Happy Anniversary, Baby

Everyone’s favorite fallback subject – the weather – is on my mind today. It’s beautiful out, 70’s and sunny. It can’t last, of course, this being Kansas City and global warming being a part of that “reality” so strenuously rejected by the neoconmen running our formerly great country. It will soar into the humid 90’s by Thursday, and at that point even a red-wine freak like yours truly will consider the benefits of a light, chilled wine.

The last white wine I had was a forgettable Lindemann’s Chardonnay. The inexpensive Australian producer has a consistently decent Semillon-Chardonnay, but the Chardonnay by itself was . . . I forget what it was. As I said.

With white wine as with red, the point is the nirvana achieved or strived for by its pairing with food. (Winos are free to disagree, but I will not be publishing their comments.) Summer wines go with summer foods, and that leads us naturally to the occasion of my second anniversary, on which my gift to my beloved was . . . dinner. The cooking of it, I mean. The menu selection was Andie’s, and not surprisingly she chose one of our all-time favorites, the gold standard Napa Risotto. A labor-intensive dish. Constant stirring, tweaking and sprinkling is required, but girlfriend didn’t care about that. NOOOOO, she did not, not being the risotto chef around here. Still, she cleans a mean kitchen, and that carries significant weight. With me. I who hate to do dishes.

A heavenly mouthful of asparagus, mushrooms and Arborio rice, this risotto exhibits exceptional flavor and fairly screams for a Barbera. We ignored its screams this time around, wanting to try out the Flora Springs Pinot Grigio 2003. I’m mostly indifferent to Pinot Grigios; they’re light, crisp and fruity, generally, but not exactly packed with flavor, to my mind. Laura favors the Santa Margherita PG, but the Bollini is at least as good, at half the price. And I figured Flora Springs would beat ‘em both.

Flora Springs is on my short list of wineries that should be visited during any trek to California. The wines produced there are stellar. Still, in the end, even the Flora Springs Pinot Grigio was just that, a Pinot Grigio. But OH, the risotto! It was my best attempt yet.

I used three kinds of mushrooms this time: portabellos, shitakes and button; I also added a touch of thyme, and a half cup of the Pinot Grigio accompanying our dinner. Most likely, though, what put the risotto over the top was the substitution of Boursin for the usual Fontina. (And the fact that I remembered to add the salt this time. At just the right moment.)

The only thing that would have made this dinner better was a Barbera. A Barbera d’Alba, a Barbera d’Asti, a Barbera from Seghesio. Or even my current favorite white wine, the Ferrari-Carano Fume Blanc. But the food, and the company, couldn’t be improved upon. I love risotto. I love my girlfriend. I love good wine.