By Sharon Lorenzo

For this summer’s remake of “The Pink Panther” starring Steve Martin as Inspector Clouseau, production designer Lilly Kilvert said she created a “recognizably real but a heightened, more benign reality.”

In truth, the Nantucket native and twice Oscar-nominated designer has created more highly memorable film scenery than the phrase “benign reality” might imply.

Among her recent achievements— in a career spanning almost 30 years and with many other awards and nominations to her credit— Kilvert recreated 19th-century Japanese villages for “The Last Samurai,” early 20th-century Montana landscapes for “Legends of the Fall” and a Colonial-era town for “The Crucible.” Her work on “Samurai”

in 2003 and “Fall” in 1994 garnered her Academy Award nominations for “Best Art Direction-Set Decoration.” In all, Kilvert’s credits as production designer include nearly 30 independent and major Hollywood feature films (see www.imdb.com for her complete filmography).

What kind of a woman climbs out of a helicopter onto a dirt runway in Sierra Leone, Africa, in a taffeta skirt and greets armed natives with a confident smile and a handshake?

She’s the same woman who managed a grizzly bear and his trainer with dead reckoning and careful staging for the movie “Legends of the Fall,” and who recently helped tame the “Pink Panther” in this summer’s new version with Steve Martin as Inspector Clouseu. She’s also the film production designer and art director who’s Academy Award-nomination in 2004 for “The Last Samurai” further bolstered her growing list of professional accolades and nominations.

Born into a Nantucket dynasty of strong women and powerful men, Kilvert has emerged as one of the film industry’s most successful production designers. With the sale last year of her family’s island homestead on Nantucket, Kilvert recently recalled how her childhood experiences continue to influence her work today.

Growing up partly on Nantucket, Kilvert and her four siblings occupied the rear quarters of their prominent family home at Main Street and Gardner Street, where it had been relocated around 1715. Dating from about 1692, the structure was first built by the Gardner family—one of Nantucket’s 12 early land-owning shareholders— at the Sherburne settlement in the northwest area of the island. Before his death, Kilvert’s father, Charles Kilvert, located its original site near Capaum Pond, where a perimeter foundation in stone mirrored the exact dimensions of the current house. After Kilvert’s mother died in 1960, her valiant father carried onward for his brood of five with a host of nannies and babysitters in Nantucket and Providence, Rhode Island. Kilvert remembered that he set up a buzzer system on Nantucket: one for Anne, two for Bay, three for Lilly, four for Charlie and five for Graham, the youngest of the clan. When summoned by their father on Sundays, they would arrive prompt and tidy, with gloves for church and dinner.

Kilvert also remembered her father mending things in the old house, where an occasional plumbing repair inside the walls revealed a pair of Quaker shoes or seaweed as insulation. She confirms that she inherited her father’s gift for fixing things: she can mend a fence, replace a shower head, build a house or realize the vision of a script to create a village for the best of Hollywood directors, from Ed Zwick in “Legends of the Fall” to Rob Reiner in “The American President.”

Persistence and ingenuity

Kilvert studied at Bard College with concentration in physics, photography and fine art— a perfect balance for her future as a production designer. When asked how she got started in her work, she said it was the result of persistent pestering for her first film job in 1977, which resulted in the chance to work as art director with producer Michael Hausman and director Robert Young on their film “Alambrista.” Since then, she has been either art director or production designer for 22 major studio productions.

In recent weeks, Kilvert has traveled several times to Africa, scouting possible locations and developing a budget for designing the new movie “Blood Diamond,” produced by Warner Brothers and directed by Ed Zwick, who also produced “Samurai.” Based on a script rewritten by Zwick, the movie recounts a diamond heist in Sierra Leone at the time of its last civil war, when local militia went wild, murdering and maiming local people. The film will tell what happens when “the devil comes out,” explained Kilvert. While Zwick is on the hunt for box-office actors for “Blood Diamond,” Kilvert will prepare a research book with detailed historical documentation of the film’s content in order to guide a team of prop managers, costume specialists and construction overseers.

For Kilvert, the knowledge and strength she gained while growing up on Nantucket helped greatly in building a 17th-century village in 1995 near Ipswich, Massachusetts, for “The Crucible.” The production’s unusual challenges began with securing permission to film on Hog Island, a National Trust Preserve off the Massachusetts coast.

