Tag Archives: bucket list

26 Before 26: Go on a Wine Tasting

1 May

The menu for the night.

In my 26th year of life, I am attempting 26 new things that I’ve never done before. Full list here.

This one fell right into my lap. Since coming to New York, I have been fairly active in my alumni group. This has led me to a Pac-12 alumni group, made up of alumni from the larger, West coast schools.

They organize a wine tasting two, maybe three times a year at a fancy Murray Hill restaurant that some alumni’s family owns. It’s an amazing deal, and I was excited to see my Pac-12 friends. Pac-12 softball is gearing up, and I dearly love playing with them in Central Park, then getting rather sloshed at a sports bar in the Upper West Side.

I always thought of a wine tasting as touring some countryside, swirling wine in glasses, sipping it gently, trying to distinguish notes. Maybe that’s how they do it in Napa (I really have no idea), but in New York, we through them back. All of the wines were bottomless. They had waiters walking around filling our wine glasses. Like filling ALL our wine glasses from ALL the courses.

In my early sobriety, I was taking this wine tasting rather seriously, but by first course I didn’t even know what I was drinking, just that the wine was ever-flowing. I was kind of listening to the wine-guy who was talking about special grapes in South Africa. But sitting here in my jammies two weeks later, I can’t tell you a single thing about those wines. Except that they were white. But I didn’t need no sommelier to tell me that.

I like white wines. A controversial opinion, apparently, as most wine-snobs I’ve met in my life have scoffed at such a statement. But I like what I like. I also like fake maple syrup over real maple syrup. Sue me.

Funnily enough, my favorite course/pairing was dessert. Feast your eyes on this beaut…

Mango Mousse with Amarula Cream Liquer

Honestly, I wish there had been five courses of this. It was fantastic. I was certainly not listening to wine-man at this point. All I could really think was “cake cake cake cake cake cake booze cake cake cake…” It was like being a kid and having to wait for your parents to light the candles before you can eat your birthday cake. I’m infamous in my family for prematurely licking the frosting off my birthday cake when I thought no one was looking. No one was looking, except the family friend who was videotaping me. Shame.

To sum up my wine tasting experience, it was a variety of delicious booze. It was an experience akin to most of my weekend excursions. Maybe I didn’t do the experience right? Maybe I should have paid more attention to what I was tasting. I was looking through one of my notebooks the other day, and I found something I had written down last fall.

“I tend to devour, but I am looking for someone to teach me a thing or two about savoring.”

Well, obviously, I have not learned my lesson. But there are certainly more wine tastings in my future.

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26 Before 26: Drink an Old Fashioned

24 Apr

In my 26th year of life, I am attempting 26 new things that I’ve never done before. Full list here.

Anyone who knows me knows that I am a beer and whiskey girl through and through. I keep a nice big bottle of Maker’s Mark on my desk, and the majority of the time my drink orders are either beer, Manhattan, Whiskey Ginger Ale, or Maker’s on the rocks. So it comes as a surprise to a lot of people that I have never had an Old Fashioned. So close to my beloved Manhattan, yet not quite.

People also find it surprising that it took me so long to knock this off the list. After all, I go out for drinks quite a bit. I frequent cocktail bars, and an Old Fashioned isn’t an obscure drink. When it comes to my list though, I have many lovely friends who see it and immediately put claims down on some of the things. So I’ve held out on a lot, saving them for certain people, certain times of year, certain events. But time’s a-wastin’, and I have a pretty hefty list on my hands.

But one of my oldest and dearest friends, Danguole, was coming to New York for a visit, and she laid claim to this one. Only because I love her so, I reserved it for her.

So D and I went bar hopping around the city. I decided to take her to Beauty Bar where for $10 you get a cocktail and a basic manicure. We plop down at the bar, and I announce that we want two Old Fashioneds and two manicures. The burly man behind the counter let out an overdramatic grunt, curled himself up into a ball behind the bar and started complaining that he couldn’t remember how to make an Old Fashioned. I felt bad and showed him the recipe on my phone, but he scoffed at me and sulked off to grab some glasses. He was the most pouty tattooed, 300+ pound man I have ever encountered, and when he plopped the drinks in front of us, our jaws were kind of on the ground.

Beauty Bar "Old Fashioned"?

Admittedly I have never had an Old Fashioned before, but what’s it doing in a martini glass? Why is it pink? Was that a Vodka bottle I saw him pouring into the shaker? D, who has more experience with the Old Fashioned than me, confirmed my suspicions. It was not an Old Fashioned. Not at all. Not even close. We don’t know what it was.

So after getting our manicures from two heavily coked-out beauticians (it was a weird and interesting night indeed), we headed to a couple of other bars, eventually landing at Raines Law Room.

Raines is one of my favorite bars in the city. It’s a speakeasy, but not too speakeasy. No real gimmicks, just a dimly lit bar with dashing bartenders and amazing cocktails.

Raines Old Fashioned.

Now that’s more like it. It was fantastic. It had that good punch of whiskey, tempered by citrus notes. We ordered a couple more fancy shmancy cocktails and eventually ended up at a dive bar with some not so fancy shmancy drinks. But the night of my first Old Fashioned was one to remember.

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