Our guests last week brought us a picanha (a slender, 3.5-lb. sirloin rump roast with a big fat cap) from their local butcher and advised us to treat it like a gigantic duck breast, so I scored the fat and salted it a few hours in advance, slow-roasted to 110F, and then seared to 125. Delicious, and gave the "high" setting on our new range hood its first real workout.
With it, we opened a Dunn 1999 Howell Mountain Cabernet Sauvignon. We had a couple of ounces each right after opening, and it was tight as a drum. "That's the most delicious rock I've ever licked," said A. But the slow-roasting took a while, and the Dunn came around. Black currant and plum, leather, a little eucalyptus, and a lot of bay. Dense and still quite youthful, as expected (my expectations for Dunn being set only by reputation and not experience: this is my first bottle of, I think, four in the cellar); but definitely accessible now, with a decant.
Bonus wine: earlier in the week, we had a Jean-Marc Burgaud 2023 Morgon Côte de Py. I can't reconstruct anything like a formal note, but at under $30, it went on the "go get more" list; it's definitely New World Order Beaujolais in its scale, but focused and vibrant. Yum.