Joshua Kates wrote:Dear Tom,
Do you live in the Santa Fe area? I did more or less from 1991-2005, and I believe I attended the first W&C: $25 for a general tasting and 5 (7?) small plates for the local restaurants. I eventually regularly attended the Reserve tasting on Friday night, which was a relatively good deal and does not seem to have increased much in price. In any case, I, too, recommend it to those who don't know it; the wine scene in Santa Fe generally in my experience was both knowledgeable/sophisticated, as well as congenial and relaxed.
Best,
Josh
Sorta, Josh. Live up in LosAlamos. Spend a lot of time in SantaFe, though.
I attended the first SFW&CF there in the back parking lot (pre-Borders) of SamBusco. Was thinking the price was $15, but could be wrong. Organized by
GordonHeiss (LaCasaSena) and MarkMiller (CoyoteCafe). Was mostly NewMexico wines then, as I recall.
I remember we got a punch card or something which allowed us a limited number of bites to try.
Back then, it was designed to promote the local restaurants during a slow part of the season. Since then, the event has sorta been taken over by the distributors (Southern & National)
to promote their wines, and the restaurant support is more secondary than it used to be.
It used to be, when they started doing the seminars, that they were pretty interesting and informative. For the last 5 yrs or so, they've been pretty much the same ole/same ole.
There are only so many Cabernet/GrilledCheese/Taste With The Somm/Pinot seminars you can take, featuring the same ole wines, before boredom sets in. A lot of the important
wineries (like Ridge) who used to be old favorites no longer participate.
I offered up a suggestion list of about a dozen seminar topics that I thought would be interesting to wine folks to the organizing committee. But they were apparently unacceptable or
"outre". So it's the same ole again. I fear that SFW&CF is on the wane unless they try something new. Most of the locals don't participate much anymore. I be one of those.
Tom
