The Great Willamette Valley Credit Card Disaster – Sunday

We woke up Sunday morning feeling bright and sprightly. So what could be more appealing than more wine tasting, this time down the southern end of the Willamette Valley near Salem. The traffic was light and we were sat in the car park at Amity Vineyards by 11am.

While we waited a few minutes for the cellar door to open, some immediate differences struck us compared to the wineries from the previous day. The signposting was minimal, as if it was meant to be difficult to find the place. The road to the cellar door was rough and steep, and we wondered more than once if we were on the right road. And the buildings were somewhat ramshackle in comparison to the opulent wineries from the previous day.

Welcome to the southern Willamette Valley. Less cars and people, virtually no tasting fees and a relaxed, laid back atmosphere. And more darn good wine.

We knew from experience that Amity made excellent Alsacian style whites. The current releases of the gewurztraminer, riesling and pinot blanc are all very attractive wines, and complete bargains. The riesling especially is refined, minerally, and has racy acids and citrus and floral overtones. How wine this good can be so under-appreciated is beyond me. The pinots were interesting too, and the 2000 reserve had aged beautifully. This is the one I’ll be drinking while the younger wines from the weekend mature at home.

Inspired by the experience at Amity, we consulted the map and plotted a few more visits. Bethel Heights, Witness Tree and St Innocent all had some highlights, but had sold most of their wines, and hence choice was limited. But stumbling into to Cristom was one of the finds of the weekend.

Cristom had a pinot gris, five pinot noirs and a syrah. All were uniformly tasty, and while we all favored different ones, there was little doubt that the single vineyard pinots were up there with the best of the weekend. The estate grown syrah was also a pleasure. Deep in color, with aromas of white pepper and plum, great acidity and a long, complex finish. This is a fine cool climate syrah, and one I suspect that will age for quite a few years.

We couldn’t take any more wine by 2pm. So we sought out a local Thai for lunch, and then cruised the four hours back to Washington with a truck full of fine booty.

The Great Willamette Valley Credit Card Disaster – Saturday

It’s still pre-ski season, so the lure of excellent food, beer and local wine dragged Jan, Kathy and I down the spectacular Columbia Gorge to Portland for the weekend. The weather cooperated, serving up perfect autumnal conditions to tour the Willamette Valley wineries. The sky was blue, the vines golden and the wine very fine indeed.

The northern end of the Willamette is only 25 minutes from downtown Portland. Numerous spectacular wineries cluster around Dundee, Yamhill and Newberg, making touring ridiculously easy. The close vicinity to Portland influences the tasting experience considerably, with not inconsiderable and often non-refundable tasting fees the norm. I don’t mind tasting fees particularly – it removes the pressure to purchase something at every winery. But it is nice if you get the cash back if you spend a few bucks. And in the Willamette, spending money on wine is pretty unavoidable.

Saturday was a mixed day. We visited 10 wineries, and overall I must confess I was a little disappointed by the consistency, especially of the pinot’s. It was apparent however that Oregon is on track to produce some marvelous chardonnays. This was a very pleasant surprise indeed.

Anyway, the Saturday highlights:

Archery Summit: The first place we visited, and probably the best pinots of the weekend. They only have 4 pinots, two of which, the 2003 Archery Summit Estate and Red Hills Estate, were quite sublime. Very serious pinots indeed.

Domain Drouhin: One of Oregon’s legendary producers, and it didn’t disappoint. The 2003 Laurene pinot was a beauty, still youthful, dark berry fruit and great length. The 2005 Arthur chardonnay was irresistable, austere and beautifully balanced. A few of the latter accompanied us out of the cellar door, and they’ll sit at home for quite a while, I suspect.

Argyle: The best sparkling wine producer we’ve found in Oregon. A clean and fresh 1998 Blanc de Blancs and the fuller bodied 1998 Knudsen pinot-based Brut were beautifully made fizzies, and perfect for drinking in the near future. And the Aussie-influenced sparkling red, made from pinot noir, was an extravagant fruit bomb that might well find itself accompanying turkey at some stage around Thanksgiving.

Adelsheim: Saturday’s best overall experience, Adelsheim’s range of whites and pinots is impressive indeed. The 2005 pinot blanc, the 2004 Caitlyn’s chardonnay and two young but delicious 2005 pinots all found their way in to the back of Kathy’s truck in considerable numbers. Fine wine at, for this area, very reasonable prices. Highly recommended.

Scary halloween photos

Halloween is a lively time around here. The locals love to dress up, eat chocolates and party. All sounds highly reasonable behavior to me.

