Drinking with Birds

I have over the last week drunk a lot of wonderful things with birds, in various locations, doing various things. It had been some time since I sat down with a bird and had an evening of good times, an evening filled with polite conversation and delicious wine.  Or for that matter an evening that was saturated with romance and gentle flirtations. Or even an evening filled with business and future developments and talks of the nows-and-the-maybes. Not even an evening spent lying around the house eating, drinking and reading the this-and-thats. It had been a long time since any of these evenings with birds had happened.  Until this past week when the birds found me, gloriously I might add, and we had evenings together.  

Now I'll say I wasn't actually dining with live birds.  That would be strange, strange indeed. Strange being said, I have no personal commentary on the dinner etiquette of a live bird, as I have never engaged one in the usual dinner conversation topics. I have to say I've never actually had a live bird at the dinner table to even to offer this situation.

The birds I'm referring to here were the dead and beautifully prepared kind. My evenings with birds started in San Francisco over Thanksgiving with a beautiful girl and a perfect bottle of 1990 Château Léoville-Barton. My lovely date for the weekend had brought this from her cellar ( hot date...moly!) with the intention of drinking it at Zuni Café. Zuni Café is known for a lot of things, good spirit and cocktail selections, homemade ingredients, but most of all they make one super badass whole roasted chicken. God this thing was good.  On the side came a killer bread salad (a touch acidic here to cut the fat...perfect), pine nuts and red mustard greens. If you stuff all these things into your mouth at once it's just a gush of freaking happiness, like for real, serious. The Léoville-Barton knew what was going on here. The warmth of the vintage in its red currents, and the poise of its Grand Cru class allowed the chicken to sing. I'm pretty sure they had fantastic food-n-wine sex in my mouth.

Having rolled up to Napa/Sonoma over the next few days (seriously rained here from October 12th to 14th....yikes) I met up with a friend in Sonoma to have dinner and discuss a new wine label he's about to launch. We took a table at the Farmhouse Inn, a little, and very exciting restaurant a short ways north of Forestville. My generous host selected a bottle of 2005 Arnot-Roberts Clajeux Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon. So much mineral here and so light on its toes, what a wonderful wine! Such fantastic acidity and so very balanced it literally massaged the guinea fowl I ordered down my throat. A big cab and bird you say? Hell yeah! This Arnot-Roberts wasn't so far removed in terms of its class from that big ol' Léoville a couple nights prior. Seriously delicious. The guinea fowl by the way blew my mind, every piece of my mind was scattered across the dining room floor, oozing with bird-goodness. Seriously delicious.

A week in Napa and Sonoma meant getting home to laundry, emails, a friend's wedding and you guessed it, a roasted chicken. Down time for Bradley meant firing a seasoned bird, complete with stuffing I might add, into the oven, drinking some wine and reading the newspaper. Popping the 2006 Julian Reynolds blend of alicante bouschet, trincadeira and syrah from Alentejano I found everything I needed. Perfumed scents of oak, sweet red currents and a very supple structure meant I drank more of it than I should have and ate way more of the chicken than is advisable.  

Delicious birds, you have reminded me how well you pair with wine. I'll find you first next time...and eat all of you!