MONTEVINA ZINFANDEL PORT

SANDY MCINTOSH writes in:

The Atlantic Beach Club is a private club on the ocean at Atlantic Beach, New York. Their wine tasting dinners are extremely popular and difficult to attend because the chef limits the number of diners each time to 50. After several attempts, we finally made it to a table last Thursday. Featured wines that night were from Montevina winery, which is located in Plymouth, in the Shenandoah Valley of Amador County, CA. Their wines on offer—the Nebbiolo Rosito, Sauvignon Blanc, Pinot Grigio, and Trinchero Merlot among them—were quite good, but not spectacular.

However, the wine that interested me most was their dessert wine, a Zinfandel Port. This one had aromas of black berry, chocolate and orange, and, thus, was quite unlike any European Port I’d ever tried. It is a fortified wine, a defining attribute of any Port, so I suppose they can call it Port, but that’s really a misnomer. Since I’m not much of a Port fan, I would have passed this one by at our local wine shop but might have tried a bottle had it been given a name more evocative of what it actually is: a dessert wine with depth and complexity, attractive on its own merits.

The port was paired well, by the way, with "Ebony and Ivory--New York Cheesecake and Chocolate Mousse covered in Chocolate Ganache." The rest of the menu included cracked lobster tail in a Remoulade sauce, Osso Bucco, swordfish, Mesculan salad with raspberries and Mandarin oranges with a raspberry orange vinaigrette.

*****

Good to hear from Sandy, also a stellar chef and poet who has written about wines in his poems, such as in this below from his new book The After-Death History of My Mother (Marsh Hawk Press, 2005):

According To My Mother (4)

My mother said: "I like this Paisano.
It's good, sour, like Hungarian wine."
I was after information. I refilled her glass to the brim.
"Why didn't you let me meet your relatives?"
I had been to Europe several times
but she'd always refused to tell me where they lived.
"You wouldn't have liked them. They were poor."

Halfway through the bottle I got the courage
to ask about her marriage to the mysterious man in Cincinnati.
"We were so young…" she began, and then nothing.

I refilled her glass. And then glass after glass.
In the end she started talking,
but by morning I'd forgotten it all.

"Say again what happened in Cincinnati," I begged.
She stared at me. "No," she answered.
"We were young and poor.
You wouldn't understand."