Girl, I want to take you to a wine bar! Wine bar! Wine bar! Wine bar!

Let's start a war! (thing I'm babbling about in link, sound necessary)

The Sherbs and I had a "date night" last night, and for the food portion of the evening, we went to Vinoteca, a super-trendy "wine bar" on U street in DC. Our server, Lauren, was a more than capable sommelier; we started by expressing some indecision about which wine assortments to order, and she ably picked a selection of whites for the Sherbs and pinot noirs for me that were really tasty.

Vinoteca doesn't do tapas, exactly; they do, however, make small plates of things that are mostly not Spanish. I ate, in whole or part:

• their tray of sheep cheeses - you cannot go wrong with a semi-hard sheep's milk cheese,
• their portobello mushroom "sliders" - cute tiny burgers with little mushrooms in a very tasty white miso/tahini sauce,
• bow tie pasta in a sauce that was just cream and butter, with sliced truffle on top and micro-greens on the bottom. I love micro greens. They are so cute. The dish itself was "oh god this is killing me through salt, fat AND cholesterol" delicious.
  
• an apple tart lightly cooked in a lattice of puff pastry and not too sweet - mostly natural apple flavor with a hint of cinnamon. The sweetness came from the calvados sabayon, which was basically faultless.

I also drank a pretty good malbec and a fabulous Pedro Ximinez sherry. Then the Sherbs and I realized that, after two hours of really drinking and eating, we still had plenty of time before the show (darn discount tickets!). So we spent some time wandering and digesting, which was probably for the best.