Moose in the Kitchen

When the guy across from me at dinner last Wednesday mentioned practicing his capuccino for the Western Regionals, I thought he was kidding.

He wasn’t.

Barista competitions are serious business, my coffee-loving friends. You have to make two perfect espresso drinks and present your own coffee creation, properly described to the judges as containing hints of jasmine and spruce. It doesn’t matter how tasty that coffee is, if the judges don’t taste jasmine and spruce, you lose. And when you lose, you realize that the tie and missed Decemberists concert was all for naught, because the judge with the bad hair OBVIOUSLY DOESN’T KNOW HER CONIFEROUS EVERGREEN.

Wednesday’s dinner required just this sort of dedication to a beverage. Specifically, chardonnay. I have no particular feelings about chardonnay, my general policy is to drink anything you put in front of me, but chardonnay is apparently the bastard step child of white wine. The man who was describing our chardonnay as we gobbled down oysters used the word “buttery” with such disdain that I almost got up and left, purely on principle. My outrage in defense of butter was soothed when I learned that doing a shot of olive oil can keep you from getting too drunk. Unfortunately, this wisdom was imparted after I nearly tipped off my chair under the weight of one and a half whole glasses of white wine.

My chardonnay education was prompted by Catwalker and Mere, who are awesome and not just because they’re both prone to saying “Let’s order fries!” well after the point when most people have thrown in the proverbial tapas-eating towel. We swirled our wine with aplomb, if I do say so myself, having never attempted such a thing because words like “bouquet” and “nose” mean nothing to me when applied to wine and words like “expensive”, “wine glass” and “broken” do. Little plates of food that matched the wine were served and, as someone who rarely makes it out the door with matching socks, this moved me to an entirely new level of existence. Though not necessarily a higher level; I still shovelled crab cakes into my maw with my fingers while everyone else used a fork. But I did notice the enlivened flavors, not unlike one might experience with a nice frosty glass of chocolate milk and the complementing Oreos. We were even supplied with sheets of paper so we could take notes on the wine. I carefully wrote the word “yum” under each selection.

Until the coffee boys (who all work at Ritual Roasters, the Che Guevara of coffee) started describing the barista competitions. That’s when I took my piece of paper and put it to good use: taking notes for my blog.

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*Mere sniffed out the bubblegum. And was my partner in crime with the loud whispers of “What the hell is tear-wa?” Catwalker knew both the definition and the proper spelling. (It’s “terroir,” if you were wondering. I forgot what the definition is. Something to do with dirt.)