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Mosby's Classic American 4th

The sky was slightly misty, or was it smoke from the fires ranging around Santa Barbara? Still, the sun shone brightly on Mosby Winery’s annual Independence Day celebration and flag retirement ceremony last Saturday in Buellton.

Guests gathered in the patio behind Mosby’s historic adobe house to snack on spicy buffalo sausages, olives, cheese, salsa and chips and listen to country music.

Chicken and ribs were grilling over red oak out back, sending tempting aromas toward the visitors, most of them wearing red, white and blue.

The menu: A classic Fourth of July spread of chicken, ribs, green salad, potato salad, boiled sweet corn, beans, garlic bread and, for dessert, a cake frosted with a replica of the American flag.

A dry spice rub added zesty flavor to the meats, and the chicken picked up even more flavor from steaming over beer, garlic and herbs after it was grilled.

There was plenty of wine too, poured at a bar shaded by grape vines.

Guests held up souvenir glasses etched with winemaker Bill Mosby's signature for tastes of Mosby Cortese, La Donna white wine, which is a blend of Cortese and Chardonnay, and a deeply colored Italian red, Ossessione, made from Montepulciano grapes.

Mosby (in the photo below) supervises the making of Ossessione in Italy, where he controls a vineyard in the Marche. The wine is bottled there, then shipped here. Only 400 casess were made of Ossessione 2005, the first release and the wine served at the party.

“It’s like a very well extracted Zinfandel or Sanviovese,” says Mosby, who specializes in Cal-Italian wines. He recommends it with robust dishes such as game, roast beef and sauerbraten. However, it went just fine with chicken and ribs.

After lunch, partygoers stood quietly for a moving rendition of taps followed by the burning of worn flags, supervised by a military honor guard from Vandenberg Air Force Base.  Retired military officers and parents of servicemen deployed in Iraq carried the flags to the fire.

To get on the list for next year’s barbecue or to order wine, call 1(800) 70-Mosby. Or email to mosbywines@yahoo.com. Cortese is $18; La Donna is $14, and Ossessione is $26. The winery is located at 9496 Santa Rosa Road, Buellton, CA. 933427-9482, just off Highway 101.

There's No Better Water

The best things in life can indeed be free, or at least cost no more than a drive to the Coachella Valley.  I’m talking about the water in Desert Hot Springs, the cleanest, clearest, finest water that I have ever tasted. And it’s free. Just turn on a tap and enjoy.

The water starts as snow on top of Mount San Gorgonio. As it melts, it slowly trickles through rocks, boulders, gravel and sand until it emerges as a limpid, delightful beverage.

I encountered it at Miracle Springs Resort & Spa, a laid-back place where I spent a few days. At dinner, I drank goblet after goblet of this enchanting water, dressed up with ice and lemon slices.  I didn’t want wine. This was better.

When I left, I emptied the water bottles in my car and refilled them from the tap in my bathroom. Yes, you can shower in this naturally pure water too and brush your teeth with it. (The water in the resort's heated pools is natural too, loaded with minerals and wonderful for dunking,but not suitable for drinking.)

My advice is take along empty bottles, jugs, buckets, tanks—the bigger the better—so that you can bring home enough water to enjoy for a few days, even serve at a dinner party.  It is definitely worth the trip.

Miracle Springs Resort & Spa, 10625 Palm Drive, Desert Hot Springs, CA  92240. Tel: (760) 329-6000 or (800) 808-7727.

Christmas in Paso Robles

For me, Christmas  took place  December 8. I mean, how much more Christmasy could anything be than  the annual Vine Street Victorian Christmas Showcase in Paso Robles?

Walking along this street of beautifully decorated Victorian homes, I saw everything from a live Nativity scene to Ebenezer Scrooge shouting insults from a balcony turned into his bedroom.

“I hate Christmas. There is no Christmas,” he roared, to the delight of the crowd. Farther along, the Grinch tried to spoil the party too.

