At a luxurious resort in the heart of Napa: a sublime and aspirational wine dinner entices the senses and stimulates the palate. Exquisite achievement for the chef and sommelier.
On my wine reporting trip to Napa: Restaurant at Meadowood
The fragrant viognier grape, when handled judiciously, results in a delicate, perfumed, complex white wine. The model is Condrieu, an appellation in France’s northern Rhone, but other areas, including Long Island, produce excellent versions. Getting a top-flight one, matching it with the right foods, and paying attention to its seductive qualities, is a rare pleasure worth the invariably high price for a good (always young) viognier.
The challenge is pairing it with the right dish, and I recently had the satisfaction of seeing this challenge met while drinking viognier with what seemed to me the perfect match in food. For the opening course of a lavish, carefully calibrated wine dinner, I was served Dungeness crab with Seckel pear, vanilla and sunflower seeds, an intricate and subtle combination melding the gentle, briny seafood, the sweet-spicy crunch of the fruit, the tropical aromatic of vanilla, and the tangy, nutty traces of the seeds, into a harmonious dish. The viognier (Paras Vineyard 2005, Napa Valley) impeccably reflected the tastes on the plate. Just as no ingredient overwhelmed any other, and each remained essential to the dish, the wine exactly suited the food.
This was just the beginning of a bold and ambitious meal prepared for a small group of us at the Restaurant at Meadowood, the axiomatically named main dining room at Meadowood, a luxurious resort and club in the Napa Valley. The chef, Joseph Humphrey, and the sommelier, Rom Toulon, had clearly set some high standards with innovative and well-chosen food combinations and thoughtfully provocative wine matches.
For the second course, a game bird terrine along with consommé containing a bit of onion flan, instead of trying to match the characteristics of the food, they chose a different direction and contrasted the flavors with dry, elegant, patrician Champagne (Dom Ruinart Blanc de Blancs, which happens to be one of my favorites).
With Alaskan halibut, we drank not the expected chardonnay but a 2005 pinot blanc from Robert Sinsky Vineyards in Napa. The wine was plump and ripe, with oak, almond and honeysuckle characteristics, and very food friendly. If the pinot blanc was only somewhat unpredictable, the choice of a primitivo with the duck breast that followed was totally unanticipated. This flavorful, lively grape is native to the Puglia region of Italy and a close relative of zinfandel (sometimes said to be identical). The version we had—the 2003 vintage from Hendry Ranch in Napa—had a velvety, rounded, fleshy, berry accented taste that was right on target with the duck.
Beef from the not too distant meadows of Point Reyes was accompanied by Neiman Cellars 2003 cabernet sauvignon, a mellow, pungent, and exuberant wine highly expressive of Napa. After that, just when I was guessing that a late harvest California dolce would accompany dessert, I spotted a bottle of 1966 Chateau Caillou, a grand cru Sauternes. That’s the kind of tasteful surprise with which I like to complete a dinner—except on this evening I went to bar and had a nightcap with some young Napa Valley winemakers.
Since the tastes of the dinner were rich and intense, and we had six courses in addition to the chef’s amuse bouche, the portions were appropriately small and presented dramatically on stylishly shaped china. The meal was deftly balanced. It could easily, in less skilled hands, have turned out to be overwrought and strained, but the kitchen at the Restaurant at Meadowood knew how to shrewdly manage their ingredients, and the sommelier knew how to keep his wines inviting and tempting, enticing the senses and stimulating the palate while avoiding the obvious. It was, for me, a memorable meal.
Eastern Long Island and the Napa Valley are separated by nearly 3,000 miles, but linked by lifestyle. The quality of the food and wine, the natural beauty, the old-fashioned charm of the towns, the interesting people—all these are parallel. And judging from the number of tips on favorite bon vivant places in Napa that I received from friends here before traveling, quite a few East Hampton people are living it up on both coasts.
