Wine: St. Estephe: Chateau Les Ormes de Pez: 1994

This is another bottle I picked up in the Old and Rare section at K and L for right around 20.00. Forget what we ate with it, but recall it tasting very french after the Dehlinger Syrah. Bright red color, straight-forward strcuture, with a leafy aspect that I enjoy in lighter cabernet-based wines.

The remarkable thing here, and with a surprising number of 10+ year old Bordeaux, is just how affordable they can be at K and L. The complexity of the drinking experience, if not necessarily the wine itself, simply increases with 10 years of bottle age.

Restaurants: Oakland: "B"

Ate at "B" for lunch yesterday. The restaurant is located across from Cafe 817 in Oakland's Old Town district, and is owned by a very nice guy named Kevin who also owns Box Lunch Company in San Francisco.

When we sat down for lunch, we noticed that between the six of us we had 3 different menus. When we brought it up, Kevin sat down at our table and explained that the menus were very expensive to print up each week (the cool looking "B" that is there logo is embossed into each of them), talked us through what was and wasn't on the menu, and described what was good and available that day.

This is the sort of thing that you will either find charming or annoying, but know going in that the restaurant is still finding its way - they were also out of the first two beers I ordered.

Our waitress --standing underneath a circular chandelier fashioned from bright white antlers-- offered up that they had plans to stay open later on weekends, to have DJ's, and generally bring people to downtown Oakland.

Just in case the food and Ridge Lytton Springs Zinfandel for 46.00 a bottle might not be enough. I saw a good range of dishes, including the following:

· Slow-roasted baby artichokes
· Wood oven roasted Calamari, with chili aioli
· Meat on a stick (Painted Hills Beef), with chili aioli
· French Fries with herbs and garlic
· Asian pear and Brie Sandwhich
· Roasted beet salad

Fruit: Apples: Crimson Gold (crab)

Picked these up on a whim last week at the Grand Lake Farmers' Market. It had been expressly communicated to me that if I were bringing apples home, I'd be eating them on my own. My wife was willing to entertain the idea of pears, but just wasn't ready to acknowledge the departure of summer in the way that 3 pounds of Fuji apples can make you acknowledge.

The sign over these apples called out in black magic marker that they were "tart not bitter". And this was true. I have just a few memories of pulling crab apples off a tree and biting into something that was wholly tannic, and tasted slightly of dirt.

I've had full-sized Crimson Golds before and been underwhelmed by both the taste and texture. These were only pleasantly tart, already sweet, and redolent of archetypal apple.

Wine: Syrah: Dehlinger: Goldridge Vineyard 2000

My first exposure to Dehlinger wine came about 3 years ago, stumbling across a few bottles of 1986 Cabernet at North Berkeley Wine. I'd dropped by North Berkeley just after they'd moved into their new digs at MLK and Cedar, and hadn't really got their collection - a lot of which was still in boxes that crowded the aisles. A year or so later I came back by and they seemed to have a lot of older wine that didn't cost much more than current vintages. I picked up some bordeaux, including a '64 Chateau Beychevelle, and one bottle of the '86 Dehlinger cab.

It was inky stuff, with more vegetal character than I'd grown accustomed to in wine from the Russian River area. It had been just over 35.00 a bottle though, and I promptly went back and picked up 3 more. It was elegant in a way that was difficult to articulate, something to do with the perverse fecundity of rotting leaves.


Onto 2000. I picked up this Syrah at K & L for 39.99 - they indicate that the wine originally retailed for 59.99. My notes and Robert Parker's aren't all that different, though I question whether a wine this big and deep can objectively be described as "medium-bodied".