For this one night, Vine Street between Eighth and 21st Streets was closed to traffic. Thousands strolled to admire the lights, line up for hot drinks and cookies, sing Christmas carols and listen to live music and story telling.

There were even belly dancers, a brave undertaking on a night cold enough for long underwear and ski gloves.

Dogs accompanied their owners, wearing Santa coats or illuminated harnesses. Babies attended too, sound asleep in decorated carriages. 

This charming, old fashioned community event is guaranteed to generate Christmas spirit, even if you feel like Scrooge. So plan on attending in 2008.  You can get the schedule from the  Downtown Paso Robles Main Street Association. Go to www.pasorobesdowntown or email mainstreet@tcsn.net.

I was lucky to find lodging just two houses from the starting point at Eighth Street. Although outside the showcase proper, Cabernet Cottage was decorated as prettily as if it were part of the display.

As I sat on the doorstep watching happy celebrants go by in the dark, my breath formed steamy clouds, and I could almost see snow on the ground.

Inside, it was cozy and comfortable, a warm refuge on such a cold night. The vintage furnishings, graceful drapes, dainty quilts and wood-burning fireplace echoed the Victorian spirit I had caught as I wandered along Vine Street. And the location was so central that the next day I could walk to shops, restaurants and wine tasting rooms in the heart of town.

For more information on this private home turned guest house, go to www.cabernetcottage.net

More Than Wine: Paso Robles' Restaurant Scene

You'd expect food in a booming wine district such as Paso Robles to be laced with wine, and it is.

I tasted everything from Cabernet-soaked Cheddar cheese at a farmers market in  Templeton to beef smoked over broken up wine casks at a restaurant in San Miguel.

Restaurant owners are sometimes winemakers too. At Villa Creek in downtown Paso Robles, I drank owner Cris Cherry's Mas de Maha, a blend of Tempranillo, Grenache and Mourvedre, and Avenger, which combines Syrah, Mourvedre and Grenache.

These were big enough to stand up to a spicy poblano chile stuffed with quinoa and roasted vegetables, circled by fiery red chile sauce.

Matthew Riley of Matthew's at the Airport puts Cabernet Sauvignon grapes on top of  focaccia, marinates chicken breasts with Chardonnay leaves, lamb with Pinot Noir leaves and makes wine reductions that run the gamut from Merlot to Muscat Canelli.

He also bottles his own wine, including the Sauvignon Blanc that I drank with pistachio-crusted halibut sautéed with lemon, white wine and butter.

If anything could distract me from wine, it would be Matthew's sumptuous chocolate pave, sliced and arranged like a pyramid around vanilla pastry cream fluffed up with whipped cream and sprinkled with raspberries.

For sheer fun, along with good food and wine, the place to go is the 10th Street Vineyard Café in San Miguel—if you're lucky enough to get a reservation. The café opens for dinner Friday through Sunday, and there's just one seating. Owner/chef Dallas Holt  chats with the guests and sends around a bota bag of sangria that brings on  a lot of laughter as each person attempts to drink without spilling.

The food is Basque, served family style in almost too many courses to count. The   night I was there, each course was glorious, from fish cakes with tarragon-butter sauce to Spanish style bouillabaisse. The standout was a beef roast smoked for seven hours over wine cask wood and served with Merlot sauce. Sliced thin, it was as tender and succulent as beef could possibly be.

Diners can bring their own wines, and there's no corkage charge as long as one orders bottles from the restaurant list too. My friends and I drank Clautiere Vineyard Estate Syrah 2003 along with Black Hand Cellars 2004 Pinot Noir from a boutique winery with a vineyard west of San Miguel.

I wish I had recipes for Holt's Basque butter, a garbanzo bean puree lightly sweetened with honey; or the baked pasta with meatballs, sausage and assorted meats, or migas Manchegas, a main dish of bread crumbs, garlic, chorizo and bacon, topped with apple salsa.

Restaurants:

Villa Creek, 1144 Pine Street, Paso Robles. Tel: (805) 238-3000.

