Tropical Wine Celebration

Filed in archive Food and Wine , Italian Wines on April 30, 2006

My husband, Michael, and I celebrated our 18th wedding anniversary this weekend. Of course, this called for a nice dinner out, including a celebratory bottle of wine.

Before I tell you about our wonderful meal, I first have to share a funny story about how our evening started. We had decided to go to a local french restaurant that we had visited I think back in November, and so I called about mid-week and made reservations. The woman who took our reservations had a thick accent and I had a hard time understanding her (and visa versa), but I remembered that some of the staff there were French, so I didn't worry.

That evening we pull to the restaurant and notice - hmmm....it's got a different name on the sign, and hmmm....it says next to the name "Latin Cuisine." Longer story short - the place was no longer our French restaurant and it was Saturday night and we had no place to eat.

We'd both heard about a local place called Ian's Tropical Grill, so we called and luckily, we got reservations. And, it was a good thing we did. That place was jamming!

Good food, good wine, good service!

Since we had both decided on the evening's salmon special (salmon served in a puff pastry with walnuts, goat cheese, and spinach), we decided white wine was in order, a bottle of 2003 Garibaldi Veneto Pinot Grigio (label pictured from Wine Express is similar - I thought about asking to bring the bottle home to photograph but did have the nerve.)

Anyway, it turned out to be a nice evening and along with discovering a wonderful restaurant, we both agree the wine was excellent too - perfect match to our meal. A tad on the acidic side, but in a good way. Neither of drink a lot of white wine or even Italian wines, so this was a nice change of pace.

Here's to another 18 years together!