Dear Feastlings,
The irony is not lost on me- as the person who struggles nearly every month to eke out a new menu in the waning moments of ordering deadlines, I have no business talking about preparedness. It’s a rare occasion that I’m as prepared as I’d like to be, be it for menus or be it for daily life.
Today, though, I’m preaching the gospel of advanced notice. Ferragosto is just over four weeks away, and while I’m still working on the logistics of what ingredients we might procure by August 15th, I thought we’d whet your appetites by introducing a few Italian wines to your palates. This Saturday being the last Saturday of the month, we’ll offer our customary end-of-month wine tasting in its usual style: larger pours, fancier wines, and food pairings with each taste. While it was all tidily organized weeks ago thanks to Cory, who’s appreciably more organized than I am, the rep who’d have been pouring us a smattering of Italian delicacies, apropos of the no-longer-new work culture that I still have yet to grasp, stopped showing up for work one day.
With Cory out of town, I found myself seeking out a rep who’d not just done a tasting, who wasn’t about to do one the week after, who was him- or herself actually in town, who had a solid portfolio of Italian wines, and who was able to support the tasting with adequate samples, enough of which were in stock in case people liked the wines and wanted to order them. Enter Brandi, who swung in like a trapeze artist to pluck us from certain death.
Years ago, we brought in a number of wines from distributor MJ Sweiss, whose sales were flagging in Southern Arizona until it had also been plucked from certain death by a company called MISA, an importer and distributor from whom we’d not heard for two years, more or less.
She emailed just as I was contemplating a Hail Mary tasting in which we’d fake our way through it without the support of a distributor and asked if she could stop by, and someone played the triangle in my ear, or maybe a harp, and a bubble came out of the sky like she was Glenda, the Good Witch of the North.
In any case, the bubble lands on Saturday at 2:00 pm, when our knowledgeable new friend and Good Witch, Brandi, will share the flavors and the lore of the wine country of central Italy, with an excellent value from Piedmont thrown in alongside them.
You’re welcome and encouraged to attend, as the wines are delicious, and there’s a new face added to our retinue of wine educators and I’m confident that you’ll like her nearly as much as I do, despite the fact that I’m the one being gently extricated from the horns of a dilemma, and you likely don’t need to be.
Will this all teach me a lesson? I doubt it. I have yet to begin writing the August menu that starts in less than two weeks, but I suppose if I’ve managed to pull it off for the past nearly three hundred menus now, one last-minute changeup of a wine tasting won’t be enough impetus for me to change. Sigh.
Your friend,
Doug