We joined in and dressed up for a party held by our friends Tami and Phil last Saturday. It was a pretty wild night and lots of fun. My faux snake skin outfit and dog collar got second place in the costume competition. I was beaten by a somewhat extravagant pumpkin – a first even for me .

See the photo album for some seriously scary snaps.Thanks to AJ for dressing us all from her amazing collection of costumes. It’s also my excuse for wearing woman’s clothing …

I’m so glad I live in Washington State!

Going out for food and beers is an absolute delight in Washington State nowadays. Smoking in bars and restaurants is no longer allowed, and we’ve discovered that many restaurants let you take your own wine along (for a corkage charge – perfectly fair). It’s almost like being back in Sydney :-}

I’m not honestly sure of the laws on the BYO wine, so we did a test run at our local restaurant, Katya’s Bistro and Wine Bar in Richland. This would be our third visit to Katya’s It’s only about a 10 minute walk from home, so very convenient. The balcony seating is enticing in the summer, but now it’s getting cool the funkily decorated dining room is the place to head.

Everyone eats early in this town – you get crushed in the line at the 5.30 dinner rush at most popular restaurants. So for us us, reservations are never an issue. We arrive at Katya’s about 8.15 just as everyone else is leaving, hand the bottle of Dog Point 2002 Chardonnay to the waitress, and take our seats. BYO definitely works, and within seconds we’re sampling the nutty, lean Marlborough chardonnay that cries out for a hunk of fresh salmon.

We share a crab cakes starter, which is lightly fried, very crabby and a perfectly sized appetizer. I then order a seared yellowfin tuna, and Jan gets the salmon fillet from the specials. Both appear promptly and the salmon especially is delicious and moist, topped with a delicate spicy sauce. The tuna is raw in the middle, and seared with big flakes of black pepper. It flakes easily and while not inspiring, is perfectly tasty.

My only quibble with this dinner is the rather dull portions of rice that we both get. This is great potato country, and some roasted reds or yukon golds would be a much better accompaniment than the bland, ‘tastes like its out of a packet’ savoury rice affair.

Katya’s is pretty much equidistant to Anthony’s from our house. While Katya’s doesn’t have the killer views or buzzy big town atmosphere of Anthony’s, from several visits to both, I think Katya’s has a clear edge on food quality. They cook fish well, with more care than we’ve found at Anthony’s. And as winter arrives, those meaty dishes with a fine red wine will be very tempting. Accompanied by spuds, of course ….

Dr Dobbs “Essential Software Architecture” book review

My old colleague Liming Zhu alerted me to this review.
Can’t complain about that one

The great gig in Seattle

Good old eBay was kind enough to deliver me a last minute Roger Waters ticket for his Seattle gig, the last one of a major North American tour. The show had been sold out for months, so I was somewhat delighted to be there, soaking up the atmosphere of the huge crowd in the Key Arena bar.

I knew from internet reviews that 8.20pm was the time the band would come out. I’d wandered in to the arena earlier to see the huge back projection of a 1950s style radio, an increasingly full ash tray, a slowly diminishing bottle of whiskey and occasional bellowing smoke from a mysterious smoker/drinker, whose arm was all that was glimsingly seen.

Kept company by a fine Pyramid Snow Cap Ale, I spied a TV screen advertising Al Gore as the next big event at the Arena. I must confess I struggled with reconciling the likely performance of a formerly incredibly dull politician’s with the show I was anticipating by the major influence behind Pink Floyd. Politically, Waters makes Gore look like Bill O’Reilly, and fortunately, the differences didn’t end there.

In a nutshell, the first hour was a mix of Floyd and Waters songs taken from the whole catalog of their material. The second half was "Dark Side of The Moon’ in its entirety, enhanced by booming quadrophonic speakers distributed throughout the arena. The encores were basically side three of The Wall, for those of you who remember the vinyl, ending with "Comfortably Numb".

The highlights were too numerous for me to recall. But some that remain are:

• The saxophone solo on ‘Shine on You Crazy Diamond’. After poignant images of a young Sid Barrett, the sax player was projected against an image resembling a brain cortex, that slowly decayed to a simple universe of shooting stars in the sky. It sent chills down my spine.
• The ‘Great Gig in the Sky’, reproduced faithfully by P.P. Arnold’s amazing voice.
• The propeller controlled, grafitti-ized, large pink pig that floated around the arena during a magnificent rendition of "Sheep". ‘Vote Nov 7th’ was one of its slogans, and I don’t think anyone there wondered who they were being implored to vote for.
• The video projection of a nuclear submarine attack during "Perfect Sense". The footage zooms in from above on to a huge sports stadium, with a water tank in the middle. A submarine lurks at one end, and oil rig at the other. The sub fires two missiles, and as they hit the target, a huge fireball ignites on the stage, as the band pound out ‘Can’t you see, it all makes perfect sense …". It was an incredibly powerful and visually spectacular moment.

