I hope you all had a happy and safe New Year’s Eve. Robert and I don’t like to venture out too far on New Year’s Eve; there are way too many crazies out and about for that. We do usually like to go out for a nice meal, though. This year we decided to go to Tango, down on Pike and Boren, for some tapas. It’s close to home and we have been there several times before so it’s nice and familiar.

We started with a bottle of 2001 Finca Valpiedra Reserva. I tend to get overwhelmed by wine lists so I decided to prepare myself with a little bit of advance research. I read up about Rioja wines in my wine book and learned that 2001 was a really good year for this region. That helped narrow things down considerably.  I settled on the Valpiedra wine because of the year and also because the description on the menu sounded intriguing: “rich, voluptuous, intense and spicy with complex silky stone fruit and a sherried finish.” It was so good! I could tell that it was a much better wine than I am used to drinking. The flavors were much more balanced and long-lasting. It felt like it was coating the inside of my mouth, but not with strong tannins, just with really good flavor. It may have been a little heavy for the food we were having, but I figured, with tapas, there are too many flavors happening to worry too much about matching wine.

For our dinner we ordered the following: a couple of “Cheap Dates” (bacon wrapped dates with grilled eggplant), Pan-roasted Green Beans with Harissa, Tequila and Vanilla Cured Salmon, Queso Azul (Valdeon blue cheese souffles with seasonal fruit compote), Croquetas de Papas (fried potato-horseradish balls with smoked tomato jam), and Gambas Picantes (chipotle tiger prawns with a corn and coconut galleta and pumpkin seed pipian sauce.) No one dish in particular stood out as spectacular but they were all really good and, together, added up to an excellent dinner. OK, so maybe the deep-fried potato balls were spectacular but, come on, deep-fried potatoes? That’s like cheating. Of course that’s going to be good. We finished with coffee and Tango’s famous El Diablo. People rave about this dessert online so we had to try it. The El Diablo is a very striking cube of bittersweet chocolate mousse dusted with cocoa and cayenne and served with a tequila caramel sauce and spicy almonds. It was very spicy.  Yum!

The walk home was pleasant.  We only passed a few crazies and they were the mild, entertaining kind not the true freaks (they come out later.) I was way too full of food and wine to bother with the prosecco that I had bought so I just poured a big glass of water and watched the space needle fireworks on TV. I know that sounds really lame, especially since we could have walked a couple of blocks down the street to watch the fireworks in person. But, it was freezing outside! Happy 2007!