Wine blending at home

I can’t say that I’m a big boozer, but I love all of the “experience kits” that have been popping up on the shelves of local wine shops, such as Crushpad’s fusebox. To give you a little bit of a back story, Crushpad is a San Francisco-based (read “less than an hour from Napa/Sonoma”) winemaking facility that specializes in providing the experience of wine production to the people. Basically, if you’ve got $5,700+ to throw around, you can come to their space in the city and they’ll walk you through the entire process of producing a bottle of wine, from the very beginning to cracking the seal on a Saturday night on your back patio (the price includes a barrel of your wine). For those of us who don’t quite have that kind of cash saved up just yet, Crushpad also offers fusebox, a 15 pound kit that contains everything you + 3 friends need for a wine blending experience of your own. Retailing for $120, the kit contains:

-Six 375 mL bottles of blending wine (including Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Petit Verdot, Malbec, and Cabernet Franc)
-One 375 mL bottle of Mystery Wine
-One graduated cylinder and four pipettes
-Four wine evaluation cards
-Four tasting place mats
-Recipe cards
-Vinography aroma card
-Corkscrew

This sounds like it would be a great activity if you’re having a couple of best friends over for the evening, or even for a shower of some sort. This also might be a good learning activity for wine newbies in general – for example, I know very little about wines BEFORE they are blended, much less once they are (at least I’ve been told not to smell the cork).

Speaking of wine bottle corks, you can now send in your wine and champagne corks for recycling in the USA through Yemm & Hart, a company in Missouri dedicated to converting used wine cork stoppers into a useful, self-sustaining product that extends the useful life of cork for decades. To find out more or to get their mailing address (they request that you pay the shipping for them to be sent in), visit their website.

Things you need at your next party

I've always been a little...different. When my husband (let's call him Mr. Bean, shall we?) and I got married in the spring of 2007, I was quite shocked and disappointed that neither he nor my mother supported my idea of having our wedding reception napkins read, "Did you get any cake in your mouth? -the napkin." Needless to say, we finally all agreed on a more universally appealing design. That said, I continue to be amused by tongue-in-cheek products suitable for various soirees and shindigs.

One such item that I've run across in recent online safaris is the Pick Your Nose Cups set, a set of paper cups with a photo-realistic design of various men and women's noses. Obviously the idea of my very dignified and feminine boss sipping punch out of a hook nosed cup with a mustache is appealing to me. These could be equally as popular if our soon-to-be Commander-in-Chief, Barack Obama, might consider these fine vessels for one of his many upcoming inaugural balls. As in dances.

Another item of unmatched sophistication and swag is the

Fingerfood Party Plate. For those of us who are too VIP to set down our nibbles plate at a cocktail party long enough to shake hands with one much less inferior, these reusable plates are roughly the size of a potato chip and slide onto your pointer finger much like a ring. Couple this with your booze of choice in one hand, and have the other free to wave to, open doors for, and make generally perverse gestures at other guests.

Finally (and this one could definitely double as a hostess gift for those passive-aggressive moments of weakness), may I recommend that you get the fete really rolling with a vintage bottle of Bitch wine? As our friends at KL Wines inform me, This is a wine about pleasure. Subversive pleasure. Not everyone needs to approve in order for YOU to have pleasure. Winemakers will tell you that Grenache is a bitch to grow. And, it's a bitch to make. The Bitch is from Barossa." Love that last line. This is a wine that I really feel was named after me!

Just think - Martha Stewart probably doesn't have these things at her parties! Yet.