Wine and Ice Cream

Today was like a celebration. Maybe we were just excited that it was Friday and I am not on call. Whatever the occasion, we made a trip to Stillwater for some delicious Chinese cuisine and much needed retail therapy. Haskell's is the closest thing we've found to a Total Wine or BevMO. It has an excellent selection of wines but is much smaller than the wine superstores we would frequent in Tucson. Twice a year Haskell's has a mega wine sale one of which happens to be going on right now.

Normally in a wine store I quickly become overwhelmed by all the glory of the wine (I want a taste of the glory...) and inevitably buy something I'm familiar with. Well this Christmas Dana got me the book Wine Trials 2011 which is a gold mine for inexpensive wines that rate really well with professional tasters. So I opened the book and compared it with the listing of sale wines from Haskell's catalog and off we went! We ended up with 5 wines off the list + 1 Portuguese wine that we wanted to try (since we love wine from the Douro region). We came home with: B&G Cabernet Sauvignon, El Coto Rioja, Gato Negro Malbec, Concannon Petit Syrah, Monte Antico Super Tuscan, and Vale do Bomfim Douro. Brilliant!



As an additional treat we went to an ice cream shop that Dana grew up with called Nelson's which provides extraordinary amounts of ice cream at wickedly low prices. We got 2 quarts to bring home and I got a child's size (around 4 scoops!) for the road.

Speaking of the road...I had my first experience with a suicidal deer. That was fun, especially since I was so focused on my ice cream and driving with my knee. Fortunately for me and the deer there was no contact...this time.