Labor Day Weekend

[dreamshark]

Weather could have been better, but it was a decent 3-day break from work. Continuing our holiday in town theme for the summer, Richard and I had two "dates." Dinner and a movie on Sunday. Dinner at Tejas in Edina, one of our favorite restaurants. I'd just read a tip in the Sunday paper on wine ordering for dummies. According to this article, California wines are never a good deal - if you want a good one you have to pay a lot for it - but you can get pretty good Chilean wines relatively cheap. Also, they say, Chardonnay has been debased in quality by its popularity, so you should order Sauvignon Blanc instead. So I bought a glass of Chilean Sauvignon Blanc (Veramonte, I think) and it was delicious. Really, really good. If I knew where to buy it, I'd buy a case. Well, maybe a bottle or two. We also loved the movie, "The Illusionist."

Monday the weather finally broke and everybody in the city went outside. We biked over to Minnehaha Falls for the free Bluegrass Festival, and had a fine time. Bluegrass pretty much always sounds good outside, but we were particularly taken with a band called Tangled Roots and bought one of their albums. Split an order of surprisingly tasty ribs and chicken from a food stand. Biked home. A perfect afternoon and evening. The nice thing about rotten weather is that it feels so good when it stops.

Did we do anything on Saturday? I don't remember. I think maybe the high point of that day was a trip to the gym, where I indulged in a double dose of exercise, sampling pretty much everything in the gym, followed by a soak in the hot tub and a swim.

Comments

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Sauvignon Blanc is a very different, and in many ways less interesting, grape than Chardonnay, but still, a good simple wine is often far better than a badly made wine from potentially better ingredients. I really like Chardonnay best in the old original Chablis wines (from the actual region in France).

I've heard Chile talked up a lot, but have had mixed results so far. I had a very nice Malbec, I think it was, with Corwin and Dee over at Khyber Pass the other week.