I've cooked and presided over hundreds of Wine Dinners over the years.
One stands out over all those events
Not that it was the best food or wine or even camaraderie. It was because of Mr. Johnson, our uninvited guest.
Many years ago at our restaurant, Jordan's Grove in Matiland, FL, I had the pleasure of meeting Orville Magoon, the owner of Guenoc Winery (Lake County, CA) on a trip he made to the area. He had great wines, great stories ( his family was from Hawaii, and he was an early pioneer of Lake County Wines in CA.), his and his family farmed hundreds of acreage, and also had a ranch where many wild animals, including boar that roamed throughout.
Orville's son Matt lived in the Orlando area and many times did wine dinners promoting his family's wines. We decided that doing a Guenoc dinner at Jordan's would be a great event...and especially since the Guenoc Ranch could provide a fresh wild boar for us to cook for the dinner as our entree'.
As we planned the dinner, Matt placed the order to his ranch manager to harvest a boar and have it sent to us by air. I was to pick up the boar at the Delta Cargo terminal at the Orlando International Airport. Over the next weeks we planned the wines and foods to go with them, wrote the menu, made the invites and gathered about 60 customers to come for what we thought should be a tremendous evening of food, wine and camaraderie.
The call came about 2 days before the dinner...our boar was shipped and would arrive at Delta Cargo for us to pick up the next day. That morning, I and one of our top chefs, Casey Bricker, jumped in my truck and went to get the boar. We were told to look for a wooden crate about 5 -6 ft. long on the cargo bay.
Casey and I arrived and to our amazement there was no one at the Delta Cargo Bay. We waited for a while, but still no person was to be found. There were several boxes in the bay, among them a 6 ft wooden crate that we were sure was our boar. Casey and I decided to load our boar into the truck and then wait for a warehouse manager to let us depart.
As we started to walk the box to the truck, finally a warehouse person appeared. Looking agitated, waving his hands and moving toward us quickly, he asked us exactly what we were doing. We explained about the boar we expected to pick up, that no one was there yet, and we were simply loading in the cargo so we could leave quickly when someone in charge could wave us through.
'Put the box down', the manager said. 'You've made a mistake. Your boar is in a different part of the cargo bay. The box you are moving is not your boar. That box is the remains of Mr. Johnson!'
We were mortified. Putting Mr. Johnson delicately back where we found him, we then were directed to where our boar was, and quickly loaded that box into the truck to travel back to the restaurant. We moved the boar to our walk in refrigerator and the day of the dinner we started to fabricate the wild boar among the other items we were preparing. We were to make a wild boar ragout for the entree'.
The night of the dinner was upon us and as our tradition, we explained each course as it was served with the wines that Matt selected to to with it. When the entree course came out, we we explained the mis-identified box of boar and the strange, strange trip we had had and the chagrin we experienced in the mix up....some snickering came from the dinner attendees knowing that we had mixed up the boar with Mr. Johnson...and then we served the ragout to the customers.
One of my best friends and one of the most witty person I have ever met, Bill Loving, was at the dinner. He waited for his moment (he had great comedic timing) and upon being served his boar dinner, he announced in a loud and resounding voice : ' If I find a gold filling in my ragout, is the dinner on the house? '
The house came down with minutes of laughing that we thought may never end and the dinner became legendary over the many wine dinners we had done over 10 years at Jordans.
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