Well it's my Sammy Hagar/Double Nickel 55th birthday. (Junior Seau from a jersey perspective). It's a Monday night and the Steelers are playing but no bottle of wine tonight - headed out to watch my youngest in a varsity soccer match. But I did have a great bottle of wine over Thanksgiving weekend that I wanted to talk about - 2012 Peter Michael Les Pavots. This red blend was 54% cab, a whopping 20% cab franc (which I have a hidden crush on), 11% merlot and 5% petite verdot. Pavots means poppies in french and Peter Michael has this wonderful orange flower on the label in honor of CA's poppy population (couldn't resist using poppy and population in the same sentence). Supposedly their vineyard was covered in these flowers when originally purchased. I have a long-standing admiration for this winery as we "banked" it when I worked at SVB back in the 90's. Sir Peter Michael founded the winery back in 1983 and the property is generally in the Knights Valley region of Calistoga (north of Napa - probably more Sonoma). He also founded Classic FM in 1992 which is how I guess we might have also banked this tech entrepreneur. This was a very cherry bordeaux-style blend (but not earthy despite all the cab franc). Lovely wine for a great weekend. Cheers!
