Megan Eaves

i have been a wine drinker for the past 7 years, but i have never kept a blog or diary about it successfully. hence the “beginnings in quote marks” title of this blog. two years ago, bill and i unsuccessfully started a wine diary in which we vowed to tear off the labels of every bottle of wine we drank and review them in a special book we got. alas, that never happened (big surprise?). anyway, i am very proud of this little stash we got today, and the act of buying it got me to thinking about how you don’t have to be rich to enjoy wine.

in some cultures, wine is as much a part of life as, say, cars. okay, this is a strange metaphor, but a true one. some people, let’s take for instance the french and the italians, rely on wine in a similar way that americans rely on their cars: for social connections, for outings, for a sense of dependence on the world, for a way to get together with family, for a way to experience life. i like that. and i like being a wine drinker. wine makes me feel like i am experiencing an organic part of the world and the earth that is unique to each bottle, each taste.

so, we went to trader joe’s today with the express purpose of stocking up on wine. this mission was two-fold: 1) we are tired of running out of wine and 2) trader joe’s has oh-so-cheap yet amazingly decent wine! we figured we might as well stock up on said amazingly-decent wine rather than waste an extra $2 per bottle drinking the swill they have for sale at smith’s.

we stopped by talin, the local “world market” (former chinese market turned into a gourmet international food shop) to check out what was there after a GORGEOUS meal at que huong (i will blog about this place some other time) and ended up running into their amazing wine selection. we’d already tasted this lovely cotes du rhone the other night at brasserie la provence, so when bill spotted it for less than a tenner, we had to take a bottle home. yummy.

after all was said and done, we brought home six bottles of wine for less than $30, which i consider to be freaking genius. half of the bottles we’d tasted and knew were good – the other half were an experiment. that’s the other thing i love about wine – experimenting.

i have plans to blog in the near future about our favorites kinds and bottles of wine, as well as my views on why red+meat and white+fish pairings are pure rubbish. but for now, suffice it to say that there hopefully will be a whole lot more wine talk on this blog in the coming days, including a review of our not-so-newest favorite wine drinking show, “spain… on the road again.”

until then, santé!