Itsy Bitsy Dogs and Great BigBeautiful Wine

I had the pleasure just last week of meeting and dining and drinking wine with the lovely and talented Cathy Corison of the Corison Winery in Napa. I can honestly say that I had never heard of the wines nor the woman before that night so when told the dinner was themed around California Cabs I was all like "well la ti fuckin da, this will be super special". (Total bitch am I!)That is not to say that some good wines don't come out of CA, but I find that a good deal of them are over-priced and under-impressive. So, with no expectations for greatness but a very strong desire to get my drink on, I headed over to the Synergy Loft. Upon arrival I was handed a glass of bubbly and the night was off to a decent start. After sweeping the room, my attention was drawn to a very tiny lady with very tiny feet. Why do I mention her feet you ask? Am I a pervert with a foot fetish? Well, maybe but that's another blog. Anyhew, I do look at feet, mostly my own, and that's all you're gettin. So here is this cute little lady with feet so tiny I wasn't sure how she didn't topple over and this, of course, turned out to be the winemaker Cathy Corison. A little intimidated at first I sauntered over to say hi but resisted the urge to ask her to take her shoe off so I could get a better look. We chatted only briefly and then it was time for the dinner to start and for me to shut the hell up and sit down. Cathy spoke for a bit about her wine, her philosophy (to make artisan wines with both power and elegance that is) and her beliefs about wine. It was then that she said something that really resonated with me. She said very simply that wine means nothing until you drink it. And as I sat there sipping her wine, her gorgeous, elegant and really quite breathtaking wine, I started to think that maybe this tiny footed little vixen of a winemaker was on to something. My previous mind set of oh big deal, California Cabs, was lost in a sea of scintillating, sultry Cabernet sexiness. Somewhere around the second course, once the wine began to warm and do its thing, I finally got up the nerve to do it. I went over to Cathy and I said hey, you've got really small feet and Ive got freakishly large ones, hows about taking your shoe off so I can get a picture of our feet side by side? Now I really wasn't sure if she was going to call security or just turn and run as fast as her tiny feet could carry her for fear I was up to something fishy, but like a real sport she said okay. So we both de-shoed mid-dinner and I had Jeremy take a picture of our feet. I learned my lesson that night that Jeremy can't take pictures because the idea was to show how tiny her feet were by using my boat of a foot as a comparison. You know, like the use of a dollar bill next to a foot print in crime scene investigation, right. But I did get the photo, perhaps not exactly what I was shooting for, but it is pretty cool and I am seriously considering hanging it on the Wall Of Fabulousness in the wine shop right next to the picture of me and my hero Jacque Pepin . Thanks Cathy, you're a peach of a person, a great sport and one hell of a good winemaker!