Two hundred foreign diplomats and 500 guests of President-elect Trump and Vice President-elect Mike Pence honored Presidential Inaugural Committee Chair Tom Barrack at dinner Tuesday night while sipping on $32 bottles of wine from Barrack’s family estate.
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Attendees at The Chairman’s Global Dinner inside the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium in Washington, D.C., started their simple three-course evening meal with mustard black cod over a carrot ribbon salad, tossed with baby arugula, pine nuts, shaved parmesan, red onion, fresh herbs, apple cider vinaigrette. The second course featured filet mignon or champignons dressed in herb gnocchi, french green beans and carrot pearls. Dessert was comprised of individual baked Alaska complete with fresh raspberries on the side.
But the wine list was where the party got started even though Trump does not drink – though he does own a winery in Charlottesville, Va. Guests were treated to two types of reds and two white wines:
Duckhorn Sauvignon Blanc, Napa Valley 2015
Vineyard 7 & 8 “Estate” Chardonnay, Napa Valley 2014
Vineyard 7 & 8 “Estate” Cabernet Sauvignon, Napa Valley 2011
Piocho Bordeaux Red Blend, Barrack Family Estate, Happy Canyon 2012
The final wine was from the Santa Barbara, Calif., estate that Barrack’s family owns. The wine has notes of dark cherries, earth, cedar wood, raspberries and plums. Just under 2,000 cases of this blend were produced. Barrack aquired the Piocho Ranch in 1992 after growing up there.
“We grew up at the ranch and the vines grew up with us. In each bottle there is more than a wine, there is a memory, a story, a taste and a feeling that is home,” Barrack said in a statement on the company’s website.
Barrack said Trump played a significant role planning this dinner, picking the place settings and tableclothes he wanted to use in various dinners and events this week.
“He’s into every detail of everything,” Barrack told the New York Post. “I beg him all the time to go back to running the free world and let me focus on setting the tables.”
Trump’s team hired former Vogue events director Stephanie Winston Wolkoff to organize the Tuesday dinner, as well as three inaugural balls to take place on Friday evening.
“She raised the level of elegance and décor,” Barrack said about Wolkoff. “Washington hasn’t been used to this.”
