Bradley N.
Yelp
If you've ever walked the streets of San Diego in the rain, it isn't very hard to picture this scene. You've just left Civico 1845 after an epic, 2 hour Calabrian inspired meal. You are still a bit weary from waking up before dawn to catch a 6am flight, which inevitably was delayed because of the need to change planes (this is the time of the Boeing 737 Supermax 8 scandal, you will recall). So, it feels late inside your well traveled, well fed body even if it's only 9pm on a Sunday night. You pass the Ballast Point taproom, filled to the breaking point with lively guests. You wisely decide to keep walking. Mikkeller, too, seems too hip, too trendy, too insistent for you to handle. You really need to escape the crowds and the rain and retreat to your hotel room. Game of Thrones S8 E3 ("The Long Night") will be on soon, and you are ready for a long night of restlessness and self-imposed isolation. You can't talk anymore, you can't socialize, but you're not ready to sleep or relax yet, either.
So, you stop at Vino Carta, which is open late even on a Sunday. About a half dozen guests are idly sipping pink and sparkling wines. Someone is buying a bottle of Santa Barbara red to share. But you're not interested in BTG. You want something chilled to go, something esoteric and interesting but nothing that will distract from Jon, Dany, the dragons, and the Night King.
You browse the shelves anyway. It's like visiting old friends from college, plus the "cool kids" in prep school you never really knew but admired from afar. Reverently, you let your fingers linger on the more precious bottles as you inspect vintages, surreptitiously check the prices, and try to focus on the shelf talkers, but you give up almost as quickly as you started. Fortunately, a staff member saunters up and asks if she can help. Can she ever!
You mumble something about Austrian wines: white, dry, but with loads of minerality and character. You indicate that you're open to experimentation. Hungary. Croatia. Serbia. Czech Republic. As long as it's white, as long as it's obscure, as long as it goes with Game of Thrones (although you don't tell her that). And chilled! Your hotel is only a few blocks away, and the castle's defenders won't be able to hold out much longer.
Then you spot it: the perfect Winterfell wine! a "Hidden Treasures by Moric NR2 Somlo 2016" imported by the "Winemonger." It's so obscure that even the women helping you select it has to look up the grape varietals online (Hárslevelü, Furmint and Welschriesling, in case you were wondering). Yep. That's the one. You carefully remove it from the refrigerated display case and beeline back to the hotel.
By the time you arrive to your 5th floor room, locate a wine glass, and wrestle the cork out with your cheap plastic complimentary corkscrew, you barely have time to fill up your ice bucket from the dispenser (which is located one floor down, just to keep things interesting). The zombified White Walkers have already breached the fire trench by forming an undead bridge of bodies for their teammates to rampage across. They are starting to scale the castle walls as you finally take your first sip of the Somlo.
Smoky. Almost no detactable fruit, at first. You taste stone. Crushed rock mixed with lemon zest and then just a hint of apricot and green apple. It's sharp. It's taut. It's a razor of flavor on your tongue. Onscreen, someone is getting slaughtered in a hailstorm of flaming arrows, but who can see what's actually happening in Winterfell? It's too damn dark to tell.
Sometime later, you open your eyes. The Night King seems to be dead by this point, but you have no idea how. A half finished bottle of Hidden Treasures lies sweating on a table while rain slicks the streets of San Diego below. You remember to put the cork back in. You think about sleep. And then, miraculously, the long night is over and a new week begins.
Is this the way that the folks at Vino Carta intended you to enjoy their expertly curated collection of natural and fine wines? Did you do that bottle of Somlo justice by pairing it with a bag of Pirate's Booty while carnage unfolded on a flickering screen?
Hastily, while dressing for the day, you take another sip. It's wine. It's white. It doesn't taste like rock or smoke anymore. But it's still cool and refreshing and yes, you are still alive to fight another day.
Just like Jon and Dany (for another 2 episodes, at least). But the Night King, you can now confirm, did not survive the night. You learn only later on Wikipedia how he got taken down by Arya with a Valerian steel dagger.
Maybe that's what you tasted in the Somlo, you suddenly realize. Valerian steel plunged into your belly on a damp and dark San Diego night. Yeah. It tasted exactly like that. Not all wine shops in the city are capable of offering you taste sensations like this. Vino Carta is in a class all its own. Just ask the Night King.