There were flames and explosions all the way thru the show, a veritable internal firework display. Many savvy locals exploited the resulting smokiness to take the opportunity to share second hand spliff smoke with the passive smokers around them. You can’t take beer into the arena, but spliffs were rampant. All very amusing.

It’s Saturday morning now, and the songs and images from the gig are still floating around my head. It was that sort of show.

Fine dining at Fresco, Kelowna

Kelowna has a few enticing restaurants, but we were drawn back to Fresco, the restaurant where I celebrated my 40th birthday four years ago with Jan’s parents. And what a fine choice it turned out to be.

Fresco is a stylish dining space, has an excellent if somewhat price-y wine list, and serves top quality food. We had Dungeness crab cakes and a baked goat cheese tart for appetizers. Both were excellent, but the goat cheese, sourced from a local producer we’d visited earlier in the day, was sublime. Light, buttery pastry with a salty, mild goat cheese filing, it set the taste buds racing.

The best was yet to come though. I don’t really know much about arctic char, but this is one of the chef’s signature dishes, and for good reason. The char is rolled and roasted in oats bound with maple brown butter. The result produces a fillet of char that is cooked to perfection, almost raw in the middle, light pink, rich and incredibly flavorsome. This was undoubtedly the best fish I’ve had since leaving Sydney, a very spectacular dish. Jan’s duck breast, duck sausage and fennel gnocchi wasn’t far behind the fish in the quality stakes either. The mains are perhaps a bit busy in terms of too many flavors one the plate, and certainly quite generous in size, but the finesse of the cooking and quality ingredients are undeniable.

All washed down by a perfectly reasonable Sandhill cabernet franc, this made for a very satisfying dinner indeed.

14/20 on the Sydney Morning Herald Good Food Guide scale :-}. This restuarant is alone is a good enough excuse to stop a night in Kelowna on the way to Big White in winter.

Walla Walla tasting trip

It was a few weekends ago, but we spent a day touring some of Walla Walla’s many wineries in early September. Walla Walla is an easy one hour drive from home, and ten of us hired a van, which made for a highly amusing day out.

The two real highlights for me were two old favorites, L’Ecole No. 41 and Walla Walla Vintners.

L’Ecole is one of the first cellar doors we get to from the Tri-cities, so its always tempting to call in. It’s a delightful, elegant old school building, and there’s always good wine to be sampled. In my opinion, they make the best semillon in Washington State. The two single vineyards bottlings are distinct and often excellent, and the blended version, while sometimes a little over-oaked, is a pleasant sipper, especially with a hunk of fresh salmon. These are distinctive and great value wines.

The red line up is wide, comprising merlot, cabernet and syrah from both Columbia Valley and Walla Walla vineyards. The 2003 Columbia Valley cabernet was my stand-out from an impressive range. A powerful, balaced wine from the warm 2003 vintage, all plums and bitter dark chocolate, this one will be sitting on my wine racks for a year or 4.

Walla Walla Vinters is a bit of a cult amongst my local wine drinking buddies. And with good reason, this unassuming producer makes some of Walla Walla’s best wine. And for a region that’s a tad on the expensive side, they produce some of the best value top quality wine in the valley. Their sangiovese is silky, smooth and smoky and just begs to be drunk immediately. It usually sells out very quickly. The 2004 cabernet franc is more robust than their usual style, being made from Columbia Valley rather than Walla Walla grapes (frost wiped out most of the 2004 Walla Walla harvest). It’s a distinctive varietal wine, probably needs a nice accompanying slab of meat right now, but in two years could be sublime.

The 2004 Cuvee, a blend of 5 red varieties, was the wine that emptied my wallet. It’s surprisingly approachable for such a young wine, with black fruit, a hint of spice and mint, velvety tannins and a long, long finish. A really lovely ‘drink now’ or ‘keep for the medium term’ wine.

