We don’t go out much, my husband and I.  We’re generally happy to get wine, beer, groceries and settle in for a quiet weekend.  This weekend was lovely, gorgeous weather, and thanks to work being the emotion-draining experience it is, I had no energy to actually go out and enjoy it.  So we drank and cooked and watched television.  

The wine for the weekend, in addition to a box of Franzia chianti and a case of Leinenkugel’s fall sampler (no, we didn’t drink *all* of that….yet), was Clos LaChance 2009 Chardonnay (Santa Cruz Mountains).  It was chosen because he wanted a chardonnay and it had a hummingbird on the label. My mother-in-law, Betty, loved humming birds.    

This was opened to go with the meal of the weekend, gyros, made with Alton Brown’s recipe for gyro meat and tzatziki.(note: I’d back off on the rosemary in this recipe, to about a half a tablespoon).  The wine was a very good choice for this.  It was intense enough to stand up to very garlicky meat and sauce (I essentially consider garlic a vegetable), but not tasting like one was sucking on a piece of lumber.  The nose struck me first, very much like pineapple soda.  Now, there seems to be people in the world who like that stuff and those who don’t, very much like there are people who like mushrooms and not, anchovies and not, etc.  Like the wine’s website says, the taste is largely carmel and vanilla with tropical fruits.  There’s enough minerality and acidity to keep it from being cloying.  This was probably the best chardonnay we’ve had since stumbling upon the 1996 Meridian which was excellent. 

Watched a good, for the Syphy Channel (who would have thought that I would be able to tell my 12 year old self “there’s nwo a channel supposedly for science fiction but you’ll rarely watch it because it sucks”), movie, Dragon Sword. It’s also known as George and the Dragon.  It has a scad of aging action star types, Val Kilmer, Patrick Swazye, and James Purefoy (always loved him from A Knight’s Tale, another wonderfully fun movie).  It was a hoot, with plenty of humor scattered through out, but not a comedy.  

Wine, good food and a fun movie with my husband, just what the doctor ordered.