December 19, 2007

Last night, we had dinner over at our friends Gregg and Karen’s place. It was great seeing them and also seeing Michele and Jimmy, their kids. I was very glad to see how well they were doing. Gregg and I have worked together for many years and are great friends. Karen is Gregg’s wife and is also good friends with me and Kim. To make our get together even more momentous, Gregg, and subsequently Karen, has been on a diet: no steak, no wine, no chocolates. And that’s what we had for dinner. We brought Gregg and his family a special box of my chocolates and confections. He provided the excellent steak and wine.

One of Gregg’s hobbies is fish. He has many multi-gallon fish tanks. Before dinner, we looked at his fish and watched him feed them. I put my hand in on an electric catfish and felt a mild jolt. Gregg had wanted me to try and squeeze him to get the full jolt. I demurred. Instead, I thought it better to eat dinner. So, we sat around the table and had a good burgundy and a Dehlinger Chardonnay, 1994 while eating cheese, crackers and just baked bread. We waited for the coals on the barbecue to become hot enough to grill our steaks.

I banked the barbecue and we seasoned our steaks. We had two aged steaks and two unaged steaks. I took one aged and one unaged and Kim and I seasoned them. Gregg and Karen took the other two. The idea was to cook both steaks, split them in half and then try them with the surprise Burgundy of the night, a 1988 DRC Richbourg, a truly beautiful wine. If you put the search string into Google, 1998 DRC Richbourg, you’ll See how tough it is to find it.

Before we had left CA, we drank a 1989 La Tache from my collection. So, for my first trip back to CA, Gregg pulled out all the stops. The steaks were very nice with the Richbourg, an aristocrat of burgundy, when Lalou Bize was still in charge of the domain.

After, we had the steaks with grilled asparagus, with salad and some very good cheese and bread, yummer, we repaired to watch the large moray eel that Gregg has. It was dark with white spots. I fed it a shrimp by grabbing the shrimp in a plastic tong and making the dead shrimp wiggle and “swim” to attract the eel. He wasn’t that hungry so he only ate one shrimp. The moray was about three to four feet in length.

At this point we had switch to a very worthy port, a 1977 Dow. (Jeez. What a typo. Gregg pulled out the 1977 not a non declared vintage. Gregg pointed this out to me with the words, “Who taught me about declared years. You think I’d pulled out a non-declared vintage. No Gregg I would think not. 😉 Gregg kept on saying, I wish I had a Fonseca. But we drank them all up 7 to 10 years ago, while smoking Cuban cigars. Sigh. This Dow was very good. It reminded me of my Taylor ’63. it was that good.

Then we played name that tune as Gregg picked out songs on the guitar. His newest hobby. He’d been playing righty for 15 months and had to switch to lefty about 6 months ago so he was plinking away and doing a pretty good job. I would have had some major problems playing, say my cello, lefty. Ouch. But he did a good job playing both cords on the acoustic and the electric as well as picking the melody line. It was fun listening to him plink away. Truly Gregg, it was.

Then completely exhausted, satiated, and happy, we went home to our new hotel, the Wild Palms, in Sunnyvale, close to Gregg’s and closer to Napa. You may not be able to go home, but you can visit good friends and make new memories. That’s what this dinner was, new memories, new fun, good times. This whole trip was one for the scrap book or the blog. Unfortunately, we didn’t take pictures. Gregg, you’ll have to at least take pictures of your house and family and your self and the now empty wine bottle. I’ll put them in my scrap book or rather on the blog.

Thank you for making this visit great. We came to congratulate Adina on her success on graduating and on getting a great job right out of college. We couldn’t be prouder. I’m just glad we had time to also see old friends and eat great steaks and drink fantastic wine.

As you can surmise, another of Gregg’s hobbies is collecting and drinking great wine and eating great food with the wine. I’m glad he thought of us and I’m glad we were able to indulge his hobbies. It was fun but more importantly, it was memorable. Thanks Gregg and Karen. Now to make things even better, you need to come an visit us in our new home. See you there.