Matthews at the Airport, 4900 Wing Way, Paso Robles (located inside the main terminal of the Paso Robles Airport). Tel: (805) 237-2007.

10th Street Vineyard Café, 249 10th Street, San Miguel.  Tel: (805) 467-3141.

Wine Touring: Paso Robles

That weird, foreshortened, dumpy image in the fun house mirror turns out to be me. In the next panel, I  appear enormously long, topped with a tiny ball of a head, but in the final mirror, I am gorgeously slim, like a pencil, so I linger there to admire that impossibly alluring image.

This fun house isn't in an amusement park. It stands in a thicket of plants outside the tasting room of Clautiere Vineyard in Paso Robles, Calif., on the Central Coast. The tasting room is just as much fun.  It's stocked with outlandish wigs for visitors to don so that sampling wine at Clautiere is like dolling up for a costume party.

This doesn't mean that the wines aren't serious. It's just that some Paso Robles winemakers favor a fresh, breezy approach that makes wine anything but intimidating.

Boo Boy Red from the Midlife Crisis Winery guarantees a giggle. Four Vines Winery hands out  "Biker" tattoos to advertise its Biker Zinfandel. I don't know whether to cry or laugh at Harrys Sweet Tears Verdelho from Fralich Vineyard. And I can't even pronounce the Irish names on Mat Garretson's labels. But who cares, when the wines inside are so good.

Paso Robles has boomed from a handful of vineyards to 170 bonded wineries spread over an AVA (American Viticultural Area) that encompasses 1,000  square miles. And it's still growing. For more information, click here to visit the Paso Robles Wine Country Alliance.

There's talk of breaking this huge area up into nine or 10 appellations. This makes sense, because there's enough variety in soils, rainfall and microclimates to make your head spin.

Rainfall  ranges from 8 inches annually in the eastern part of the region to 45 inches in the west. Some of that fell, hampering the grape harvest, when I was there.  An  electrical storm at night was so fierce that I dreamed  a mechanical harvester was crashing through my lodgings.

In a single day, night and day  temperatures can vary by 50 degrees. At the low end, it's really cold. In October, I shivered under two quilts even though wrapped in a thick terry robe.

The region is so vast that in a week I could reach only a handful of wineries. Some were in rolling, oak-studded terrain far to the west, others along back roads toward the east, and a few along Highway 46, the main drag of the region. If you're in town without a car, you can at least get to Anglim Winery's tasting room by the railroad tracks.

Paso Robles is known for Rhone wines and Rhone blends, but as much Cabernet Sauvignon is planted in the region as in all of the Napa Valley. Cabernet, Syrah and Merlot make up two-thirds of the vines planted, but Zinfandel is so important there's an annual Zinfandel festival in March.

Super serious wineries include Windward, which makes  Pinot Noir as if  in Burgundy. Stephan Asseo of L'Aventure was born in Paris, started his wine career in Bordeaux and now specializes in Rhone varietals and Rhone-Bordeaux blends.

Tablas Creek is a joint venture between Chateau Beaucastel of Chateauneuf-du-Pape in the Rhone Valley and American importer Robert Hass. Its Rhone wine vines came from French clones, and the winery propagates Rhone cuttings for other winemakers. If you visit the tasting room, you might find a few for sale. Tablas Creek Marsanne and Grenache Blanc vines now grow along a fence in my yard.

Tasting room fees range from $3 to sample six wines at Peachy Canyon to $15 if you want to taste certain reserve wines at Anglim. General tasting at Anglim is free, and region pioneer Gary Eberle has always believed in free samples.

Tasting rooms range from Peachy Canyon's quaint 100-year-old schoolhouse to Robert Hall's grand structure with imposing caves and a central waterway that made me think of Mogul palaces in northern India.

The wines can be hard to get. Small producers tend to sell only at their tasting rooms or through web sites, which is a good reason to go to Paso. Not only can you find pleasing wines, but the region still has the countrylike, pioneer enthusiasm that is just a memory in that high-flying wine district to the south, Santa Barbara County.