The National Guard transported Kilvert daily to the isolated island without electricity or water, where she rode to the set by moped or on horseback on rainy days. Kilvert supervised the construction of an entire village in nine weeks, including the planting of Colonial-era food crops. Thankfully, the choice of her son Alexander Streit to play Joseph Proctor— the young son of Elizabeth and John Proctor, played by Joan Allen and Daniel Day-Lewis— eased Kilvert’s role as a mother because Alex was home-schooled on the set for three weeks during filming.

Bearing up to challenges

Building a replica of the White House in 1994 for producer and director Rob Reiner’s “The American President” was done from memory because White House security would not let Kilvert take photographs or notes during her official tour there. On a studio lot, she constructed three separate sets that allowed lead actor Michael Douglas to wander freely during his White House monologues. Exterior locations were filmed in Washington, DC, with Camp David sequences filmed near Lake Tahoe, Nevada. Recalling Michael Douglas’ natural presidential demeanor, Kilvert reported that he was subsequently greeted at a White House dinner by then-President Bill Clinton with the words, “Good Evening, Mr. President.”

Working with Bart the Bear on “Legends of the Fall” in 1993 also challenged Kilvert beyond what many production designers might encounter. Directed by his trainer using his favorite snack of pear pieces, the massive grizzly bear never stepped off a special wooden platform that Kilvert had built. Sets built for “Legends” in Calgary, British Columbia, were plagued by 60-mph winds. Kilvert created a background for the movie’s war sequences by digging trenches on the windy plains, lined with special barbed wire that would not cause tetanus if an actor were scratched.

In designing “The Last Samurai” in 2002, Kilvert was given a construction budget of $15 million to recreate entire villages. Battlefields were designed so that trained horses could fall into grass pits and emerge without injury.

Architectural Digest lauded the magnificent sets for “Samurai” for their success in accurately capturing the brilliant simplicity of the rural life that Japanese warriors fought so valiantly to preserve.

Kilvert hopes that she will be chosen to recreate “In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex” if the award-winning account by Nantucket author Nathaniel Philbrick goes from book to movie. Large water tanks in the country of Malta and in Baja, California, have already allowed for filming of “boat movies,” including “Master and Commander,” according to Kilvert, and could accommodate filming of this factual story about the whaleship Essex that Herman Melville famously depicted in his novel “Moby Dick.” A box-office star of the caliber of Anthony Hopkins or Russell Crowe would probably be hired to play the infamous real Essex Captain George Pollard— renamed Ahab in Melville’s fictionalized account— in order to offset the cost of filming the epic.

Asked how she’s so excellent at coming in on budget and knowing what things cost, Kilvert explained: “That Yankee mentality of getting your money’s worth also works in Hollywood, where films are not just entertainment, but big business.”

By James Kinsella

When the passenger ferry Grey Lady swoops into the big turn just south of the Hyannis Port breakwater and enters the harbor, its riders sometimes see a little red, white and blue vessel moseying its way out toward the breakwater and the Kennedy compound beyond.

In that moment, passengers have seen a capsule history of Hy-Line Cruises Inc, the privately owned ferry company whose success has changed the way thousands of Nantucket residents, visitors and commuters travel to and from Cape Cod to the island.

Started during the Kennedy administration with Hyannis harbor tours, the Hy-Line has evolved into a multi-faceted $18 million maritime business with a devoted customer base. The company employs 80 people year-round and up to 330 at the height of the season, with a 12-vessel fleet that includes fishing craft, sightseeing boats, passenger ferries and two high-speed catamarans.

Hy-Line has run seasonal ferries to Nantucket since 1973. But the company’s year-round fast ferry service to the island, which it pioneered in 1995, has since made it a part of Nantucket’s everyday life. Last year, 280,000 people rode the Grey Lady, the company’s latest fast ferry on the route.

Propelled by water jets from four engines producing 1,875 horsepower each, the ferry cruises comfortably at 32 knots over the waters of Nantucket Sound, traveling to and from the island in about an hour each way.

The Grey Lady is fast, but more important, the $7 million vessel has shown itself to be reliable. Mechanical breakdowns are few. Bad weather seldom stops it.

That reliability has been the key ingredient that’s earned the vessel a fierce loyalty from many frequent ferry travelers on the Hyannis-Nantucket route. That ingredient has helped the vessel to dominant the fast-ferry market for the route, besting the Steamship Authority’s own entry, the Flying Cloud.

The Flying Cloud, which entered service in May 2000, has missed so many scheduled trips— usually for engine or mechanical-related breakdowns—that the ferry has become a major headache for the Authority. This past winter, the boat line pulled the vessel out of operation from early January through mid-March, conceding the route’s winter market to the Grey Lady.

