The last Wine Club meeting before Scott and Amy move to Tennessee.
It was with mixed emotions that we had FEWC last night. Our good friends, and co-founders of FEWC, will be moving to Tennessee next week. While this is the realization of one of their longtime goals, they will certainly leave a void that will be tough to fill. We wish them all the best in their new home. To celebrate their accomplishment, we drank 4 bottles of wine that each had a special meaning.
These are the four bottles we opened last night
The first was very special, Bald Knob, from Owl Creek Winery in Southern Illinois.
When we first started getting interested in wine, the 4 of us took a weekend trip down to Makanda, Illinois where we sampled several wines along the Southern Illinois Wine Trail. The grape that is commonly grown down there is Chambourcin, not a great wine making grape, but for Illinois… not bad. We had a really good time during that trip and have several funny memories. This was the last bottle I had, a 2009 vintage, that actually was not awful… we did drink it! It got the evening started with some good memories.
Second bottle of the night was an old FEWC favorite that Scott and Amy brought over. This 2019 vintage of Rutherford Ranch’s Cabernet Sauvignon was delightful. It is one of our favorite wineries from Napa Valley. Over the years we coined a phrase, “You can’t go wrong with Rutherford!”. Rutherford is one of the Regions in Napa that consistently delivers excellent wine. This was quite a different taste from the Knob Creek!
Our third bottle of the evening was another that brought some significance to the table. FEWC members have historically not been fans of Pinot Noir. However, over the years we have found a few that we actually liked very much. This Pinot from Lemelson Vineyards of Oregon, is one of those wines. This was a 2012 vintage, so it had some nice aging to it, and the other point of significance is that this particular wine is called, “Thea’s Selection”. So we were also honoring Scott and Amy’s daughter, Thea, her husband Will, and son, Blaise. What a delightful bottle of wine!
The fourth and final bottle was an Italian wine, Brunello di Montalcino, a 2015 vintage from Siro Pacenti. I had been saving this for a very special occasion. Why? Because this wine was deemed the “best wine of 2019” by James Suckiling, with a perfect 100 point score! I could think of no better occasion than celebrating Scott and Amy’s new journey in life. We may not be seeing them as much as we used to, but I know we will still see them now and then.
So Lenny and Janet would like to offer our goodbye to our dear friends in a familiar way:
“Good friends, Good wine, Long life!”