Paint fumes and alcohol fumes

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A simple dinner tonight to catch up with someone over a couple of bottles of wine.  Where to go for such a meal?  Apparently Amuse Bouche is an ideal location for our purpose, and I must admit that I don't go back there as often as I probably should.  These guys serve good food and know how to take care of your wines, so I'm left wondering why it took me almost a year to come back...

Neither of us wanted a big dinner tonight - especially since I had a late lunch - so simple was the way to go...

Our amuse bouche was "mixed seafood" - with marinated octopus, snail, and tomato.  Silly me, I hadn't realized snails were from the sea... And the octopus tasted like those store-bought Japanese baby octopus with that thick, sweet red sauce...  The amuse bouche at Amuse Bouche failed tonight.

Tuscan artisanal pasta with black truffle and chicken gravy - loved this last time, and wanted an encore performance.  Just as tasty as I remembered, and inhaled in no time.  The only problem is that the added cheese kinda clogged up as the dish started to cool down, and this stuck to the utensils.  A little annoying.

Duck leg confit served with sautéed potatoes and herb salad, with duck jus - I had fond memories of this from my first visit, so I decided to go for this classic.  Very well done, and just what I wanted.

I actually didn't need dessert, but kinda wanted some.  I asked two different members of the staff for their opinions on the range on offer, and I was pleasantly surprised when they gave me their honest opinions.

Marscapone cheese mousse and raspberry jelly with chocolate crumbles - I should have listened to my friend and not ordered dessert...  This was OK, but I wouldn't order it again.  The cubes of mango were ripe and sweet, but the raspberry jelly was a little harder than I expected.

Floating island with vanilla, passion fruit coulis and lemon tart - the staff brought me this because I had asked about it earlier.  A couple of problems with this:  while the meringue was soft and nice, it actually wasn't floating on anything... and the reason why it's called île flottante it because it's usually sitting on top of a pool of crème anglaise...  And for some reason the staff decided to deprive me of the full experience by withholding the lemon tart and the passion fruit coulis...

But tonight was more about wine... and here's where we ran into trouble.  The building that houses the restaurant has a number of units undergoing renovations, and the unfortunate result was that the air was filled with paint fumes.  This obviously significantly impaired our ability to smell the wines, and we asked the restaurant to turn up the power of their air conditioning to try to get rid of the fumes.  Eventually we stopped smelling the fumes - either because the ventilation had gotten rid of them, or we had become accustomed to the fumes...

2001 Castellare di Castellina I Sodi di San Niccolò - initially the nose was simply not clean, a little green and vegetal with wet chalk.  We debated whether the bottle was corked, but decided it wasn't obvious enough.  A little minty with dried herbs.  Very smooth on the palate, with velvety tannins.  Surprisingly for a Sangiovese, this wasn't acidic at all.

1994 Colgin Herb Lamb - wow! Pretty much the way I expected it to be: really exotic, tons of coconut butter, tons of vanilla, very sweet, with lots of tangerine.  Alcoholic a little sharp on the nose.

There was a little too much wine for the two of us, as both of us are a little weak... so I poured the Colgin from the decanter back into the bottle and took it home.  I guess I'll try to finish it off tomorrow.