Cold Lamb and Good Wine

Monday 29 September
An after school special. Just set out the leftover lamb, the little roasted peppers, and then added a lot of long-hairy chives to the parsnip mash, dipped them in bread crumbs, and fried them in butter and oil to make cute cakes.
The high point was the accident. Holt grabbed a bottle of wine, more or less blindly, from downstairs. He took a sip and thought, "Sacre merde, that's tasty": so much richer, deeper, more complicated than his usual swill. Turned out he had nabbed a bottle of the Featherstone 2006 Merlot, which we had tasted on our visit to see the sheeps. This is their young vines, first year of production, each vine pruned back to a single cluster, and OH MY, did it make for a splendid concentrated wine, so far above the usual pleasant-enough Merlot. Though we had just knocked back a $30 bottle for the leftovers, it was a kind of vindication: to know that our palates had not been deceived merely by silly ovicaprids, nice people, and a sunny afternoon.