Great Wines with Friends During Covid and Riots

A group of five of us have been getting together monthly for dinner for a long time. We call ourselves The Small Group with the purpose of sharing great wines, eating great food and virtue signaling.

The way it normally works is we settle on a general theme and each brings a number of bottles which we whittle down to what we can responsibly drink. However, our city council has been actively cutting back on law enforcement, so we decided to up the bottle count.

We each scheduled our arrival times to the restaurant so as to not have to open doors for each other, except for B. who now always seems to be late. He owns restaurants and it has been tough for him to get people to still work.

We got settled in our pre-planned seating, each chair exactly 1.8288 meters apart (we are a Euro-centric group).

D., being the protective one, plopped a big bottle of hand sanitizer on the table for everyone to use. Unfortunately, no one else could reach it. So the waiter served up individual ramekins of sanitizer for everyone.

We started off, as is our want, with some nice bubbles. Things have changed of late though. The bottle of 2002 Sir Winston Churchill pulled out of D.’s bag was immediately received by gasps from the tables nearest us. A ten-spot for the manager was enough for him to reluctantly smooth the situation over. Luckily we had a backup bottle – a 2006 Taittinger Compte de Champagne Blanc de…we put that one back in the bag too.

Well there was no controversy with the 2014 Leflaive Batard-Montrachet. However, the sad thing was that the day before I had begun to notice I was losing my sense of taste and smell (for some odd reason my buddies kept asking me if I had been recently tested). Everyone else said that all they could smell was alcohol.

Our red was the magnificent 1989 La Mission Haut Brion. Great expectations all. Unfortunately, I should have decanted it ahead of time as the restaurant was out of decanters. We decided that we would just drink it through our masks.

Finally, the cheese course that we had pre-ordered. A special cheese made with a unique mesophilic cheese culture. The waiter warned us that use of this particular culture was getting a lot of negative reviews of late. So we cancelled that and instead decided upon a well respected blue cheese. The waiter said they no longer carry any cheese with blue in its name as it now considered offensive, for reasons other than smell.

It was great being with my buddies. Next month though, we are going to Zoom.

well done Kelly

^How Kelly felt (beneath the wry facade) when writing this…

Nicely done !

… but how was the food?!

Now that’s funny

Bland

Nice writeup Kelly. Wishing you better food

Fail. You didn’t provide a trigger warning for this thread.

All in good fun