Family successes

Hy-Line, which is owned by the Scudder family, will soon launch yet another year-round fast ferry operation, this one between Hyannis and Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard. Some observers question whether the move is wise, whether the Scudders are opening themselves to traveling back and forth with a mostly empty boat. But history has shown that betting against the Scudders usually doesn’t pay off.

“They’re businessmen,” said Lynne Poyant, who worked for Hy-Line for 19 years and is now executive director of the Hyannis Area Chamber of Commerce. “When they started the fast ferry, they had done the research.”

The Nantucket and Vineyard fast ferries are among the latest chapters in a story that goes back more than four decades, to when Jack Kennedy was president, to that colorful little boat and to two brothers named Bob and Dick Scudder.

The Scudder brothers were the grandsons of Freeman Scudder, who operated an Osterville, Massachusetts, coal company. The company evolved into the fuel oil company Scudder & Taylor, owned by their father, Frederic Scudder, and his partner E. Raymond Taylor. By the start of the 1960s, the family’s businesses were centered at the intersection of Ocean Street and Old Colony Way in Hyannis. There was the oil company.There were the family homes.And there was Scudder Sunoco, located close to the Christy’s convenience store and gas station that now occupies a corner along the Hyannis waterfront and near Hy-Line’s Ocean Street docks and offices.

Bob and Dick Scudder ran the gas station. Even then, the brothers were thinking about ways to expand the business.

In the late 1950s, they began using two school buses, named the Scudder Hey and the Scudder Ho, to take tourists on a loop through Hyannis and the town of Barnstable.

A few years later, the national spotlight fell on the Cape after Senator John F. Kennedy, a summer Hyannis Port resident, was elected President of the United States in November, 1960. Then as now, people came to Hyannis asking directions to the Kennedy family compound. And then as now, the best way to see the compound wasn’t from land, where the homes were blocked off and shielded from view, but rather from the water.

As purveyors of Scudder Sunoco in downtown Hyannis, Bob and Dick Scudder spent a lot of time giving tourists directions to Hyannis Port. They also knew that boat tours from Hyannis harbor had started including views of the Kennedy compound in their itineraries.

Both men knew the water. Indeed, both were graduates of Massachusetts Maritime Academy. The family owned property at the northwest corner of the Hyannis harbor, which they had accepted in lieu of a fuel oil bill, so they decided to go into the harbor tour business. After they went looking for a boat, a 65-foot vessel named the Prudence— built in 1911 and used on a run between Bristol and Prudence Island in Rhode Island— became available.

The Scudders bought the Prudence and tied the boat at their corner of the Ocean Street docks. Old waterfront hands came by to see the vessel. Skip Scudder’s heart sank as he heard one say, “Jeez, I wish ‘em luck, but they’ll never make it.”

Again, the Scudders took turns on the boat, with one brother skippering during the morning while the other worked at the gas station, and then switching jobs for the afternoon. They were personable and popular captains. The Prudence was the largest of the harbor tour boats.

The business took off.

By the mid-1960s, another opportunity opened up for the Scudders when a local man approached them about running a recreational fishing boat out of Hyannis harbor. They took it on, and that, too, became a success. In 1971, the Scudders used the ferry East Chop to head south— not for a Nantucket route, covered by other companies with seasonal runs, but for Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard.

Smart moves

In 1973, a key turning point came for the Scudders, courtesy of the Steamship Authority. The Authority, created by the state in 1960 to ensure reliable, year-round ferry transportation to the islands of Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard, had talked about running ferries directly from Hyannis to Nantucket, instead of from Woods Hole.

The presence of the Steamship Goliath operating from Hyannis was enough to scare off yet another company, the Hyannis Island Line, which operated seasonal ferries to Nantucket. Because of the pending challenge from the Steamship Authority, the Island Line looked a short distance up the Ocean Street docks and offered up its business to the Scudders and Hyannis Harbor Tours Inc.

More than 30 years later, Phil Scudder, one of Dick Scudder’s sons and now vice president of marketing for Hy-Line, gets up from a conference table at the company’s Channel Point Road office in Hyannis and comes back with a framed check for $30,000.

The money was the down payment for the assets of the Hyannis Island Line: its ferries, its building on Channel Point Road and its dock space at the southwest corner of the Ocean Street docks.

The Scudders would run a seasonal service to Nantucket in direct competition with the Steamship Authority.

