After our own “ day that will live in infamy’ Troya and I decided that we would try to put everything behind us by treating ourselves a nice dinner with wine. What better way to drown away your sorrows. We have been wanting to go to Ma Maison for a while now but unfortunately it was closed on this Friday evening. We settled on Café Sparrow a local French country restaurant where we have had several fine meals. On this evening they had two fish specials, one a fresh salmon and the other a halibut, both sounded very intriguing. We ordered one of both along with a Mediterranean salad. Then came the fun part, choosing the wine they would go best with our dinner. They very pleasantly allowed us to taste several wines that they had available by the glass. We almost chose a Chardonnay from Sonoma until we noticed they had a 2011 Albarino from Abacela in southern Oregon. This wine has gotten some very positive press recently and even won a gold medal at the Sunset international Wine competition. We have tasted several Albarino’s before and they are typically a very clean wine with a nice balance of floral and fruit flavors. We could not taste this option because it was only available by the bottle but we thought it would go perfect with both of our dinners. We were surprised when we found it to be very tart with not much fruit at all. I initially felt that it was probably just because the bottle was served very cool and that it would open up as the evening progressed. Unfortunately this was not the case. Our dinners had some interesting flavors but nothing that either one of us would order again. I would like to try other wines from Abacela since they specialize in Spanish varietals, something that we both enjoy very much. They also have gotten quite a bit of positive write ups recently. I would like to find out if this is typical for their Albarino or if we just had a bad bottle.