Don't believe what we've been telling you about box wine?

Check out this short clip from NPR's Studio360:
studio080108d.mp3

Labels: stuff, wine culture

I know summer is when people usually take it easy, but even so it's important to exercise your tongue. Otherwise it'll get all flabby for necking season. I'm doing my part to help all of you by making this week's tasting the second of our Guess the Grape challenges. Come by and see if all this drinking you've been doing has educated you or if you need to up your regimen.

You may remember a few months back that our first challenge was based around the syrah grape. We sampled an Italian syrah, a Californian syrah, an Australian shiraz and... some other one that I can't remember. We had lots of fun guessing, and a lot of people learned about syrah's characteristics and styles. This week we're giving you even more incentive to bring your A game. You could actually win something if you're on point.

This time, if you guess the correct grape on the first try, we'll give you a $20 punch on your punch card. Guess correctly on the second try & we'll give you a $15 punch. Third prize is you're fired! No, no, no... of course you don't lose anything if it takes more than two tries... the tasting will be a quiet, pressure-free environment. Really though, how cool would it be to get free credits on your punch card without having to do all the hard work of actually drinking a bottle of $20 wine?

Seriously. If you enjoy wine and want to know more about what you're drinking without reading some weirdo's book or some loud weirdo's video blog, this is the best way to do it. Tasting and analyzing a wine before you know anything about its price, style or winemaking methods is truly the fastest route to getting knowledgeable.

Why exercise at a yoga studio when you could exercise at a wine store?

Wednesday, July 16th, 5:30p-8:30p

Labels: events, stuff, tasting, wine culture

I feel compelled to write something about Heath Ledger's untimely and ultimately very sad death. We utilize celebrity on our chalkboards, every day at both Vine Wine and Champion Coffee. Sometimes to ridicule and sometimes to celebrate the obnoxious and seemingly silly behavior and spectacle taking place in this, at times, mundane world that we live in. It started out when I first opened TEN63 as a way to fill a chalkboard with more than just blather about the product inside, and as a way to stop thinking about the Iraq war, which had just begun, for one minute. It grew, those silly little chalkboards, into a part of the day that random people as well as devoted customers looked forward to.

This all has nothing and everything to do with Heath Ledger. For whatever reason when he died my first thought was; this is not chalkboard material. I think unlike Britney Spears and Scarlett Johansson, I laid some weird (and perhaps irrational) personal claim to Heath Ledger. He was the guy who moved to Brooklyn and lived there as one of us, he was the guy so openly in love with Michelle Williams at the Oscars in 2005. He was the guy who you would play some skeeball with at a bar and never realize who he 'was'.

This past fall Michelle Williams showed up on a school tour that I was on. I remember wondering why she would have to take a tour? After all can't the celebrities just back door the entire process? I like to think that maybe she and Heath didn't see themselves as celebrities and rather as people employed in the field of acting. And I like to think that what happened to Heath Ledger was above all a tragic accident and nothing more depressing.

Labels: stuff