Dinner and a lesson in cork

Today I tackled the linen closet and bedroom. I put the new mattress pad and all of our beautiful new sheets, pillows and duvet cover on our bed.

I also washed and put away all of our new towels and extra sheets. Jerry quickly established his spot on the bed and is happily napping on it already.
After all of our work to set up our kitchen this weekend, we thought it would be nice to have a few friends over and share some of the wines we had purchased as well as the dishes we’d enjoyed in France. So we invited Mike, Becky & Aaron and Goodie for dinner.

I was very excited to use our new dishes and the linen tablecloth we picked up in Vaison.

David made scallops on a warm salad with shallots, mushrooms and the truffle oil we got in Tourette. He worked really hard all day on his 3-potato gratin and the rest of our amazing meal.

Dessert course was taken care of by our guests- Goodie brought over a huge assortment of cookies, and the Baeckers brought a raspberry chocolate cake.

We planned to drink the wine we bought at Mont Redon, but just after we opened the bottle, we realized that it unfortunately was corked. Corked wine is basically a bottle of wine that has gone bad. Corks are natural products- and they may have imperfections or traces of a fungus contaminant called Trichloroanisole (TCA). The wine industry estimates the incidence of bottles with some traces of cork taint to be between 1 -15 % but only 3- 7% of all wines have TCA contamination at levels that can be detected by consumers. Still- there was no denying it in this bottle. TCA causes flavors and aromas of wet cardboard or a musty, wet basement- and that’s just what our bottle smelled like. Pretty disappointing.

In recent years, the prevalence of TCA has spurred the growth of alternative enclosures such as screw caps and synthetic corks. Many fine winemakers are making the switch. Synthetic corks have a lot of great features- they don’t crumble or break inside the bottle and replacing natural corks with synthetic is no additional cost to wineries since they are mechanically the same device. Additionally, it’s a matter of sustainability. Cork comes from the bark of a specific species of oak tree found in the Mediterranean and Portugal. While the trees have an average lifespan of 150 years, the cork can only be harvested every nine to twelve years. There are about 17,000,000,000 bottles of wine produced each year, and the current natural cork production just cannot meet that demand. So I say bring on the synthetic cork and screw caps!

Still, all was not lost in the wine department. We had a Cambria Chardonnay, Pinot Noir by Acacia and a Zinfandel by Chateau Montelena. Oh, and Aaron & Becky had brought over a really wonderful sauterne- boy do I love that stuff!.