Salads Days With Prager Grüner Veltliner And Andrea Calek Blonde

After our initial euphoria over a Mariano's opening up mere blocks from our house, reality has set in over just how much we'll be shopping there.

This week's "Explosion of Salads" serves as a good example.

Salad #1: Sea bass with garbanzo beans, mustard greens, barley, farro, mint and celery leaves, served with 2009 Prager Grüner Veltliner Smaragd Wachstum Bodenstein ($40 - Vin Chicago)

Fish over salad that tasted chefy, like someone experimented with these combinations 15 times until they got the balance right in every bite. Outside of the goat, this was probably the best meal this year.

Based on this recipe, swapping out fava beans for utterly cheap, fresh garbanzos from Harvesttime, leaving out the fennel flowers, including some pecorino in the barley/farro mixture, adding mint and roasted garlic to the vinaigrette, and putting celery leaves on top of the sea bass.

With a nod to a spring that won't f'in come to Chicago, this meal, with the greeny greenness and an underlying earthiness from the barley/farro business, was a party in our mouths and everyone was invited. It was WOW! food. As good as sea bass a la Veracruzana, a house favorite. Both meals use the fattiness from the sea bass perfectly by staying in the realm of light and clean without ever seeming too light and clean. A gravity and substantialness exists with every bite offering something different and deep. We became sated and satisfied by the flurry of flavors and sheer abundance of everything. Great Meal. Tasted like Zuni.

Frenchy-French On Crack & Rillettes, Salumi, Cheese & Andrea Calek Blonde

Drink wine from great importers like Kermit Lynch, Terry Theise, Neal Rosenthal, Cream and such, and you're going to end up drinking a boatload of organic, biodynamic and natural wine.

None of them stock their portfolios based on whether the wines are org-bio-nat or anything in-between. The wines they carry are wines they like that typically come from small producers that put a premium on subtlety, grace and good farming. That usually means not dumping a bunch of crap on their crop to some (or all) extent.

We don't drink org-bio-nat wines because they're that. We buy wines from good importers (mostly) and their wines happen to fall in that realm. We're not dogmatists. Dogma is "RIGHT OUT!" in our house.

But over the course of our wine drinking, our taste for wines that we like and want has been developed by those great importers, in a way that's almost like having a good hitting coach. It's become, in a small way, a cross-section of our own jones and how those importers can satisfy it. Not always but rather significantly. Heck, I liked the Yellow Tail sparkling rosé so there's that.

So as we wade deeper into the natural wine world, something that's been a big jones of mine lately, we're finding some limits in our tastes, but we're also finding wines chockablock with interesting interestingness. Which is all we ever want. Give me something interesting. If it's interesting, you're constantly engaged. If it's interesting, true surprise is possible.

Drinking the same thing night after night is boring.