It’s been nearly 4 weeks since we left Park City on a road trip across the west part of the states, through Nevada, California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho and now into Montana.  It’s not often the opportunity for a trip like this, so, I celebrate this.  We have been able to experience a couple of truly wonderfully pleasing cocktails and bottles of wine in the process of this trip including…dun, dun, dun… this top 5:

1.  Fairmont Empress Hotel Victoria’s Bengal Lounge Empress “1908 Tea Cocktail”.  This sounds weird, a cocktail made with tea?!  However, this is in a class of it’s own.  The Empress Victoria is known for their traditional English High Tea, served in the afternoon, however, the bartender’s have taken tea time to the next level by using the Empress’ tea to infuse vodka, shaken with a bit of lemon juice, simple syrup, egg whites, and served up garnished with a sugar rim and lemon peel and a tea biscuit, this is light, refreshing, frothy, and awakening.  It’s tea time gone naughty.

2.  Honig’s Sauvignon Blanc – end of story. It’s light, crisp, fruity, and Honig’s story is full of environmental flair.

3.  Laurelhurst Market in Portland’s Smoke Signals cocktail – the market’s Evan Zimmerman created this by first making smoked ice – not an easy feat. Taking some serious trial and error, he learned to slowly melt a frozen chunk of water by smoking it with hickory chips and then re-freezing the melted water.  He then chips off a manhatten glass sized piece for your glass, then adds Tennessee whiskey, pecan flavoring, sherry, lemon, and who knows what else. Did I mention he smoked ice?!

4.  Winery to visit – Frog’s Leap in Napa.  Not a lot of people know the story behind Frog’s Leap, basically owner John Williams started at Stag’s Leap and then created his own wine which was a success.  Their merlot is fantastic, their chardonnay their knight in shining armor, and the actual winery is a gem.  The name, comes from the location, a former frog farm supplying the delicacy to San Francisco restaurant’s in the 1800’s.

5.  Bubbles? Duh, there has to be bubbles. Domaine Carneros, done in the French fashion, mmm bubbles.

What have you been drinking this month?! Something wonderful, I’m sure.

-h