Other highlights:
Three Rivers: Lots to like here. I’d sampled their reserve wines in May, and bought heaps. So this time we just tasted their regular range. The 2003 reds are standouts and excellent value for Walla Walla wine. Another of Walla Walla’s finest.
Forgeron: Consistently make the best chardonnay and zinfandel in Walla Walla. The 2005 chardy is elegant and powerful, with subtle French oak, creating a superb example of Washington whites at their best. The 2004 zinfandel had just been bottled, so was a little hard to judge. I’ll be back to try this again soon, as their zin, sourced from the Maryhill vineyards on the Columbia River, can be very tasty indeed.
Whitman Cellars: Liked the wine here so much I joined the wine club. The small annual commitment and free parties at the winery might have had some influence on this decision, but so did the wine quality. They had three vintages of merlot to sample, including a perfectly aged 2001 that we collectively bought several of. Another impressive Walla Walla red producer, and by far the friendliest and most fun cellar door of the day.

SIFT goes public

More good work news – the paper we submitted to the International Conference on COTS Based Software Systems 2007 (ICCBSS) was accepted. It describes the latest work on a project at PNNL that I sort-of started in 2003, and since has evolved nicely (without my ideas to pollute it ) to create an infrastructure for the kinds of analytical systems we build here.

The technology is called SIFT (Scalable Information Fusion and Triage), and it’s based on the open source Mule enterprise service bus. We’re building at least three demonstrators using SIFT right now, and a serious one will be rolled out in November for public viewing. This requires high throughput and scalability, and will be a real test of the technology. No doubt I’ll blog about it once it’s properly tested . We’re nearly there right now, actually, jusy some stress testing to go.

ICCBSS 2007 is in Banff in late February. It promises to be an interesting conference in a beautiful setting. Bring your woollies and I’ll see you there.

51 brown bags of wine …

While evocative of drunken vagrants slugging booze (or me with my roadie walking to the Atomic), brown bags are in fact an essential parts of any wine tasting. This is especially true at the People’s Choice Wine Tasting, held annually as part of the Okanagan Fall wine festival. We’d attended this event 3 years ago, and had a good time. Apart from the wine, it’s makes for fine people watching, as Kelowna’s socialites come out dressed in their finery and showing off their latest surgical enhancements.

So we left early on Friday had a very pleasant 6 hour drive up to Kelowna, BC. The perfect late summer weather made for fabulous vistas of the North Cascades and the deep turquoise lakes of the Okanagan Valley.

The event is like a regular tasting, but with an additional room for the blind tasting. You get score sheets and wander around tasting the brown bag encased wines and rating them out of 20. There were 6 categories in the blind tasting, with 51 wines to sample. A daunting effort, but it had to be done ;-}. Pass the spitoon …

We started on the sauvignon blancs, and one was obviously superior. Not surprisingly it turned out to be the winner from Jackson Triggs. Maybe the best sauvignon in the valley and a cracker of a wine. Gehringer took second with a very drinkable passionfruit number.

The pinot gris, gewurztraminer and chardonnay classes were mixed bags. Mostly nice wine, but little stood out from the pack. Two of the most reliable producers of pinot gris in the area, Gray Monk and Cedar Creek took out first and second respectively. These were both crisp, citrusy drops, best drunk soon, I suspect.

Wineries we knew little about won the gewurztraminer and chardonnay classes. A sweeter style gewurztraminer from Dirty Laundry took first place, followed by a spritzy, spicy wine from Thornhaven which we thought was marginally the best of the bunch. The chardonnay gong went to Orofino, with second place to Therapy. In our scoring these were two of six wines that were all very quaffable indeed. They make pretty decent chardy up here.

The pinot noir selection was an odd mix of somewhat light, acidic wine, but with a few stand-outs. We both though the Inniskillin Dark Horse was a cracker – smoky cherries and velvety tannins, one to leave alone for a year or two. This only took second place though, trumped in the vote by Lang Vineyards. I’m afraid I didn’t rate this highly, and Jan ranked it fourth in her list. Maybe we need to taste that one again …

Finally, and personally with a little trepidation, we got to the merlots. Three years ago I remember thinking the merlots were a pretty average bunch, with one or two half-decent wines amongst them. So what a surprise it was when, across the board, the quality of the merlots was probably the highest of all six classes. Jan’s top-rated and my second-rated won the people’s choice, another high quality, complex wine from Jackson Triggs with their 2004 Grand Reserve. Second place went to Church and State, a wine we both liked, but I at least thought was more of a pleasant, straightforward plummy quaffer.

So, some more new discoveries, and further confirmation that some of the old favorites are still producing the goods.

This is a really fun event for punters like us. It’s a shame that other wine shows don’t offer blind tastings for the public to test their taste buds. It helps develop our palates, and I’m sure the producers get some ‘interesting’ insights in to what the populace likes to knock back.