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This list is limited, as we just couldn’t taste every wine or food. But we tried really hard. So here are some highlights from the San Diego Bay Wine & Food Festival, 2009 for you:
Tremendous view of San Diego Bay and the bridge to Coronado Island from the Saturday tasting event. Everything tastes better with a view like this.
Fantesca 2002 Cabernet Sauvignon, Napa Valley. First tasted Fantesca at the Wine 2.0 Expo 2009 San Francisco. Enjoyed it then and now. Heidi Barrett is making their wines.
Cavas Valmar Winery Tempranillo, Baja California. I’d never before tasted a wine from Baja, but tasted a number in this festival. We’re going to have to visit the area and the wineries sometime soon. Until we get there, we’ll have to live on the memories, especially of this Tempranillo, which was quite good.
Veramonte Winery Pinot Noir, Chile. Veramonte is owned by Quintessa Winery, from Napa Valley. I had never had or seen a Pinot Noir from Chile (not that I’m anything close to an expert on Chilean wines, actually fairly ignorant). This was surprisingly good.
Peltier Station USB Zin (“Port”). A dessert wine for tech geeks like me, with the “Port” double entendre. And a picture of head trained Zin and the USB port symbol on the label. Aside from the fun marketing, it was enjoyable to drink.
Rosa D’Oro Vineyards. They came all the way down from Lake County, which if you don’t know where that is, it’s the next county north of Napa. Take a look at a map, it’s a long way up there. Nice wines, nice people.
Richard Perry Vineyards. Sheila Perry came to San Diego, and was pouring the ’97 Cabernet Sauvignon from Napa Valley at the Friday night event. Delicious.
Coral Mustang Wines, Tempranillo Rosé. I like good pink wines in the summer, and there just aren’t enough of them. Too often the flavor just gets washed out. Not here.
Calcareous Vineyards, Paso Robles. There were more wineries from the Paso Robles / San Luis Obispo area than any other California region. Calcareous stood out for its name (refers to the soil type for their vineyards), for the winemaker (Damien is from Wales, and who would ever think of a Welsh upbringing as a background for this industry), and for the Mourvedre, which was excellent. We don’t usually find good Mourvedre wines, as the grape is more often used in a Rhone blend (the “M” in a GSM blend). This was really well done.
There were a number of places serving food at the events. Two deserve mention in my mind. The first was a catering company called Dinners by David, who served Nacho Sushi. Take a tortilla chip and spoon onto it a mixture of raw fish, avocado and spices, and put it into your mouth. The flavors went zing, sort of like a ceviche, but different texture.
The second was the Robert Mondavi Winery food and wine pairing. They had Chef Paul Squicciarini from the Orange County Food and Wine Center doing a live cooking demonstration, and serving it for about 50 people at a time, paired with Mondavi wines. Food was great, the cooking demo was great, but the wines could have been better. A lot of fun, and some good discussion of food and wine pairing.
If you didn't attend this year's event, go next year. San Diego in November is very nice, and there's quite a variety of wine and food to have fun with.
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