IPNC Reflections

For those of you who went, what were the wine highlights of the weekend including any pre or post events you attended? Any brief food highlights or TN’s would be appreciated.

Thanks

I was at the salmon bake, my first time at a formal IPNC event. Was a great time, mostly about hanging out with friends including some people I hardly ever get to see. Probably missed a number of people too, including you if you were there! Tasted a bunch of things but didn’t pay lots of attention for once. Honestly an '08 Belle Pente Riesling was the most memorable wine, just terrific. I think might be available, and for not too much money. The food was well done for the setting, cooking outdoors for many hundreds of people. The salmon was the highlight for me, especially the rarer cuts of fillet. Great texture and balance, so good.

We are the beer provider for IPNC. Besides providing beer for the kitchen and Somms, we were pouring beer Saturday afternoon, at the Salmon Bake, and at Passport to Pinot on Sunday.

We sat with the O’Donnells and the Passos at the Salmon Bake, and had a number of great wines, including a late disgorged 1976 Lanson and a number of stellar older Belle Pente wines (1998 Estate was killer as was an older late harvest Riesling).

I really like Passport. The food is generally better than the Salmon Bake (Lardo’s lamb ribs, Ken’s canales, Tina’s gourmet corn dogs, and Bollywood Theater’s chicken were all stand-outs) and you get to try all the featured wines from IPNC. Marcus Goodfellow was pouring a bunch of killer Chardonnay as well. As a beer provider, it’s amazing what people will trade for a couple beers on a hot afternoon!

Damn. Belle Pente had a Memorial Day sale on that Riesling when I visited in May and it was dirt cheap. Now I’m kicking myself for not buying some!

Making the trip for IPNC is definitely on my travel list for 2018.

The food overall was the best in (my) recent memory. I’ve had better individual dishes in past weekends, but almost everything I tasted over the weekend was better than good. It was super to have Rick’s beer throughout the event - in years past, the kitchen kegs were not Heater-Allen.

Wine highlights…hmmm
Champagne Jean-Josselin was new to me and I really liked it. Not available in my local market, of course

I enjoyed trying the Alsatian Pinot Noirs - Albert Mann, Zusslin, and Rene Mure all were interesting.

The Drouhin, Westrey, and Cameron featured wines were all delicious, albeit young. Grivot was uniformly good - everything I tried. I loved the Evening Land La Source too. A taste of the '04 St. Innocent Seven Springs was also excellent and made the Evening Land a bittersweet pleasure.

I brought an '81 Eyrie Reserve that was pretty tired. My first (and only) '81 from Oregon. This was not a shock, and was a fun historical sip.

Weather was a highlight as well, given what is going on this week. We had one year where the heat wave was during IPNC. It’s much better in the 80s-90s than in the 100s.

Cheers,
fred

The first year in maybe the past 7 that I didn’t hit a single IPNC event, unless you count the Thursday Night Pre-IPNC dinner at Belle Pente (with the Josselin Champagnes). I heard the food was truly a highlight, the best yet…which is really saying something considering the number of attendees. The Le Pigeon fare at Brian’s was delicious.

I’m sorry to have missed John Paul. Has he ever poured as a featured winery before? I might have one bottle of that 04 St. I 7 Springs left…very bittersweet. Also a fan of Grivot (thanks to Jim Anderson), although a fair number of Burg-heads are less enthralled.

I assume you were hard at work again Fred? The “wine room” is the engine that drives that whole show and NO PICNIC.

RT

This year’s IPNC was great!

The food was the best I can recall of the IPNC’s I’ve been to (14).

The primary seminar featuring Burgundians making wines in Oregon was also among the best I can recall.

Sorry we missed finding your table on Saturday Night!

Ditto that Andy!

Food was all around better this year. Our lunch was incredible at Christom.

The food at IPNC was a notch above what I recall from recent previous years but overall I wasn’t as taken with the wines being poured. Having said that, I was most taken with the Cameron Clos Electrique chard that was poured at the Friday night dinner. I can’t find a picture of it or my notes so not sure if it was a 2014?

For our Friday winery lunch, we were at Durant winery. The chef was Sunny Jin from Jory at the Allison. It was quite spectacular - my favorite dish was Grilled Finnegan Creek beef deckle and crispy alliums with carmelized garlic jus. Thank god for Wikipedia to help out with ‘deckle’ which sounds like a weird part but is just the tender part of the ribeye.

At the friday dinner, I loved the octopus carpaccio over potato and summer bean salad with chorizo vinaigrette and nasturtium by Vitaly Paley and I’m not even an octopus fan! It also had these tiny little soft popcorns to add texture to the dish. But it was kind of a mystery for me because they were too small to be corn and way too soft. What was funny was at the salmon bake on Saturday, we had 2 open seats at our table and a couple from Portland joined us. They asked about the food and I told them about the octopus dish from the night before. They said they supplied the micro greens to Paley’s restaurants inc the nasturtiums for the Octopus dish and knew that the tiny popped popcorns were actually popped sorghum- so mystery solved!

At the throwdown, I think the 11s showed much better than I was expecting but I was not generally an '11 oregon pinot fan. Vincent Armstrong was a favorite as was Westry Abbey Ridge, Walter Scott Holstein and Johan Nils.