Wine Dinner with my Grandparents

Wine Dinner with the Grandparents!

On Easter I planned to have dinner with my grandparents and my boyfriend, so I decided this would be the most opportune time to knock out a wine dinner with extra points for dining with parental figures.

My grandmother prepared a lobster crostini for an appetizer with a refreshing extra dry Prosecco from the Beviamo winery in Italy. On the nose it smelled of green apple and citrus, with a hint of pear. On the palate, the drink started with a crisp green apple fruit, with hints of peaches and apricots on the mid palate, and then a very crisp dry finish.  I feel like this sparkling beverage would be fit for a palate cleanser as well.

The spread on the crostini was heavy with cream cheese and chives, which did not compliment the Prosecco particularly well. However, when I drank the wine with a large hunk of lobster, the wine really brought out the sweetness of the shellfish. As predicted, then Prosecco had a palate cleansing effect.

My grandmother started grilling the steaks on the stove in the kitchen, and about two minutes into cooking them the power went out! So this turned into a two part ordeal. We waited about 45 minutes (til about seven o’clock) to see if the power would come back on and at this point my grandfather got very frustrated. He is used to eating at 6pm every evening on the dot so as you can imagine the poor man was STARVING so he made a very adamant argument that we to go to Outback Steakhouse for the main course and then return for the desert and pairing my grandmother had already made.

We all ordered steak and the “Little Bloomy Cabernet Sauvignon” to pair with it, and I’ll go out on a limb and guess it was an Australian wine. I didn’t want to pester the poor waitress to bring me the bottle so I do not have a photo of it. I feel absolutely ridiculous writing a review on this wine. It’s difficult to take a commercial restaurant house wine seriously, especially when it has as ridiculous a name as Little Bloomy. Overall this was a very basic red wine. It had hints of blackberry and cherry on the nose, and had those same flavors on the palate. I would never order this wine again because I prefer my reds to be a little peppery and this was just an extremely basic sweet red. It paired as expected with the steak, bringing out some of the greasier flavors of the meet and accentuating the portions of the steak that were a little more rare.

Luckily, my grandmother is the kindest woman in the world and gave me my filet mignon that she was going to cook to take home so I could cook it myself and experience it with the nice bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon she had procured for the occasion.  I cooked my filet rare in a skillet, and when it needed about one more minute of cooking on each side I splashed some of the wine into the pan and let it simmer so the meat would absorb the flavors a little. Once it was done I also drizzled the remaining wine/grease combination left in the pot over the steak and it was hands down the best steak I have ever eaten in my entire life. That’s really saying something; I eat a lot of steak.

The 2010 Ménage a Trois Cabernet Sauvignon from California also had hints of cherry and blackberry on the nose, but on the palate had a much creamier richness than the crappy Little Bloomy cab sauv I had before.  This wine also had some slight peppery taste to it on the finish that I liked a lot. The wine came out beautifully with my steak; it was cooked so perfectly it practically melted in my mouth. With the wine the rareness of the steak was brought out even more and so were the cherry and blackberry notes on the wine finish.

Now on to a lovely strawberry shortcake that my grandmother and I prepared that was paired with a 2013 La Crema Chardonnay from the Sonoma Coast. This chardonnay was a little different from others that I’ve had because it had a little more of a creamy aspect to it that helped bring out different flavors. As you would expect you could smell oak in the wine with some citrus hints and floral aspects. With the strawberry shortcake the wine brought out more of the fresh strawberry flavors, and muted some of the sweetness in the strawberry glaze and angel food cake.

Even though this dinner was interrupted with a power outage I still consider it a success.