Dead. Not this stuff, though, and all the next morning I was cataloging everything on earth it would go well with. After exhausting most of life's flora and fauna, I took a nap and came to work.

May is Bike Month.

(click on to enlarge)

LA Times Magazine: "A Taste of Pinot Paradise"

LA Times Magazine tasted over 30 bottles of Pinot from the Santa Rita Hills Appellation.

Here's their preferred ten.

And here's a bit of back-story on the region.

store dot Korkage dot com

This is Steve. Oh, sorry, I forgot to take a picture of Steve when he was last in. Well, he's taller than I am, younger, has dark hair and is an all-around decent human being. Nice kid.

Though Steve keeps some of his wine here at The Cave, wine storage facilities require different licences for different intents, one of those intents being to set up your own business to sell wine on-line. The closest wine storage that accommodates that is Pacific Wine Distributors in Irwindale. It provides the full array of services one might need for moving and shaking your wine, and this is reflected in its prices. The Cave is the sort of place where your wine just sort of hangs out and ages, kind of like its resident troglodyte, and this is reflected in its prices.

Quite a few conversations in The Cave revolve around selling one's wine and the options for that. Steve's website is up and running and he is now our residential option. Because he cellars here you could get a better deal than with the usual suspects, so when you talk to him let him know you cellar here, too.

http://store.korkage.com/

The Cave is OPEN Easter Sunday

Regular hours, 2 - 7 pm.