COFFEE IS MORE KING'S TURF: SI's Peter King reported on Monday:
On Friday night, the Saints' staff at the combine gathered in a private room at St. Elmo Steakhouse, an 108-year-old Indy landmark, for a final celebratory nod to the Super Bowl win over the Colts. This is a group that likes its wine, and likes to have fun.
At the restaurant, word passed that Dallas owner Jerry Jones would have his Dallas group in this exact room Saturday night for a team dinner. Jones had even phoned ahead, according to a waiter, to make sure a magnum of a wine he loved, Caymus Special Selection cabernet sauvignon, was ready to be served at dinner.
Sean Payton told the waiter he'd like to have that wine, too. The waiter told him: Sorry, sir. We have only one bottle left, and it's reserved for Mr. Jones.
Payton said he'd like to have the bottle nonetheless. I assume there was much angst on the part of the wait staff at that point. My God! Who do we piss off? One of the most powerful owners in the NFL, or the coach who's the toast of the NFL, the coach who just won the Super Bowl?
Here came the bottle of Caymus Special Selection, and the Saints' party drained it.
But drinking Jones' wine wasn't enough. Payton gave the waiter some instructions, took out his pen ... and, well, the Cowboys party found at the middle of their table the next evening an empty magnum of Caymus Special Selection cabernet sauvignon, with these words hand-written on the fancy label:
WHO DAT!
World Champions XLIV
Sean Payton
That's the kind of thing Jones will get a big laugh out of. And remember.
I tracked down our anonymous resident oenophile for an explanation of what I regarded as
the critical question -- just how good of a wine was this?
It's often a very good wine, but sort of commodified and a super-not-original choice -- kind of like a somewhat-better Silver Oak. To me, Caymus wines (much like Silver Oak) in general often taste "overmade" -- there's too much manipulation to achieve a house "style" and year-to-year consistency in taste. It was a bigger name in the 1990s before the emergence of so many smaller boutique wineries making superior products at similar prices.
To me, the Special Selection is (much like, say, Opus One) one of the most over-priced wines on the American market, but that's not to say it isn't tasty -- it certainly is. And the vintage date might matter a bit to this story -- the 1994 and 2002 are both very highly regarded wines (I tried the 1994 back around the time we graduated, and although it was way too early to be drinking it, I wasn't choosing, buying or complaining -- very nice). More than anything, this is just the type of "reserve selection" I'd expect to see being ordered by the likes of Jerry Jones from the reserve wine list of an Indianapolis steakhouse.
To which Isaac noted, via email, that the last line was "gold-medal condescension if I've ever seen it ... dismissive of Jerry Jones, Indianapolis, and inexpert self-described oenophiles," and our friend responded:
All I mean is that, as a predictive matter, if you had said to me, "Jerry Jones walks into an Indianapolis steakhouse and orders a bottle of high-end wine... what does he order?" this would have been like my second guess.