One of the brothers’ first decisions—in early appreciation of Nantucket’s psyche— was to leave out of the deal the Siasconset, a big ferry that was being run by the Hyannis Island Line, known as the Hi-Line. Walter Beinecke, the economic visionary who owned much of downtown Nantucket including Straight Wharf where the Hi-Line docked, wasn’t keen on the Siasconset pouring out up to 1,000 passengers at a time onto the streets of Nantucket. The Scudders decided instead to run smaller ferries more frequently.

The Scudders decided to retain the familiar Hi-Line logo— a whale found on the door of their Channel Point Road office. The blue whale with a cheerful smile became the new company’s symbolic mascot. The Scudders also absorbed and tweaked the name, eventually calling it the Hy-Line.

Battle of the boats

Again the Scudders succeeded. People liked the company’s emphasis on service. In response, the Scudders began expanding their Nantucket trips farther outside the traditional summer season, counting on a grandfathering clause to protect them as an existing operation before the Steamship started running Nantucket trips from Hyannis.

The Authority, however, was less enamored by Hy-Line’s steady siphoning of its business. In 1984, the matter boiled over into a court battle in Barnstable Superior Court. In 1985, Judge Elizabeth Dolan sided with the Steamship Authority, holding that the grandfathering clause only extended as far as the old Hi-Line’s original seasonal schedule when the Authority came to Hyannis in 1973, which ran from May to October. Future expansion of their business on the Hyannis-Nantucket route would need Steamship Authority approval as well.

Wanting to expand but confronted with a now more constricted schedule, the Hy-Line responded with what would become a de facto operating principle: emphasizing quality over quantity.

The idea became reality with the arrival in 1988 of the ferry Great Point. The Great Point – a 195-foot vessel that cost $4 million and could carry 800 passengers – was a significantly larger vessel than the company had been running on the Nantucket route. The Great Point offered a more comfortable ride, a faster journey and an upscale first-class section whose tickets sold at a premium.

By the early 1990s, a basic equilibrium had evolved on the Nantucket route. The Steamship stayed its course, moving passengers and their vehicles on the Nantucket route on a no-frills, year-round basis. Hy-Line appeared at the start of the season, offering more comfort at a higher price, before closing down for the winter.

But the Scudders weren’t done yet.

By this time, company management had expanded to the second generation. Bob Scudder died in 1978; his son Skip came aboard, first running the family fuel oil business, then joined the Hy-Line in 1990 after the fuel business was sold.

Dick Scudder’s children— Phil, David, Murray and Susan— also became involved in management after learning the business from the inside-out. “We worked our way up from the bilges,” Phil Scudder recalled. Their father, Dick Scudder, today remains as chairman.

The Scudders had developed a friendship with George Duclos, who ran the Gladding-Hearn Shipyard in Somerset, Massachusetts. One day, Duclos invited them for a ride aboard a new kind of ferry, a high-speed catamaran.

Zipping along

Skip Scudder remembers the ferry zipping its way downtown to Newport and back. The running time of the trip was about an hour. The Scudders considered the possibility: One hour.One hour to Nantucket.

Back in Hyannis, they began to research high-speed catamarans, their operating cost and what a passenger would conceivably pay for a quicker passage to Nantucket.

“The numbers worked,” Phil Scudder said. Their excitement grew. Hy-Line wasn’t so much targeting the lumbering Authority boats as it was the commuter air shuttle services operated by Island Air and Nantucket Airlines. The airlines, flying nine-passenger Cessna 402s, offered 15-minute hops year-round between the Hyannis and Nantucket airports.

Hy-Line decided to come in around the same price points offered by the commuter airlines, hoping that the slower trip over the water would be fast enough to draw away people who would prefer not to fly. The company also emphasized the “downtown-to-downtown” aspect of the ferry, cutting out the cost and time of taxi rides to and from the airports.

In December 1995, the company’s new $1.9 million catamaran, the Grey Lady, left the Ocean Street docks on its maiden voyage. On board were the crew, the Scudders and one paying customer.

That first winter was difficult, Phil Scudder remembered, given a mix of tough weather and skimpy ridership. “If we had six or eight people on board, we were happy,” he said.

They soon acquired unexpected allies in Nantucket’s booming construction business and in the fog that sporadically closed down the morning airline commute out of Hyannis. Suddenly influxes of tradesmen on their way to jobs on Nantucket were coming aboard.

The Scudders decided to stay in the high-speed business, but they also wanted a bigger, more powerful ferry. The first Grey Lady could get pushed around by the sometimes tempestuous waters of Nantucket Sound, making for an uncomfortable ride that would slow the vessel and throw it off its schedule.

