Picnic Time - Two New Sandwiches and Two New Wines!
This week we would like to announce two new wines as we continue to ramp up our carry-away wine bottle program -- our first Oregon pinot noir and chardonnay. And that we are happy to return to sandwich-making, which we are offering as our Secret Items this week! Our valued newsletter subscribers are getting the first opportunities to buy these freshly-made sandwiches as well as these wines.
The first sandwich is one that many Bakeshop regulars will recall fondly from purchasing at the bakery in the past - our take on the classic French Jambon-Beurre, made with Tails and Trotters ham and French butter on a Grand Central Bakery baguette. But we are upping this sandwich a notch by adding Fontal cheese!
The second sandwich is made with Mozzarella cheese marinated in delicious herbs, garlic and olive oil, then topped with arugula on a Grand Central Bakery seeded baguette.
We are recommending you take one, or both, of these sandwiches out for a picnic this weekend, and pair them with one of our exciting new wines. We suggest pairing the Ham and Cheese sandwich with the pinot noir, and the Mozzarella sandwich with the chardonnay, but please feel free to mix and match as you desire. You can read a description of the wines below:
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Like us, our friend Vincent Frirtzsche is another Southern California expatriate, and a fellow wine lover. Following his passion, he staged in the wine cellar of our friend Mike Carlisle at Carlisle Vineyards in Santa Rosa before the turn of the millennium. Vince then moved his family up to Portland, and he began making his own single vineyard wines in the Eola Hills of the Willamette Valley in 2009.
In deciding to add our first Oregon chardonnay and a pinot noir to our wine list, it was easy for us to choose Vincent Wines for both. Vince makes small-batch production of excellent wines, loaded with character and expressive of the local vineyards he selects, and offers them at an exceedingly fair price for their quality. In his words: “We’re all about low-input wine making, working with several sustainably-farmed vineyards around the Willamette Valley to produce small amounts of handmade wine without a lot of fuss...Vincent makes natural wines from vineyards around the northern Willamette Valley farmed at minimum sustainably, if not organic or biodynamic.”
The pinot we chose is Vincent 2019 Ribbon Ridge, featuring fruit from the Armstrong Vineyard, and this wine succinctly captures the vineyard’s terroir -- strong red cherry and black raspberry flavors topped with earthy mineral tones, and is well-built with a hefty structure and a very solid backbone. This is a wine that can be cellared for several years to come, but can be enjoyed now with just a bit of breathing time.
The chardonnay is Vincent’s 2019 Tardive, which means “late” in French, and is so named in this instance not because it is late-harvested, but because this wine spends between 16-18 months resting in neutral oak barrels. It is a generous and forthcoming chard, full-bodied with a creamy texture, offering tropical fruit flavors topped with tangy lemon-lime notes, and a touch of saline and flint.
Both of these wines provide tremendous value!
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Available to our newsletter subscribers only, so be sure to join our email list for access to all future Secret Newsletter Items.