Beer, wine and sangria... What have we been doing?

The Guilded Otter

For my blog followers and my twitter followers who do not follow me on Facebook, here is a make-up post with all the pictures that are currently on my FB account and the Life By Chocolate FB account. There is even more on the Greenville Arms 1889 Inn and Hudson River Valley Art Workshops and of course our Wee Forest Folk store. So that should be most of what we have on Facebook.

Now, what have we been doing besides making chocolate and brewing beer and of course knitting and quilting? We've been dining and having great wines and beers.

Let me start from most recent. We went to The Guilded Otter in New Paltz.



We tried their sampler and then decided that the Winter Wassail was the one that we wanted to drink. The Crimson Lager was also good as was their Altbier and their Imperial Stout and the porter. Mostly all their beers are good. I bought a growler of the Winter Wassail.

They make a great sandwich. Here is my love, looking at the menu.



We've also been drinking some stellar wines. Here is a montage or rather a pictorial of the wine we've had over the last few months. These will be in reverse order of drinking them, from latest to lastest, if that's a word. Which I know it is not.

Very super yummy.

When I first opened this rosé I thought it was gone. It wasn't. It did take a few minutes, about 30 of them, to open and be delightful. I highly recommend this nice rosé.

One of the wonderful meals Kim made for us. I'm definitely going to steal the slaw. Great. Tasty and yummified.

The Hosmer was good and the Heron Hill was great though I think the Heron Hill needs a lot more time.

Ooooh La La, as my French friends would say, this wine was superb. It had honey and other complex flavors on the finish. Here's what I said about it when I was drinking it. "another stunner from the collection. Sauzet and a 1er cru. A wonderful wine that went well with the gigli we had with cheese sauce. Basically a goat cheese, mascarpone sauce."

These are the glasses we had the wine in.

I couldn't detect the honey and honeysuckle flavors I was expecting on the finish with a trace of caramel. When the wine opened, it was beautiful and delicious with all the flavors you'd expect from a 1er cru Meursault of this caliber.

We've also been making a great drink with the St. Germain and Apple Cider, local good stuff, cinnamon heated. I use almost a 1/2 and 1/2 mixture of St. Germain and Apple Cider. Very nice. Sorry, no sangria so this will have to do. It makes a very good winter cocktail of about wine strength.

A most lovely Chardonnay. This was a great drink. I've been taking out wines that I thought might be over the hill because when I opened this Chablis I thought it was already over the hill.

This was the bottle of wine that started all the problems. I thought it was bad. But I was wrong. It just took a long time to open. At least 1 hour. This wine was very gravely and very austere and had no fruit at all but after it had opened, it was a very typical Chablis with plenty of fruit though not as much as other Burgundies.

I'll leave you with two more. This is a great dessert wine and one of Kim's favorites. We had this with Roquefort and other blue cheeses.



I bought this next Sauterne back in the 80's and back when people were more concerned with Terroir than the skill in making the wine. This bottle of wine was sold to me as "contiguë à Yquem" that is the vineyard for this wine was contiguous with Yquem, the greatest Sauterne.

All of Burgundy is an example of this belief that Terroir isn't everything but the only thing and how wrong that can be. Clos de Tart is a particularly great example of how a change in the technique produces a much better wine. My last bottle of Clos de Tart was a 1990, which was superb.

And another great dessert wine. We drank this one with Roquefort and other great cheeses, mostly blue. All of these dessert wines had that characteristic honey and bottle sunlight greatness to them. No Yquem but still worth the drink. I am leaving out the great Champagnes we had over New Years, DVX, Krug etc. But you can see them on my Facebook site.

I hope this post satisfies not only the beer people following me but also the wine people and the cocktail or mixed drink crowd. And I hope it also makes for interesting reading for all you chocoholics out there. Enjoy.