This past Saturday night dinner was supposed to be Chris and Jan joining the four of us for dinner. Unfortunately, Mick and Amy had to cancel at the last moment due to a family medical emergency so dinner for six became dinner for four.
This put me a bit of a dilemma as I had ton of food prepped and was planning on doing to higher end reds with dinner. I didn’t want Mick and Amy to miss out on the ‘good stuff’ but it also didn’t feel right going ‘well Mick and Amy aren’t making it, so put away the expensive reds and breakout the cheaper stuff’ as if to imply that Jan and Chris weren’t somehow worthy of the wines. Ideally it would have been great to postpone for a day but I didn’t know Chris and Jan’s schedule and depending on how things went this evening, Mick and Amy might not be available anyways. In the end I decide to ‘stick to the plan’.
For the first course I did Gorgonzola dip with crackers and paired it with a 2009 “To Kalon” Fume Blanc from Robert Mondavi. This is one of my favourite wines for this year and I really wanted Chris and Jan to try it. The “To Kalon” was really good with the Gorgonzola dip. It was decent to start with but as the wine warmed up it became even better with the dip.
A small side story before I get to the main course. For the Gorgonzola dip, two key ingredients that I needed were Gorgonzola and fresh basil. My two closest supermarkets never carry Gorgonzola and while they carry fresh basil I have found their stock dicey at best; either they are sold out or the basil should have the word fresh in quotations marks as it is usually starting to brown/ is wilting.
There is a supermarket chain locally that carries Gorgonzola but it is more out of the way for me and I hate shopping there as they are always very busy. On Friday I decided to hit this supermarket to get the Gorgonzola. I grabbed a shopping cart from outside the store and thought to myself, “I hope they have some freaking basil…” I turned the cart around then stopped dead and my jaw fell open in disbelief. Outside the store they had a huge display of potted basil plants. There must have been over a hundred basil plants on display and each plant was huge and looked great. I put one in the cart and went shopping. As I was shopping I kept admiring my basil plant as the leaves were nice and full. In the end I actually bought a second one as they were only $6.99 each. I just thought it was funny that I was worried about finding basil and run into the world’s largest basil display.
The main course was Beef Tenderloin with Grilled Shrimp, Béarnaise, baby potatoes and sugar snap peas. I had two red wines to pair with this course that I hadn’t tried before – a 2005 Insignia by Joseph Phelps and a 2007 Robert Mondavi “Private Reserve” Cabernet Sauvignon.
I’m going to review the Insignia here and do the Mondavi in part 2.
The nose on the Insignia was big and powerful with cocoa, evergreen and cedar aromas. Tasting the wine I was caught a little off guard as it had a much smaller mouth-feel than I expected. The 1999 and 2003 Insignia are big and bold in the month with huge fruit and tons of flavour whereas this had a cherry chocolate flavour that seemed very subdued in comparison. The structure was interesting as this is probably the smoothest wine I have ever tried as the tannins were silky and soft, there was decent acidity and the wine didn’t come across as hot either. The finish on the wine was good as it lingered around for quite a while. I liked the wine but was disappointed with the 2005 as it didn’t ‘wow’ me as much as the 2003 or 1999 vintages.
Here is the group rating for the wine – Mark -90, Chris -89, Kathy -88, Jan - 90, Overall – 89.25.
There is no listing for Insignia on the LCBO’s website. The 2005 Insignia was purchased from the Lifford Wine Agency at $220 per bottle when buying a half case.
Click here for Part 2
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