On anniversaries and milestones

On 9/7/1997 I married my wife Suzi, and today we celebrated our 8th wedding anniversary. As is often the case on special occasions, we took the opportunity to have a quiet evening with a dinner at Lampreia.

The meal, as always, was impeccable: Kobe beef gravlax; Poached fava beans with shaved summer truffle, smoked Pecorino and roma tomatoe; Ravioli aperto with duck egg and smokey chive/butter sauce; Baby squab sous vide atop grated Ricotta salata; slivered parmesan with 50 year balsamico; Baked pecorino drizzled with vanilla honey; warm chocolate dumplings with vanilla sauce. Yummy!

• 1990 Pertimali (Livio Sassetti) Brunello di Montalcino 90 Points

  Italy, Tuscany, Montalcino, Brunello di Montalcino

  This was a bottle recently acquired from Brown Derby. The nose shows dominating notes of cedar moving to sandalwood. This is very perfumed with an almost cologne-like character. Hints of violet bloom in the mouth. The texture is somewhat delicate, and the wine seems a bit closed. Mmm, with aeration this starts to show dried cherry and gets a lot more floral. Ahhh, two hours later it yielded even more on the palate, very perfumey, with lots of dried wood.

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Just 15 minutes before I left for dinner, I also surpassed a milestone which I have been tracking for more than 16 months. When CellarTracker first opened up for public availability on 4/25/2004, the beta users had inventoried 65,000 bottles of wine. However, I had a tall mountain ahead, as the Cellar! website showed more than 665,000 bottles tracked at the same time. Of course, that was a mature product which had launched in 1995, so I recall thinking that making up 10% while in beta was pretty good. I was surprised to find a year later that Cellar! had 937,224 bottles tracked to 751,365 in-stock for CellarTracker, quite a lot of progress in just a year. And so I projected when both products might surpass a million bottles in stock, and Excel told me that Cellar would get there just about a month ahead of me and the products would converge in September of this year. As it turns out, I had a pretty good forecast, for as I type this, the Cellar website shows 1,024,789 bottles compared to 1,025,512 for CellarTracker. That was a nice anniversary present!

Anyway, onward and upward and thanks to so many members who have provided so much support and encouragement!