699 Bottles Of Wine On The Wall

I am faced with a conundrum. Do I actually whinge about the task I had this weekend or do I go about my merry way. Well since it is 10:16 PM here in California and I have not finished reading this weeks Barron's, I will not have much time to impress you with my suppositions for the week.

So let me tell you about my weekend. Let's scroll back to Thursday when we were still celebrating our high from playing the famous Riviera Country Club. Yeah, that was cool. I also found out that I was just a couple of blocks away from one of our readers (The Mysterious Robert S.) when we were chowing down Pizza at Mozzo's.

Anyway Devin and I had a nice lunch with State Senator Mimi Walters, and let me tell you she is the real deal. A wonderful person who cares and is very frustrated with the state of current affairs in Sacramento. I have only been the politico game for a few years and I assumed Senator Walter was there to pitch us on her next endeavor. As she explained in her invite, she just wanted to thanks us for our support over the last couple of years.

I even volunteered to help her war chest for what ever her next run might be and she politely told me to be patient, but thanks. She and Devin talked about our kids, school teachers, sports, and some issues regarding physical therapy, a state bill that Senator Walters was instrumental in shutting down. A great lunch and Mimi go to meet the owner of the place we were dining. Some guy name Dave Hanna.

While we were enjoying our lunch, some friends of our daughters were in Catalina on their first day of the PADI Open Water Program. Our good friend, employee and reader Ted was instilling divine scuba knowledge.

We got a message to him and asked if he would like to join us, the parents of the young ladies (also readers-the parents that is) at Hanna's for dinner. They made it all six of us had a great night.

Friday we took a bit of a sleep in and got right to work on our project. You see the last item left from the catastrophe was the wine room. It is basically finished (though we found a few items that needed tweaking) so it was time to bring about 700 bottles of wine back into the Chateau Cronin.

I started about 9:00 and we worked until about 4:00 moving and inventorying wine. If you want to look at the inventory, you can go to cellartracker.com and look up ewineguy, that is my screen name. By 4:00, I was done and looked forward to a nice father son night as Devin was off to the Orange County Fairground to see Blake Shelton. Manchild and I enjoyed a downloaded version of Source Code. Good movie, but a bit of a funky ending.

Saturday, it was off to have breakfast with the golf buddies. It was good to catch up with them for a while. Ben met up with us as well, as he had volunteered to help out on the wine project. I also had a family breakfast to go to with the family who had just had their daughters certified to go scuba diving. So it was off to second breakfast with the group. It was nice and I received a nice card for arranging the classes with Ted. We all talked about heading the Dominican Republic for a nice Dive Holiday.

(In all seriousness, I am blessed to work in a sport like ours. There are a lot of cool jobs and activities, but when I sat there and watched these to beautiful young ladies go on about all they had seen in just two days at Catalina and how it has excited them, scuba diving is a magical life changing activity that really trumps just about anything else I can think of. Way Cool.)

Then it was back to Chateau Cronin and with the help of Ben M. we got a few loads of wine moved and tediously inventoried. Seriously, Thank You Ben. It would have been a much tougher project without you (and Jessica).

We had to wrap up about 3:30 as Devin Jack and I had a spectacular wedding to head off to. It was in Laguna Beach and about 150 people showed up for the nicest ceremony. We have a couple of readers Mike and Patti D., who invited us to the blessed event as their Daughter Linday and her about to be husband Andy stood before the crowd as the sun set on their life as they knew and the dawn broke on their new life together. (I can' take full credit for that, I think one of the wedding party may have said something like that during one of the speeches.) The weather, which did look a little worrisome warmed up and turned out to be perfect. As they were saying their vows, a couple of dolphin could be seen a few hundred yards off shore and a herd (possibly a flock) of pelicans came cruising by.

Mom and dad looked wonderful and I think Dad may have only lost it for a minute or two during the father daughter dance. The food was great, and the crowd was having a good time as we did the various dance rituals. What a wonderful night.

This morning, we did not make it to church as I was reading the hymnal in the Chateau Cronin Chapel. By 8:00 this morning I was tackling the wine project. Ben and his wonderful daughter Jess hooked up with me and after two trips, got all of the wine out of my office, 7 months and one week after the flood. We wrapped up, (actually I said enough) about 6:15 tonight and Ben's other daughter Lauren and her boyfriend all came over for Pizza. I will admit the wine I picked out was a little over the top, but after moving 700 bottles, I had to have a decent pour.

For the white wine lover we had 2005 Lucien Le Moine Chassagne-Montrachet 1er Cru La Romanée but the better match for the pizza was the 2001 Vitanza Brunello di Montalcino Riserva. The Chassagne was incredible with a sharp crisp apply appricottie feel and taste. There were really mild florals, peaches and pears on the nose. The acid was well balanced and did not have the big minerally feel some of the big burgs have. Scrumptious. The Vitanza we dark and purply and gripped the glass well. On the nose, like most sangiovsese, we got some plum and cherries but there was more happening there. In the mouth, it was warm and luscious. Chewy with a currant feel to it as well smokey meaty flavours. I enjoyed a glass for desert tonight. I would need about a case more to ignore all the shenanigans happening in Washington.