Hy-Line went back to Gladding-Hearn and ordered a larger fast ferry, which would become the Grey Lady II. The company also prepared for the challenge of convincing the Steamship Authority to allow them to fill the larger ferry. Hy-Line had initially avoided dealing with the Authority when it launched its fast ferry service by stipulating that their the vessel would carry no more than 40 passengers, making Authority approval unnecessary.

The Steamship Authority was less than thrilled by the Hy-Line proposal, seeing the Scudders up to their old tricks of skimming the cream from the Nantucket-Hyannis route. In the end, the Authority allowed the service, though at a lower passenger level than requested by Hy-Line.

The Grey Lady II, with its larger quarters and more comfortable ride, was an even bigger hit than the first Grey Lady.

In May 2000, the Steamship Authority launched its own entry into the Hyannis-Nantucket fast ferry market, the Flying Cloud. But that new ferry, larger and permitted to carry more passengers than the Grey Lady II, immediately ran into a string of nautical mishaps and mechanical breakdowns.

In the battle of the fast ferries, reliability has so far won the day for Hy-Line.

The Grey Lady II and its successor—a larger vessel again named simply Grey Lady, which came into service in May 2003— have rarely broken down and tend to run in all but the roughest weather. Meanwhile, the Flying Cloud has missed more than 1,000 trips during its four years of service, eroding whatever customer loyalty it might have earned. This past winter, the Steamship Authority didn’t bother running the vessel.

Vineyard bound

The Scudders’ latest initiative— to offer fast ferry service from Hyannis to Oak Bluffs, along the lines of the Hyannis-Nantucket service— came about as a creative redeployment of the Grey Lady II, which had been leased to a California ferry company but was returned last fall.

Hy-Line has seen ridership fall in recent years on its conventional summer ferry service between Hyannis and Oak Bluffs, which takes about an hour-and-a-half to travel one-way. Based on their Nantucket experience, the Scudders suspected that a faster trip might draw more passengers. “Everyone wants to go fast these days,” Skip Scudder said. “You have to meet he market.”

The Scudders also saw a fast year-round Vineyard operation as tapping two under-served markets: Vineyarders who want a more convenient way to get to mid-Cape stores or medical and educational services, and residents from Lower Cape towns such as Orleans and Brewster who otherwise rarely travel to the Vineyard.

Public hearings held by the Steamship Authority drew mostly positive comments. On March 17, the Authority board followed management’s recommendation to license the service for two years, collecting a per-rider fee that would increase as passenger volume rose, akin to the agreement governing the Grey Lady on the Hyannis-Nantucket route.

Marc Hanover, the Vineyard’s Steamship representative, had reservations about the proposal, but decided to vote in favor of it.

Speaking of the Scudders, he said, “They do a great job, which scares me, and there’s enormous public support on the Vineyard for this.”

Hy-Line plans to start the service June 25. Aware of rivalries between the two islands, the Scudders plan to drop the “Grey Lady” name and hold a contest on the Vineyard to rename the boat.

Loyal fans

These days, traveling on the Grey Lady between Hyannis and Nantucket is something like joining a floating fan club, especially in the off-season.

“The best,” proclaims Ben Gannett of Nantucket and Manchester, traveling on a Saturday with his wife, Lummy, and their two retrievers, Barnaby and Baisley. “It’s a great, great operation all the way around. The family that runs it— they get it.”

For Carole Brackett of Centerville, the issue is one of “trust.” Brackett said she could rely on the Grey Lady, unlike “the one that breaks down every two weeks,” a reference to the Flying Cloud.“I think it’s a great service,” she said. “The staff is always cheerful. They enjoy their work.”

The mood is amiable up in the pilot house, where captain Robert Bazydlo and mate Peter Buckler operate in an environment more like the starship Enterprise than a conventional wheel house. Buckler calls it “the best office in the world.”

Both Bazydlo and Buckler have put in a lot of years with Hy-Line. Bazydlo has been with the company since 1965. He was one of the first captains on the company’s sightseeing and fishing boats. Buckler, who started as a parking lot attendant 15 years ago, was hoping to get the company nod as a captain on the new Oak Bluffs fast ferry service.

For Bazydlo, his shift on board the Grey Lady hardly qualifies as work. “What else are you going to do and play with someone’s multi-million-dollar vessels?”

The three Grey Ladies, Bazydlo said, all have had distinct personalities. The first Grey Lady, he said, was a ballerina. The Grey Lady II, although it had the ride control that the first vessel lacked, was more ornery during docking.

