Brown, Gold, and a Little Sweaty

Three straight Octobers. We don't take it for granted, and we know you don't either.

Tuesday night at Petco was one of those games you'll be telling people about for years. Michael King carried a no-hitter into the seventh, Tatis and Machado both went deep, and the Cubs went home with a zero. Padres 8, Cubs 0. One more win and it's on to Milwaukee.

To everyone who has loved this team through the lean years, the heartbreak years, and every "maybe next year": this one's yours. You earned it.

Meanwhile, summer came back from vacation. The forecast says hot through next week, with inland running 10 to 20 degrees above normal. We can handle the heat. It's the humidity we'd like to have a word with.

A Greek dish, a Greek wine, and 25 years of history.

Starting Thursday at dinner: layers of silky eggplant, a spiced meat sauce, and a thick blanket of béchamel baked until the top turns golden. Moussaka is the dish Greek grandmothers judge you by, and ours holds up just fine.

Pairing: Amethystos Cava from Costa Lazaridi. By the bottle only for this special.

First, the name. This isn't the sparkling Cava you know from Spain. In Greece, "Cava" is the word for an aged wine, and this one is a red made entirely from Cabernet Franc in Drama, northern Greece. It spends about a year and a half in new French oak and then rests in bottle before it's released. You get dark fruit, violets, a little mint and cedar, and warm spice with a touch of cinnamon.

We've poured Costa Lazaridi at Yanni's for 25 years, and Yanni and Denise just visited the estate for the first time (more on that below). In the family's private cellar, the bottle that caught Yanni's eye was a 2003 Amethystos Cava. Same wine you'll have on your table, just a lot older.

Why they work together: the cinnamon and sweet spice in the wine match the warm spice in the meat sauce, and the Cabernet Franc has the structure to cut through all that béchamel. It's a Greek dish and a Greek wine from a family we've known for a quarter century.

You're hearing this first.

Saturday, October 10 is close to a full house. Before the last few tables go public, they're yours. Call (858) 527-0011.

For the nights when it's too hot to put on real shoes, you can now order Yanni's online. Start your order.

Yanni went to Marathon. He did not run it.

In 490 BC, legend says, Pheidippides ran from Marathon to Athens with news of a victory. Twenty-five centuries later, Yanni and Denise made the same trip back to Athens. By car.

Before that, they spent the day at Costa Lazaridi, a winery we've carried at Yanni's for 25 years and had never visited until now. The corkscrew collection alone has more than a thousand pieces.

It's the 5th chapter of From the Road, our newsletter section following their travels.

Go Padres. Stay cool. Save room for moussaka.

"Wine is just sunlight held together by water."

- Galileo Galilei