Mountain Views News, Sierra Madre Edition [Pasadena] Saturday, September 8, 2018

8

FOOD & DRINK

Mountain Views-News Saturday, September 8, 2018 


TABLE FOR TWO by Peter Dills

thechefknows@yahoo.com

Cabernet Sauvignon is one of the world’s most 
widely recognized red wine grape varieties. It is often 
called the “King of the California Grape”. If you have 
followed me for the past five years, it isn’t news to you 
that Santa Barbara County has its share of quality 
wineries. 

This week I introduce you to a new wine, but not a 
new winemaker. Doug Margerum has been in the 
winemaking business for decades harvesting grapes 
since as far back as I can remember. I have to admit, 
on this particular review, my friend Jake Chueng 
from Gelson’s gave me the heads up. It’s not that this 
label is any more special then the hundred other 
cabernets that line my local Gelson’s wine section, 
but this Cabernet is a stand out! 

First, I will say this is one of the best $20 cabernets 
that I have had in recent memory - is this an 
introductory price? If so, get to your Gelson’s and 
stock up. I interview chefs every week on my two 
radio shows, and the term “farm to table” has been 
used more then a dozen times. Doug Margerum 
uses that phrase with a bit of a twist, “farm to glass”. 

This 2017 cabernet is aged for 10 months in neutral 
French Oak, and the result is a dark red velvet color 
with a very pleasant first and last sip. This cabernet is very easy to drink and medium-bodied. The 
tannins (how it lays on your tongue and mouth) are smooth and structured. I was able to get winemaker 
Magerum on the phone for this article, and he told me “2017 was a warm dry year. It really allowed us to 
make picking decisions that were based on fruit flavor. We were able to let the grapes hang until optimum 
ripeness this translates directly into the wine, which is very fruit forward”.

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 13.9%. 

Dills Score: 90

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

 

Join me this Sunday at 5 PM for Dining w/Dills 830 AM KLAA me on twitter kingofcuisine 


ULTIMA THULE IN VIEW: NEW HORIZONS MAKES FIRST DETECTION OF KUIPER BELT FLYBY TARGET


NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has made its 
first detection of its next flyby target, the Kuiper 
Belt object nicknamed Ultima Thule, more than 
four months ahead of its New Year’s 2019 close 
encounter.

 Mission team members were thrilled—if not a 
little surprised –that the New Horizons’ telescopic 
Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) was 
able to see the small, dim object while still more 
than 100 million miles away from it, and against 
a dense background of stars. Taken Aug. 16 and 
transmitted home through NASA’s Deep Space 
Network over the following days, the set of 48 
images marked the team’s first attempt to find 
Ultima with the spacecraft’s own cameras.

 “The image field is extremely rich with 
background stars, which makes it difficult to 
detect faint objects,” said Hal Weaver, New 
Horizons project scientist and LORRI principal 
investigator from the Johns Hopkins Applied 
Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland. “It really 
is like finding a needle in a haystack. In these first 
images, Ultima appears only as a bump on the 
side of a background star that’s roughly 17 times 
brighter, but Ultima will be getting brighter—and 
easier to see—as the spacecraft gets closer.”

 This first detection is important because the 
observations New Horizons makes of Ultima over 
the next four months will help the mission team 
refine the spacecraft’s course toward a closest 
approach to Ultima, at 12:33 a.m. EST on Jan. 1, 
2019. That Ultima was where mission scientists 
expected it to be—in precisely the spot they 
predicted, using data gathered by the Hubble 
Space Telescope—indicates the team already has a 
good idea of Ultima’s orbit.

 The Ultima flyby will be the first-ever close-
up exploration of a small Kuiper Belt object and 
the farthest exploration of any planetary body in 
history, shattering the record New Horizons itself 
set at Pluto in July 2015 by about 1 billion miles. 
These images are also the most distant from the 
Sun ever taken, breaking the record set by Voyager 
1’s “Pale Blue Dot” image of Earth taken in 1990. 
(New Horizons set the record for the most distant 
image from Earth in December 2017.)

 “Our team worked hard to determine if Ultima 
was detected by LORRI at such a great distance, 
and the result is a clear yes,” said New Horizons 
Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest 
Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. “We now 
have Ultima in our sights from much farther out 
than once thought possible. We are on Ultima’s 
doorstep, and an amazing exploration awaits!”

 The name “Ultima Thule” was selected from 
some 15,000 names for this object, submitted in a 
public contest. Thule was the place located furthest 
north, which was mentioned in ancient Greek and 
Roman literature and cartography. In classical 
and medieval literature, Ultima Thule (Latin 
“furthermost Thule”) acquired a metaphorical 
meaning of any distant place located beyond the 
borders of the known world.

 By the late middle ages and early modern era, 
the Greco-Roman Thule was often identified with 
the real Iceland or Greenland. Sometimes Ultima 
Thule was a Latin name for Greenland, when Thule 
was used for Iceland.

 In 1910, the explorer Knud Rasmussen 
established a missionary and trading post in 
northwestern Greenland, which he named “Thule”.

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

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