Bazydlo said the third Grey Lady (which doesn’t carry any Roman numerals) “is a gentle giant. She’s a honey.”

Among the best moments in the pilot house, Bazydlo said, “is a bright moonlit night with a full moon up there so you can see right down to Nantucket…It’s gorgeous. Sunrises and sunsets are always the best.”
“There’ve been ugly days out here, too,” Bazydlo said. But he said the Grey Lady keeps them from being uglier. “This boat is just so good on the seas.”

Architect Lyman Perry has been a sailing man all of his life, but his passion for boating reached a new level this year with his purchase of the Picnic Boat EP by the renowned 80-year-old yacht builder Hinckley Company. For one who competed in the 1960 Olympics on the United States rowing team and who once sailed partially around the world on a sailboat, the motor yacht seems to set a drastic new course. Not really, according to Perry.

“My father had a crabbing boat that was just about this size,” Perry said of the Picnic Boat. “So I’m going back to my roots. Why not go with the best?”

Judging from most reviews, the Hinckley craft certainly ranks among the best of its type. Introduced in 1994, the Picnic Boat has become “the most successful single motor yacht” in its history, according to company officials. The boat’s innovative JetStick control and its 18-inch draft both allow access to beaches and shallow waters where other 36-foot yachts might encounter trouble. The boat’s hull construction of Kevlar and carbon makes it highly rigid and impact-resistant yet lightweight enough to reach a top speed of 28 knots. Its interior is handcrafted in cherry with Hinckley’s signature teak and holly sole, or floor, varnished to a rich luster. The cabin and berth below offer a small galley and room to stretch out for an afternoon nap. But with this boat’s beauty and handling to admire, few passengers are likely to fall asleep while aboard.

Over Memorial Day weekend, Perry and crew cruised Nantucket Harbor while sipping wine from Island Spirits and food prepared by one of the island’s newest gourmet takeout cafés, Eat No Evil at 24 Centre Street. The menu included fresh salads of lobster, chicken and Israeli couscous and roasted vegetable, with a juicy fruit salad for the finish.

Lobster Salad

2 cups cooked lobster knuckle meat (from just the claws)
1 tbs. chopped scallions
1 tbs. fat free sour cream
1 tbs. fat free mayonnaise
1 tsp. ketchup
Add salt and pepper to taste.

Toss all ingredients together. Serve cold.

Rotisserie Lemon
Chicken Salad

1 lb. rotisserie cooked chicken breast
1/4 cup fresh lemon juice
2 tbs. extra virgin olive oil
1/2 cups sugar snap peas
1/2 cup each julienned red & yellow bell peppers
1/2 lemon peeled and thinly sliced
Add salt and black pepper to taste.
Toss all ingredients together.

Couscous with Baby spinach and Shitake mushrooms

2 cups cooked Isreali couscous
1 cup sliced fresh shitake mushrooms
1 cup baby spinach
1 tsp. minced garlic
1 tbs. extra virgin olive oil
Add salt and black or white pepper to taste

Place cooked couscous in a bowl.
Toss in baby spinach.
Sauté shitake mushrooms and garlic in olive oil over medium heat for about 2 min.
Toss with couscous. Serve warm or cold.

Wines on Deck

2004 TENZ SAUVIGNON BLANC
TOM EDDY WINES

Tom Eddy Wines of Calistoga, California, in Napa Valley produced this Sauvignon Blanc through a wine growing partnership with colleagues in Marlborough, New Zealand, from a vineyard planted especially for this product. The vineyard notes its bright aromas of gooseberry and green apple that combine with honeydew melons for a “powerful flowery fruit and perfume.”

Eddy calls it a “classic fruit forward Kiwi Sauvignon” designed to “dance with oysters, shrimp cocktail or…your date!”

2001 CLOS LACHANCE
SANTA CRUZ MOUNTAINS CHARDONNAY

LaChance Winery, a family owned vineyard in San Martin, California, just south of Silicon Valley, noted that its 2001 harvest yielded an “intense and complex Chardonnay.” Keeping with the terroir of the Santa Cruz Mountains, this wine offers mineral notes surrounded by tropical fruits and peach, with hints of flower blossom, vanilla, toast and honey to round out its nose. The wine’s acid backbone anchors flavors of Meyer lemon, marshmallow and mineral to the palate. “Wine Enthusiast” placed it in the top third of its “Best 100 Wines of 2003,” with a rating of 91.