Weekend at Pebble Beach Wine & Food

For the weekend, we went to Carmel for the Pebble Beach Food & Wine, a grand event in the food and wine world. Of course as you drive north from Los Angeles, there are many wine temptations along the way and we gave in; we picked up a lot of wines for the weekend; some familiar and some new, since we were going to cook there and we needed wines.

A new discovery for me was the Vina Robles Red 4, $16.00 (51% Petite Syrah, 43% Syrah, 4% Tannat and 2% Touriga, a Portuguese varietal similar to Merlot), a bone dry and very delicious red wine filled with blackberries, cherries and currants. Loved it!

On Saturday we went to Pebble Beach for the food and wine festival. This was my first time at this festival, although our friends and family who came with us had attended it before and they have been bragging about it for the whole year. My hat’s off to the organizers. I don’t think you can have a more beautiful place to hold a wine tasting and they had done a GREAT job of putting together a grand event. There must have been five thousand people there along with hundreds of wineries pouring wines and dozens of chefs putting out bite size morsels of their creations.

Regarding the food, I was not impressed with the quality and the creativity of what was being served. I realize that these were mass produced for the 5000 people who were there and the chefs and the sous chefs were working very hard to serve the hungry and sometimes drunk masses, but the food could have been better.

As to the wines, once again, maybe I am jaded and have tasted a lot of wines; I attend many trade wine tasting events almost on a weekly bases, but I was not impressed with what was being poured. Don’t get me wrong, there were a lot of good wines being poured on Saturday, but nothing excited me, with few noted exceptions.

• Donkey & Goat, a small winery out of Berkeley, yes Berkeley, CA, with very interesting and enjoyable wines.
• Morlet Family Vineyards, delicious wines, on a grander scale coming from Napa and Sonoma, with matching prices, but nevertheless wonderful, delicious and classy wines.
• Paraiso Vineyards from Santa Lucia Highlands with their Pinot Noirs and in particular their 2008 Santa Lucia Highlands Pinot Noir was simply delicious; it had all the elements in the right amount specially the nose. It was great.

This was a wonderful weekend to get away with family and friends and enjoyed it tremendously. After all when we are with our loved ones and there is plenty of food and wine, it doesn’t matter where we are. We are blesses and we should be grateful!