Mountain Views News, Pasadena Edition [Sierra Madre] Saturday, September 15, 2018

8

FOOD & DRINK

Mountain Views-News Saturday, September 15, 2018 


TABLE FOR TWO by Peter Dills

thechefknows@yahoo.com


TIME TO SUPPORT OUR 
LOCAL BUSINESSES AND 
SOME GREAT FOOD EVENTS 
ARE ON THE CALENDAR 

It’s time to give the small retailer some love and 
affection. Fred and Lewy Fedial have owned Gerlach’s 
Liquor store in Pasadena for many years. I think when I 
was a student at nearby Blair High School is when they 
took over. These guys truly know their wines. Recently 
I talked to owner Fred on how they buy wines for their 
limited space and how they can compete with the big 
box boys. Fred told me straight out they can’t compete, 
but where else can you go where the owners have gone 
to over 200 wine tastings and their knowledge of wines 
is available on a day to day basis? I asked Fred to give me 
a stand-out good value wine. I was told that when they 
do find a wine that they can personally recommend 
they simply buy more of it so they can pass the savings 
on to their customers.

 Fred suggested one that I wrote about several years 
ago, Leese Fitch’s Cabernet Sauvignon from Sonoma 
County. A steal at $12 a bottle, this cabernet sauvignon 
is a blend of cabernet sauvignon California grapes from 
the region. I first sampled the Leese-Fitch at the Sonoma Wine Festival, and Fred’s recommendation is right 
on! This cabernet goes great with a goat cheese salad, crusty sourdough bread, or even goat cheese pizza. The 
blending of this cabernet brings the alcohol content down to a modest 13.5%. Its flavor starts with a hint of 
blackberry and then somehow bursts into a dark cherry, with notes of vanilla that come from the French and 
American oak barrels.

 Cabernet Sauvignon is one of the world’s most widely recognized red wine grape varieties. It is grown in 
nearly every major wine-producing country among a diverse spectrum of climates from Canada’s Okanagan 
Valley to Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley where it found new homes in places like California’s Santa Cruz Mountains, 
Napa Valley, and Sonoma. Its popularity is often attributed to its ease of cultivation—the grapes have thick skins 
and the vines are hardy and naturally low-yielding, budding late to avoid frost and other dangers. 

 Leese–Fitch Cabernet 2015 retails for $14, and can be found on sale at many fine retailers for $12. I found this 
bargain at Gerlach’s on Fair Oaks in Pasadena.

Dills Score: 89

Each week I will give you my Dills Score. Starting with a base of 50 points, I have added points for value - 8 
points for color, 8 points for aroma or “nose”, 8 points for taste, 7 points for finish, and 8 points for my overall 
impression, which includes my value rating.

 Important Food Stuff !! Parkway Grills Annual Food and Wine Festival is just around the corner, Hotel 
Constance in Pasadena has opened up their pool (officially) this open to guests and club members and Santa 
Anita Race Track hosts their Oktoberfest.


LEGACY OF NASA’S DAWN, NEAR THE END OF ITS MISSION:

Reveals Solar System Time Capsules, Breaks Engineering Barriers

NASA’s Dawn mission is drawing to a close after 11 
years of breaking new ground in planetary science, 
gathering breathtaking imagery, and performing 
unprecedented feats of spacecraft engineering.

 Dawn’s mission was extended several times, 
outperforming scientists’ expectations in its 
exploration of two planet-like bodies, Ceres and 
Vesta, that make up 45 percent of the mass of the 
main asteroid belt. Now the spacecraft is about to 
run out of a key fuel, hydrazine. When that happens, 
most likely between mid-September and mid-
October, Dawn will lose its ability to communicate 
with Earth. It will remain in a silent orbit around 
Ceres for decades.

 “Although it will be sad to see Dawn’s departure 
from our mission family, we are intensely proud 
of its many accomplishments,” said Lori Glaze, 
acting director of the Planetary Science Division 
at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Not only 
did this spacecraft unlock scientific secrets at 
these two small but significant worlds, it was also 
the first spacecraft to visit and orbit bodies at two 
extraterrestrial destinations during its mission. 
Dawn’s science and engineering achievements will 
echo throughout history.”

 When Dawn launched from Cape Canaveral 
Air Force Station in Florida in September 2007, 
strapped on a Delta II-Heavy rocket, scientists 
and engineers had an idea of what Ceres and 
Vesta looked like. Thanks to ground- and space-
based telescopes, including NASA’s Hubble Space 
Telescope, the bodies in the asteroid belt between 
Mars and Jupiter were visible -- but even the best 
pictures were fuzzy.

 From 2011 to 2012, Dawn swept over Vesta, 
capturing images that exceeded everyone’s 
imaginings— craters, canyons and even mountains. 
Then on Ceres in 2015, Dawn showed us a 
cryovolcano and mysterious bright spots, which 
scientists later found might be salt deposits 
produced by the exposure of briny liquid from Ceres’ 
interior. Through Dawn’s eyes, these bright spots 
were especially stunning, glowing like diamonds 
scattered across the dwarf planet’s surface.

 “Dawn’s legacy is that it explored two of the last 
uncharted worlds in the inner Solar System,” said 
Marc Rayman of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory 
in Pasadena California, who serves as Dawn’s 
mission director and chief engineer. “Dawn has 
shown us alien worlds that for two centuries were 
just pinpoints of light amidst the stars. And it has 
produced these richly detailed, intimate portraits 
and revealed exotic, mysterious landscapes unlike 
anything we’ve ever seen.”

 Dawn is the only spacecraft to orbit a body in the 
asteroid belt. And it is the only spacecraft to orbit 
two extraterrestrial destinations. These feats were 
possible thanks to ion propulsion, a tremendously 
efficient propulsion system familiar to science-
fiction fans and space enthusiasts.

 Pushed by ion propulsion, Dawn reached Vesta in 
2011 and investigated it from surface to core during 
14 months in orbit. In 2012, engineers maneuvered 
Dawn out of orbit and steered it though the asteroid 
belt for more than two years before inserting it into 
orbit around the dwarf planet Ceres, where it has 
been collecting data since 2015.

 All the while, scientists gained new insight into 
the early stages of our Solar System, fulfilling Dawn’s 
objective. The mission was named for its purpose: 
to learn more about the dawn of the Solar System. 
It targeted Ceres and Vesta because they function as 
time capsules, intact survivors of the earliest part of 
our history.

 You can contact Bob Eklund at: b.eklund@
MtnViewsNews.com.

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