Photo: Fine Wine

The day before yesterday, our close friend Sharon, who is the author of  Phoenix Daily Photo, posted photos of our dinner last Saturday night at our house, as an observance of her and my birthdays.  She showed photos of the salad, entree and dessert.

But she overlooked the wine.  Fine wine is an important complement to a good meal, of course.  So we decided to have a bottle of wine that we have been saving for 7 or 8 years.

In 2006 Sharon travelled with Dave and me to visit Dave's son who lives in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and we took a trip to Mendoza, the Argentine wine country.  We loved visiting the wineries in the region, and had some excellent meals as well.  One of the wineries was LaGarde, and we bought some Henry 2002.  We decided that our birthday dinner was a suitable time to open this bottle.  The bottle was individually numbered, which is the reason for the second label below the main label.

Over the course of  a long evening, we decided to open a bottle of dessert wine, and chose the Grgich Hills Violetta, shown in the second photo.  The bottle did not have a label, as what you see in the photo was embedded in the glass of the bottle.

We have visited the Grgich Hills winery in Napa Valley several times, once for a special dinner with flights of their varietals in several successive years.  The Grgich family was originally from Croatia, which has an excellent wine tradition, but which has not been marketed in the U.S. very much.

Our friend, Sharon, in addition to being an excellent cook, is also very knowledgeable about wine (and other subjects, especially art.  She is also both an Anglophile and a Francophile).  An evening with Sharon is guaranteed to be an enjoyable time with stimulating conversation.

This week we have photos of the colonial architecture of Grenada, Nicaragua, posted on our Viva la Voyage travel photo site.