Sta Rita Hills Wine Dinner at The Factory

Tuesday, July 19, 2011

Theme tonight at the Factory was Sta Rita Hills. This would be mainly Pinots and Chardonnays. Dishes were taken from a restaurant menu in the Santa Ynez area. Why they felt it was compatible with wines from another area is beyond me.  Dinner was 40 minutes late in starting. They know how many people are coming. They advertise it at 7:00 so I cannot understand how they cannot have something ready to go with 15 minutes. I know for $30 I can't expect much but how hard is it get an appetizer on the table. As I have indicated before, quit being so creative and get back to basics.

We started out with a pizza - had a lemon sauce and grilled cherry tomatoes on it. Flavor was good but the crust was soft. Some kind of whole wheat thing.

Grilled eggplant showed up. Two rounds of eggplant that was breaded and fried. Not greasy, had good flavor and was served with a Pesto sauce and Marinara sauce.

Main course was Rigatoni Bolognese - at this point I felt this dinner was far better suited with last months Italian wine theme than this months theme. The Bolognese sauce had Spanish Pork Loin in it. Sauce was good. Way to much Rigatoni on the plate for the amount of sauce. First time I have taken food home from this restaurant.

Dessert was supposed to be a Fresh Blackberry and Lemon Curd. I was really looking forward to this after such a heavy meal. But no - Natalie decided to be inspired - so we had a corn pancake/crepe thing stuffed with Mozzarella and a Blackberry sauce with Marscapone cheese.  This was good but at this point we were really carbed out. I think that instead of Mozzarella inside if she would have out some Marscapone cheese it would have been lighter in taste. The sauce was very good. This was probably the best dish of the evening.

The theme tonight was Sta Rita Hills.  One person who seems to think he knows everything brought a Jaffurs Mouvedre and a Santa Barbara Winery Chardonnay. His reasoning was they sourced grapes from the Thompson Vineyard and he thought it was close to the Sta Rita Hills because it was near the Melville property. I did not say much as I wanted to double check that I was right and he was dead wrong. Next month at the dinner I will tell him  my findings. He is way off base. If he wasn't so much of a pompous "a--" I would let it go. But sometimes you just have to get in someones face.

Some other wines tonight were 2007 & 2008 Huber Chardonnays, 2006 Loring Clos Pepe Vineyard Pinot Noir, 2007 Flying Goat Rio Vista Pinot Noir, 2006 Longoria Pinot Noir, 2009 Clos Pepe Chardonnay, 2004 Curran-D'Alfinso Tancho La Vina Pinot Noir and a Flying Goat "Goat Bubbles". A few other wines were there but I seemed to have missed them