My wife and I had a quiet celebration of our 38th wedding anniversary (I robbed the cradle for sure, and did it in style) at our favorite local haunt, the Oregon Grille, which is unquestionably the best restaurant in the Baltimore suburbs. While basically a steak and lobster house, they offer a number of brilliant dishes. Although the food isn’t intellectually challenging, it always respects the integrity and quality of the raw materials - something many chefs forget. The Oregon Grille’s Chef Mark Henry knows how to take fine ingredients and deliver the goods, and that’s why I’m a loyal customer. His soft shelled crabs are the finest I have ever had. A Maryland specialty during the summer, they are the state’s equivalent of Piedmontese white truffles or Périgord’s black truffles. The crabs are caught early in the morning and are prepared and served that same day, making them among the freshest seafood one can get in the United States. We also enjoyed one of Chef Henry’s newest dishes, superb poached oysters topped with crab imperial, as well as one of his signature dishes, lobster corn cakes. These are wonderful cakes filled with chunky lobster meat and sweet Maryland corn. Another dish he does well is the grilled free range chicken and vegetables over a bed of penne pasta.

To celebrate our extraordinarily successful and blessed union, we opened some of our favorite wines. We began with Sine Qua Non’s 2004 The Rejuvenators. I like the name, and the wine was even better. A classic blend of Roussanne, Chardonnay, and Viognier, it exhibits plenty of honeysuckle and tropical fruit notes along with good minerality. Initially, an aggressive hint of new oak pushed through, but after I asked the waiter to decant the wine, that component quickly blew off, and the gorgeous fruit and purity burst forth. This is a young, big, exuberant, complex white that demonstrates the terrific potential that exists on California’s Central Coast for these kind of blends. We then moved to what I have always considered to be the two most profound Châteauneuf du Papes I have ever had. Both possess in excess of 16% alcohol, but you would never know that by tasting them. They are both elegant, but neither hot, raisiny, nor pruny. The 1990 Rayas was a freak early in life, but it soon settled down and became increasingly elegant with age. I suspect if I had tasted this wine by itself it may have gotten a perfect score (which it has received in the past), but I couldn’t give that magic three digit score when I tasted it next to truly one of the most monumental wines I have ever had, Henri Bonneau’s 1990 Châteauneuf du Pape Réserve des Céléstins. I have probably drunk more than four cases total of these two wines, and, luckily, I have never had a corked bottle. On every occasion, they were as good as dry red wine can be. The Rayas exhibited a medium dark ruby color with only some slight lightening at the edge, and a gorgeously explosive nose of kirsch liqueur, raspberries, licorice, and spice, a voluptuous palate, wonderful sweetness, and incredible elegance, purity, and lusciousness. The 1990 Réserve des Céléstins was pure beef blood. It smelled like steak being roasted over hardwood charcoal, and revealed a much darker, brooding, plum/garnet/purple color. Full-bodied and powerful without a hard edge to it, each sip offered more nuances and flavor dimensions. These two wines went back and forth all night, but in the end, we decided that comparisons are odious, but if we had to choose, Bonneau’s Réserve des Céléstins would be the winner. It seems to have at least another 10-15 years of life ahead of it, whereas the Rayas should be consumed over the next 5 years.

When we left that evening, no Bonneau wine was left in the bottle, but about 1/4 of the Rayas remained. I returned the next day for a scheduled tasting, and the restaurant manager, who had sampled the remaining Rayas, said the 1990 Rayas was the single greatest red wine he had ever had ... and he drinks a lot of wine. I apologized for not leaving some of the Réserve des Céléstins for him to try!

In any event, it was a quiet, but great anniversary with fabulous food and even more fabulous wines.