Wine Dinner - 622 North Restaurant and Wine Bar

    On Saturday evening, a dear friend of mine and I went to dinner at 622 North to enjoy a broad selection of delicious wine and food. The evening was rather casual and we were intent on enjoying each others company and broaden our wine experience. 

    We both ordered a flight of 4 wines, each chosen with some help from the amendable wait staff. I ordered:

- Wild Hills Pinot Noir '19

- Truchard 'shepard' Blend '20

- Las Rocas Garnacha '18

- Clay Shannon Sauvignon Blanc '20

    Along with the wine I ordered the duck breast that came with fried brussels sprouts, mashed potatoes, along with rum spiced julienned carrots and other garnishes. My date ordered the sirloin steak with mashed potatoes and a vegetable medley.  

    Each wine was for the most part delightfully distinct in flavor, which allowed for a varying of experimentation. We each tasted all our wines prior to enjoying our fragrant food. 

    The Wild Hills Pinot Noir was woody with the taste of plums but was also very tannic heavy and had a bitter aftertaste. The Truchard Blend was perhaps the most unique of the bunch, it was salty and tasted like the brine often used for pickles along with sweet pineapple. Finally, the Clay Shannon Sauvignon Blanc was rather muted in comparison to the heavier reds, it was light and acidic with a citric zest.

    The muteness of the Sauvignon Blanc was most likely my own fault for starting with the red wines first, which later via the wine lectures I learned that generally you should start with white wines. I know this now for future reference and hopefully won't make the same mistake.

    While we tasted our wines our food was presented to us and so unfortunately a lot of the aromas from the wines were mixed and hard to distinguish so sadly I will not be commenting on them.  

   After all of our wonderful tasting of each individual wine on their own, we moved into enjoying each item of our meal to have a baseline of everything we will be tasting. My duck breast was succulent and fatty, the brussels sprouts earthy and salty, and the julienned carrots were syrupy sweet. Once we were both sufficiently satisfied with enjoying all elements of our meal we began our attempts at pairing the wines with those elements.

    Perhaps due to my inexperience with flexing my complex tasting muscles, throughout the entire meal the only absolutely detectable flavor that made changes to the taste to the wine was from salty foods. I noticed that salt seemed to make the bitterness of the Wild Hills Pinot Noir even more extreme. While for the most part all the other wines seemed to become more mellow and what I'll refer to as smoothed out. This smoothing out may have been just the cutting of a lot of the acidity. 

  

    Besides the Pinot Noir becoming more bitter from salty food the wine that paired the least well with the saltiness of the food was the Sauvignon Blanc, which when combined with the salt of the food become little more detectable than it's slight citrus flavor. I suppose since the Sauvignon Blanc wasn't very sweet to begin with by smoothing out the acidity, the result left you with what seemed like a tepid class of lemon water. 

    In the future I hope that through practice and guidance that I will be able to extract more flavor pairings so that I can truly enjoy the complexities of the wine and food that I can share with people close to me.