The Chest Always Gets Opened
TASTING NOTES:
Rubidoux Ridge Malbec - “Rubidoux Ridge Malbec is grown on a west-facing slope varying from 1900 ft to 2000 ft in elevation. Our Malbec has a medium red color (not as inky) due to the addition of some estate Sangiovese to add acidity and bright fruit. It has a pleasant nose and flavors of bright red cherry fruit with a hint of tobacco. It is a nice inviting wine with a bit of a sweet edge on the mid palate and finish which pulls in a lot of red fruit flavors. A good food wine which would pair well with steak tartare or other red meats.” (AbV 14.5%, pH 3.8)
Malbec
Rubidoux Ridge Petite Sirah - “Rubidoux Ridge Petite Sirah is grown on a west-facing slope varying from 2100 ft to 2000 ft in elevation. Our Petite Sirah has a deep inky color with good clarity and prominent legs. Its nose is earthy and woody. It has long bright raspberry fruit flavors with hints of chocolate. The tannins are sharp and crisp, much like Cabernet Sauvignon. It’s amazing bright and dark cherry berries just explode in your mouth as you sip this.” (AbV 14.6%, pH 3.8)
Petite Sirah
BARRELS: Not specified.
PAIRS WITH: Steak tartare or other red meats
THAT REMINDS ME OF: The Rubidoux Hotel treasure chest.
There’s something almost mythologically perfect about a treasure chest for children who finish their chicken pot pie. It’s the Ark of the Covenant of midcentury Midwestern hospitality — a wooden box, presumably lacquered and brass-hinged, containing what exactly? Plastic rings? Balsa wood gliders? Tiny metal cars with wheels that spun for approximately four minutes before one fell off and was never seen again? It doesn’t matter, because the treasure chest’s power was never in its contents. It was in the deal. You eat the pie, you get the prize. The contract was iron. And for a child, a contract that simple and that honored — an adult following through — was itself the treasure.
Hotels used to understand this. They understood that their job was to make you feel like something was happening, that you had arrived somewhere with intention and occasion. The Rubidoux Hotel in St. Joseph, Missouri doing its quiet work in the 1940s — feeding traveling families, rewarding small acts of childhood effort, lodging people mid-journey during the most consequential years of the 20th century — is the kind of story that sounds like it should be a novel but is actually just Tuesday in America. A young man meets a young woman there. Decades later, their son names a vineyard after the place. The treasure chest turns into Malbec.
That’s not nothing. That’s actually everything.
